the thing about backstory is that it needs to be a good story.  otherwise it's just a waste of screen time.  the story of this episode is morgan clearwalker goes to degobah.  that had potential, but george lucas managed to do a much better job telling a similar story in about 20 minutes of screen time.  those 20 minutes were funny, poignant, and even exciting, because they constantly played against our expectations.  what was the story here?

-deranged morgan tries to rob degobah and kill yoda.

-yoda "imprisons" morgan, and takes him through a PTSD counseling session.  as a physical component of the therapy, yoda encourages morgan to undertake aikido practice.

-yoda tells morgan that he once killed a guy, but it didn't make things better.  he says that killing is unhelpful.

-morgan shows a little improvement, but regresses when taken off the planet.

-this regression gets yoda killed.

-morgan heads back out into the galaxy, somewhat better, but somewhat worse.

that's the entire story of the 80-minute episode.  this same story could have been done just as effectively in 20 minutes.  hell--they could have gotten the same exposition across in 5 minutes, as morgan recounts the story to junior sith wolf.  nothing in the episode added anything, or made morgan's history any more compelling.

not only was there not enough story to fill all that screen time, but what story there was was told in exactly the way that anyone would expect.  eastman (a great casting choice) had a couple of mildly funny lines, but that's it.



story is action and reaction.  the best stories give us what we want--and what we know needs to happen--but gives it to us in an interesting way that we would't have expected.  absolutely nothing in this episode was unexpected.  and that's just not good storytelling.

Look, I liked the episode...

Was it the best ever?  No, far from it.  

But it gave a little backstory on Morgan and how killing everything in your way has affects on one's psyche down the road.


There can't always be fighting with other groups and tons of walker killings so we need a little story here and there to tie it all together.

I am not a big soap opera fan either but character development is important to the plot lines of a story.

I like the season so far and last nights episode. It could always be worse, like spending a season looking for Sophia.

My closed captioning last night had it as Rick saying it and that seems more probable.... Glen's comeback would not be done in so cavalier a manner...

Hey, I was taught to shoot (revolver) using that grip, and I occasionally lapse into it when I'm not paying attention.  It hasn't bit me so far.

Are you the type that asks, "if I would have left the house 5 minutes later, would that have been me in the fatal accident?"

 

Sort of like an alcoholic who is on the wagon. He knows how to drink... REALLY drink... which is why he won't drink at all.  

Once he gets the taste of blood again he's gonna be a killdozer trapped in a man's body.

Nice summary!


To a different point regarding Morgan...I believe the viewers saw some symbolism (for lack for a better term) in his defense of the goat. Was it just me or did Morgan turn it on when he looked back and saw the crying goat? He went full Rambo in order to protect it.

Do we see a Morgan who will go on to feverishly defend the young in Alexandria? Perhaps Rick fails Coral at some point and Morgan defends him to some capacity?

I dunno, I just saw something in Morgans eyes when fighting for that goat.

Ditto, I'm guessing someone photoshopped it to spur the hype

We'll have to just disagree then. I did find it to be a good story.



Perhaps the story could have been told in 20 minutes, but people wouldn't have given a damn about Eastman, nor would it have changed any views or opinions about Morgan. I also won't be surprised if there turns out to be some significant foreshadowing from this episode. It's the kind of thing this series is well known for.



Also, Walking Dead isn't in the habit of jumping from storyline to storyline within a single episode, especially when dealing with back story. If you tell Morgan's story in 20 minutes of a 45 minute show, what other story are you going to shortchange?



 

Interesting point. That goat meant something to someone he had grown to care about. Might be something that springs out later.
 

I liked it just fine. I just don't think that makes me the reincarnation of Socrates.

That's good then, because I'm the reincarnation of Gene Siskel.

Y     11/2 hrs


by hyping the hour and a half show guarantees commercial revenues the perfect vessel
to get more ads is a longer show with an excited audience.

It cost money to make the shows and generate a profit.

we gave a damn about yoda, and it only took 2 scenes of 'empire' to make that happen.  that's the difference between good and mediocre storytelling.  remember back in season 1, when we weren't sure about darryl?  because frank darabont is a good storyteller, he got us all on board with darryl in a couple of flashbacks.  we came to understand why darryl was the way that he is, and his complicated relationship with merle.

what opinions changed about morgan?  we knew that he bounced back and forth from the levelheaded guy who saved rick, to the basket case 'clear' mode, to refusing to kill anything...even when his refusal to kill anything resulted in the deaths of people he cared about.  sp what happened?  obviously, he had some sort of epiphany.  this whole episode was intended to show how he arrived at that, but it didn't really do it.  we never get to see how and why his thinking changed--we just saw that it changed.  

think about 'clear' for a second.  the most potentially interesting thing in this episode was to find out what 'clear' really meant in morgan's mind.  had the writing been better, that absurd "i have to clear" line could have taken a very interesting turn into exactly the psychology that the episode was trying (but failed) to get at. why didn't morgan differentiate between walkers and the living?  killing walkers is all well and good, but why did he feel entitled to kill the living?  was it just self-defense?  something else maybe?  if he kills them because they're "already dead", then he's already dead too--why not put a bullet in his own head?  why does he insist that eastman kill him, instead of doing it for himself?  why does he keep going?  is he trying to cleanse the earth or something?  does he have any idea at all?  all these questions could have made the episode interesting, but they got glossed over--we just had to watch morgan making faces and meaningfully sweating.

if you don't like the yoda example, the bulk of this episode was pretty much identical to tom cruise's "some small measure of peace" sequence in "the last samurai".  because zwick is a good storyteller, he accomplished exactly the same thing in about 20 minutes of screen time, and did a much better job of it.  everything was interesting, and everything was in there for a reason.  we didn't get 7 minutes of bloated exposition about the guy eastman killed--we just needed to know that a guy killed his family, eastman took revenge, and it didn't fix anything.  that was eastman's epiphany.  what was morgan's?  we still don't know--maybe the goat, as mikepiet suggested.  but what this episode confirmed for me is that i no longer give a shit.  morgan is still in crazytown, and in an uninteresting way.  hopefully they'll fix that in future episodes, but right now, his character is less interesting than andrea's ever was.


in the end, the intent behind this episode is pretty clear--production efficiency.  it was a single-location shoot with only 2 actors and the 2nd unit production team.  why they gave it 90 minutes just baffles me.

My guess is that the actor who plays Morgan needed to be induced into coming back to the series and one the ways they did that was to give him his own episode basically centered around his character.  He is after all a pretty accomplished actor in the UK having been in a few films over there.

I don't find Morgan uninteresting at all. Consider for a moment that he could be one death (intended or otherwise) from going full clearance mode on everyone around him, and the best part is nobody knows it. I don't think the epiphany you're looking for ever really happened. Morgan isn't "cured". He's a potential time bomb and only extended time around other people is going to show us if he goes off or not.



Again, we'll have to agree to disagree. Especially since you seem to think George Lucas is a good writer.  



[Just kidding about that last part. Sort of.]

Nope...

But in all seriousness Empire has more of Kershner's fingerprints on it than Lucas, Kershner being something of a savant when it comes to handling characters.

And to a degree I think sirensong is spot on in his critique. I liked the little moments in the episode but the broader picture was kind of staid with this languid Malick-esque "overlingering"... they even hit on it on Talking Dead, that the director just wanted them to really walk around their dialog and not feel confined by timecode.

I think Morgan needs to CLEAR

In TWD universe, is there no winter?

 
John Carrol Lynch - not a member of Tenacious D:



Kyle Gass of Tenacious D:



I can see how you might confuse the two.


Kyle was hilarious in Elf.


Lynch was Frances McDormand's husband in Fargo.

No, I actually agree on the Empire stuff. I just couldn't resist the Lucas jab, since he's ruined my favorite childhood franchise.



 

I think my humor does not translate well to print.



Oh Luke Scenewrecker is high on my list of hate as well. Perhaps "hate" is a strong word... "digitally remastered dislike".

Maybe we have it all wrong - maybe he is a Scientologist

Eastman also told him he "Would hold a baby again" And he has already done that on the front porch of Ricks place. My take is the Idiot is going to get out and do something to the baby, and Morgan will go old "Clear" him...

lawrence kasdan is a fantastic writer, and kershner is a fluid visual storyteller.  the reason empire is the best of the bunch is that it has the least amount of lucas.

i guess the reason i'm so annoyed is that the ep started out well (with eastman sort of mocking morgan).  but then it was just predictable, on-the-nose dialogue.  i'm thinking about the goat more and more, and i think the episode would have been far better had it been framed around this incongruous thing.  "let me tell you a story about a goat".

Interesting. Zombicles? Wonder how the comics deal with frozen zombiepops.

Really good point. You do get the sense after the last episode that he could slip back into insanity especially if he were to lose someone he formed a bond with.

Is it just me, or is the Wolf that Morgan locked in the house look an awful lot like Nick Clark (aka doper-kid) from Fear the Walking Dead?  

If so, there's a pretty interesting story building.  Like how he got from a boat off the coast of California all the way to Alexandria...and hooked up with the Wolves.

 
Lynch did a fine job. Morgan is what's lame.

i think dialectic is the whole point here.  'clear' (thesis) doesn't work, and neither does hippie no-harm (antithesis).  so he has to find his own way somewhere in the middle (synthesis).

that has been the single most consistent theme throughout the series.  the characters are constantly tacking back and forth between hard pragmatism and humanistic idealism: between shane and dale.  the governor and hershel.  terminus and alexandria.

if you don't go in for hegel, TWD is also a perfect example of virtue ethics reasoning.  for aristotle, a virtue is a mean between opposing extremes, both of which are wrong.  courage is the classic example--a position between cowardice (letting fear make decisions for you) and foolhardiness (refusing to consider consequences).  most importantly, a virtue is not a rote rule--sometimes you have to tend more towards one extreme and sometimes the other.  phronesis--practical wisdom--is how we decide.

It snows on Alexandria in the comics - probably pretty hard to replicate since the show is filmed over the summer in GA.

And the Bushes are related to every Royal  House in Europe....

Actually i really like Morgan until this episodd, now i detest him.

That would be le shark jumping instant.

In the episode where everything is falling apart in Alexandria, towards the end, that wolf brawls with Morgan, and Morgan gains the upper hand. The episode either ends, or it cuts to someone else. But, at the time, I thought he killed the wolf.

Yep, that scene ended with Cheezus simply saying "I'm sorry" to cuttywolf and smacking him (ending with a hard editing cut), leading us to believe that he had killed him. The next time we see Cheezus that episode he is walking down the street carrying his friendly stick and what appears to be his lunch and Carol walks by him gives him so much shade you'd think she was a tree. Which added to the inkling that he had killed cuttywolf... but nope, this episode we see he kept him as a pet. I just wonder how many people know about his precious pet.

Do you know what that means?

Is Megan Gene's chinese girlfriend?

Morgan is a liability, and his hesitation in offing bad guys is going to cost Alexandria dearly

i have a nasty suspicion that morgan is going to try to 'rehabilitate' the wolf in the same way that eastman tried to rehabilitate morgan...with predictable results.

over/under on body count is 11.

Well if he DID turn, then Eastman was in for a big fucking surprise!

Captured wolf will be the mechanism for the group to learn about the wolves, I think they will attempt to let him join after hearing his story and he will betray them.

I think the episode was pretty good form and acting, writing and storytelling standpoint just not needed. It killed some of the momentum of the season. I think they are Emmy award hunting with this episode.