While Tara is definitely second tier, at least they acknowledged that in this episode. She basically survives just because of luck. If the one bleeding heart from Oceanside hadn’t been along when she was found, she’d be dead. She handled the lying to them very clumsy – which makes sense for an inexperienced character. She had no cover story worked up and basically tried to rely on her joking, nervous humor way of dealing with unusual circumstances like she probably did pre-apocalypse.
I got the impression Oceanside actually wanted to see how Alexandria was faring after Tara tipped them that they had attacked the Saviors. I think they would have taken her all the way back to Alexandria to learn what they could. Of course a simple hood over Tara’s head would have effectively allowed them to both take her back and keep their location a secret. Maybe that hints that they were just going to execute her, but seems like a lot of trouble versus just killing her in camp.
And this episode got back to some of the things that really interests the core audience, different communities. We got to see two in this episode. The bridge community had failed but we saw they were making an attempt. They were planting gardens, constructing defenses against walkers. One would assume fishing from the bridge would be the mainstay of their food. Why did they fail, we don’t know, but it was still a neat glimpse into the world of TWD.
Then there was Oceanside which is very successful from a food supply standpoint, they are a fishing village. They were organized, orderly, and well armed. And they provided us with an answer to a question that has been posed here, why not just drive away from the Saviors area of control. Oceanside proves that is possible. If the women left post skirmish with the Saviors, then that tells us that there probably aren’t spies doing recon on Alexandria just because they are producing for Negan. If Negan’s SOP was to post look outs around conquered communities, then the women who made it to Seaside would have never gotten away.
I’ll give you, they could have tightened Tara’s story up time wise, but overall this is one of the best episodes so far this season.
…that didn’t occur to me at all: now her running away makes so much more sense! (Although to be fair to myself I was watching at 0200 in the morning.)
Tara was always one of my favourite characters, so I both enjoyed this episode, and was petrified they were going to kill her off. Her adventures with Glenn and her travels with Abe and Rosita and Eugene were some of my favourite parts of the series.
Did I miss the explanation of what exactly the Oceansiders did that was so much wore than the Alexandrians that Negan responded by killing all the men and boys?
I like the structure of this season. Little vignettes that show us all the different communities in the area. It is interesting and fun. Better still, as a comic reader, this community was not in the comics so I had no idea at all what would happen.
Was Tara always so snarky and sarcastic? I honestly couldn’t remember what she was like.
ETA: yes it was clear they were going to kill Tara but pretended otherwise to placate the other girl (who wisely did not trust her friends).
I feel like “cover story” might have been something she might have worked out with what’s his name in the two weeks they’ve been traveling together. “We just wander the wasteland in a Winni” should be sufficient IMHO. Why make up some bullshit about a fishing boat you know nothing about?
Also, Cyndie was actually correct about “people not being inherently evil” and “just losing their way”. I think it’s been pretty well established that The Governor, most of the other antagonists and probably even Negan were just normal people before. It’s not like the ladies of Oceanside are any less evil than the Saviors or Terminus-folk for murdering everyone who crosses their path. Heck, the Saviors don’t even murder everyone. They usually just murder one person and put the rest to work.
Interestingly, like every location in The Walking Dead, it seems to take about the same amount of time to reach regardless of whether you walk or drive there. So one wonders how far Oceanside really is from Alexandria and The Saviors.
Tara knows where the bridge is. It’s not hard to extrapolate where the current took her and then find Oceanside.
I was thinking along the lines of the Saviors knowing they had a hidden stash of weapons, demanding they hand it over, then killing all the men when they refused. Then, the women picked up the stash on their way out of Dodge.
Since I watched the first episode, TWD was my favorite show. Never missed it. This season, I have literally forgotten to watch it twice now. Last night was one of those times. I never thought I would say this but I have gotten to where I just don’t are anymore. It started with that long cliffhanger, but even after it was resolved, the spark is gone. I don’t like the groups being spread out so much. Honestly…ad totally forgotten about Tara and Heath. Totally and completely. Not sure how much longer I’ll be watching. I gave up on Fear the Walking Dead after one episode this season.
Agreed. The writers are just milking the show until they see the end coming and only then will it move towards some resolution. These filler episodes do nothing to move the plot forward.
Well it seems there are only so many inventive ways one can be in danger from flesh-eating zombies, eh? I don’t like thinking this, and nothing against the previous poster, but I wonder if one would risk getting equally burned out if they were watching graphic video of, say, the Syrian civil war for seven years straight.
It may be that a relentless diet of televised, fictional atrocity does numb one to it, except for the targets or actual witnesses of real atrocities, of course. For example, my late Dad, who was on hand for the liberation of a couple of small concentration camps at the end of WWII, said he could never bring himself to watch Schindler’s List.
MsSmith537 wrote: “Also, I feel like Negan has been kind of lenient for a local warlord. Given that they wiped out like 20 Saviors in an outpost (plus a few road patrols), he didn’t just line all the men up and shoot them. One head smashing (a second provoked by Daryl) and parking an old Gremlin inside the walls to attract zombies? Most of The Kingdom don’t even know they are dealing with the Saviors at all.”
The greatest power of all is the power to be arbitrary.
I’m not so sure. At this point we know so little about the Oceanside leader that I think it is ambiguous. Yes Tara thought that, but Tara also thought it would be good to include a fishing boat career in her lie when all that had potential to do was expose her. Good writing would leave the viewers questioning the Oceansiders’ intentions so as to add weigh and drama to Tara deciding to bolt (is she wisely saving herself or alienating possible allies). I think at the beginning of the meal they were being nice to Tara to woo information out of her. But then it felt to me that there may have been an actual shift in the OSers attitude based on what Tara said. A the very least, using her to take them to Alexandria would give them valuable intel on the Saviors.
Hopefully future episodes will make it clear what was intended…unless the OSers are as throwaway as the Wolves.
No, that’s not it at all. The zombies have always been secondary to me. It was the human interactions and watching characters grow as they faced the challenges of an apocalypse. Splitting the groups up weakens them to me, makes them less interesting without the interactions of people (characters) I felt I had come to know. So many new characters… too many, to me, too many to care about any more. And on FTWD, I just honestly never found characters that I really LIKED.