The Walking Dead: 713 “Bury Me Here” Review
Reviewed by John Hussey.
I have really loved the current season of The Walking Dead because it’s introduced some really juicy elements, which in turn have pushed the characters to new boundaries. ‘Bury Me Here’ continued that idea and left me in a somewhat middle ground. I will admit that I liked the episode, but I can also admit that the episode annoyed the hell out of me. This is all down to Morgan, a character that I have despised for quite some time now.
Morgan’s attitude towards killing has rubbed me the wrong way ever since Season Six. He acts like he’s doing the right thing but fails to realise that he’s actually endangering everyone around him. Never mind Negan bashing people’s skulls in with Lucille, or ripping open people’s intestines with a blade, or branding his subordinates faces with an iron, look out for Morgan and his arrogant ideals. On multiple occasions he has got people killed because he either refused to kill or because he let the enemy live.
The entire attack on Alexandria by the Wolfpack was directly caused by him, and yet he never took full responsibility for his actions, and instead embraced his decision like it was still a good one. Sorry pal, but it doesn’t work like that. You screwed up and it’s about damn time that you realised that only you live by the stupid idea that killing is a bad thing. I’m not saying that going around killing for the sake of it is a good idea either, but by not killing when you need to in order to survive, or protect your loved ones, is a crucial aspect within an apocalyptic landscape.
His hypocrisy really angers me. It seems like I can’t escape annoying characters within The Walking Dead. They linger around like flies. What makes me angrier is that Morgan constantly fails to see the errors of his delusional existence, and therefore expects others to be okay with his way of doing things. And God forbid you try to challenge him because he’ll be quick to try and play the superiority game, in which apparently he’s better because he’s following the lifestyle that makes him feel closer to humanity. Sorry Morgan, it’s a game of survival and you’re not going to get far by making friends with every psychopath that wants to kill you for the sake of enjoyment.
Now that’s not to say that Lennie James is a bad actor, because he plays the role of Morgan perfectly. It’s just unfortunate he plays an annoying bastard that drives me up the wall. Continuing on from his views in ‘Rock in the Road’, Morgan still believes that the Kingdom shouldn’t join Rick’s crusade to fight the Saviors. He believes they should find another way. In the meantime the Saviors keep demanding more and more supplies as their strength grows and grows. Not to mention their attitude every time they come to collect, to which King Ezekiel simply grins and bears for the sake of his people’s safety.
As established in ‘New Best Friends,’ Richard was willing to do what was necessary in order to convince King Ezekiel to change his mind about fighting. This led to him trying to set Carol up so that she would be killed by the Saviors, to which Daryl quickly put a stop to. Now he’s trying again and his plans don’t go according to plan. The episode isn’t very good at concealing the fact that Richard is up to something, but this doesn’t necessarily ruin the episode’s tension.
Richard attempts to mess-up King Ezekiel’s delivery drop in order to provoke the Saviors, thereby giving the king reason to want to retaliate. Unfortunately the plan backfires when it isn’t Richard who is killed (which was Richard’s intentions) but rather poor Benjamin. Now I kind of predicted from his first appearance that he would die in order to be a crucial message for Morgan. Sadly Benjamin is left to bleed out and slowly die, with his friends being unable to save him. At the very least the crazy bastard that always causes trouble on these pick-ups (and shot Benjamin) is scolded, and threatened with death, by the group’s leader, who is almost disgusted by the event and in his own way apologises.
Morgan soon discovers that Richard caused this event to happen and flips at him. But to give Richard credit he didn’t intend for Benjamin to die, he wanted himself to be sacrificed. All he wanted to do was to protect his people by doing what he deemed was right. And deep down everybody knew that Rick’s proposal was just and needed to happen before the Saviors grew too powerful, or worse, they decided to be dicks for the sake of it, thus attacking the Kingdom for sport. I even liked how Richard justified his actions further by comparing the current events to his past, in which he didn’t act when he should havve and this ultimately cost him his family. Richard simply doesn’t want history to repeat itself, making him a rather understandable (and dare I say) sympathetic character.
And what does Morgan go and do? He kills Richard. What a massive douchebag! And the worst part is King Ezekiel and his men just stand by and let him it happen (and that was before they found out the truth). I really didn’t think Morgan could stoop any lower but here he is being the biggest freaking hypocrite on the planet. ‘Oh, I don’t kill because it’s wrong, and you should all do the same. Oh, but I will kill from time to time when it suits me, you know, when I think it’s absolutely necessary. Did I mention I was the world’s biggest hypocrite? Everybody love Morgan!’
Poor Richard essentially died because he was trying to do the right thing. Yes, it was sad that Benjamin had to die, but Richard didn’t mean for that to happen. Blame the Saviors, not Richard. Sure if it wasn’t for Richard Benjamin wouldn’t have been killed. But the whole put was to demonstrate what the Saviors are really like and what they are capable of when provoked. King Ezekiel, and Morgan, needed an eye-opener so that they could retract their heads from their arses and actually take some concrete action instead of living in the lands of Knights and Tigers.
I was kind of hoping Morgan was going to do the right thing afterwards and use Richard’s death as a means to gain the Saviors trust, thus begin preparations to have King Ezekiel engage in battle, but no. Instead he played the snitch and tried desperately to regain peace by talking. I really don’t understand this man. And then he has a rage-fit over the fact that he had to kill someone, which added to my annoyance within both his character and the episode. The only good thing he did throughout the episode was give Carol the information she needed in order to rekindle her mojo, making her want to fight again after hearing her friends had been brutally murdered in her absence, and now Rick needed help in fighting back.
So, all in all, ‘Bury Me Here’ was a good character development episode in which we established that Morgan is a complete arse and that he needs to ram that stick of his where the sun don’t shine. And if that doesn’t make him see sense then at the very least it will help clean out the crap that spouts from his mouth every time he speaks. The episode was good for pushing the ongoing arc forward, and allowing King Ezekiel to see reason and finally join the battle, with Carol too also ready to fight.
With all this in mind it’s fair to say that things are shaping up nicely for the finale (which is due in three weeks). I just really, really, really hope that we don’t get the same treatment as Season Six. Big build-up, sod all happens until the last five minutes, followed by a massive cliff-hanger to which we have to endure traumatic questions throughout the entire summer…
Verdict: 9/10