Tales of the Walking Dead Recap: Troubled Water

There’s a great little fake-out at the start of “Dee.” Brooke, a woman we’ve never met before, is in bed with a guy who pitches her on what sounds like an idyllic little life: settling down, getting married, having kids. She puts him off. She has a busy day ahead: going shopping, getting ready for dinner. She promises they’ll meet up at a restaurant later.

It would be very easy to mistake this scene as a moment of calm before the storm — the last lazy afternoon a couple gets to enjoy before the zombie apocalypse happens. But as Brooke dresses and heads outside, it becomes clear that this is happening well after the zombie apocalypse. Brooke and the rest of her little group, who are holed up on a riverboat with careful security protocols, have simply found a way to keep living like nothing is wrong.

And so — for the second time in as many weeks — I found myself watching a Tales of the Walking Dead episode, wishing it more fully embraced the interesting premise it teases in its opening moments. There’s a potentially fascinating Walking Dead story to be told about a community that successfully cuts itself off from the zombie apocalypse, play-acting like they’re in a pre-cataclysm world where nothing has changed.

But that’s not the story “Dee” is telling. Because before long, Brooke cedes the center of the story to a character who will be very familiar to Walking Dead fans: Alpha (Samantha Morton) — or, as she’s called here, in her pre-Whisperer days, Dee.

As it turns out, the real purpose of this episode is to knit Tales of the Walking Dead a little closer to the main Walking Dead series by giving us the origin story of Alpha, the big villain of seasons nine and ten. The episode is threaded with Dee’s Southern Gothic-style narration, which should theoretically add some style — but in practice, it’s mostly scaffolding designed to make the connections between this one-off episode and the larger franchise even clearer.

A confession: I abandoned The Walking Dead around the time Alpha was introduced, so I can’t really say whether this episode adds anything to either the Alpha’s arc or Samantha Morton’s performance.  What I can say is that I think this is, conceptually, the least interesting direction for Tale of the Walking Dead: A delivery mechanism for excess story beats that the main series just didn’t have time for.

In retrospect, I was probably a little hard on last week’s “Blair / Gina,” which — while not wholly successful — at least used the anthology format to do something genuinely strange storytelling under the Walking Dead mantle. “Dee,” by contrast, feels like it’s just playing the old hits of The Walking Dead: A bleak, self-fulfilling prophecy about how there’s no reason for anyone to try to make the world better, because things are only going to get worse.

This time, Brooke is our hopelessly naïve dupe whose idealism is doomed to be crushed. As the episode begins, Brooke’s riverboat seems like a little slice of post-apocalyptic paradise. There’s yoga in the morning, booze and music at night, and the promise of a garden party on the horizon.

The price of admission to Brooke’s club of survivors seems relatively low: Work the occasional shift as a guard or bartender or whatever, wear fancy clothes when the moment calls for it, and try not to be an asshole the rest of the time. At the top of the episode, a new guy named Billy needles Dee about her lack of enthusiasm for this way of life: “You know how many people would kill to be here?” he marvels as Dee scowls.

As it turns out: At least six people would kill to be there, because Billy runs a little gang, and they have their own plans for the riverboat. Dee knows Billy is sketchy from the start — this is, after all, a franchise where cynicism about other people is nearly always rewarded. But because Brooke and her allies are such Pollyannas, Billy manages to evade suspicion, kill one of the boat’s residents, and invite the rest of his gang aboard for a quasi-mutiny.

Billy turns out to be one of those Walking Dead villains whose plan doesn’t quite make sense. It would be easier if he just wanted to kill everyone onboard, take over the boat, and enjoy the unusual luxuries it contains. Instead, Billy only wants to kill the six people he deems the most useless, give the rooms and resources they’re hogging to his buddies, and start hooking up with Brooke. All of this is completely delusional, but he’s such a two-dimensional baddie that I guess we have no choice but to assume he’s dumb enough to believe everyone else on the boat would just shrug and accept him as their new leader.

Dee, inevitably, is the fly in Billy’s ointment. But she doesn’t actually care about saving Brooke or the rest of the riverboat gang. She just wants to escape with her nine-year-old daughter Lydia — who, inconveniently enough, has become much more enamored with Brooke’s build-the-future approach than Dee’s kill-or-be-killed philosophy. So even after Dee kills a few of Billy’s guys and flees with Lydia in a dinghy, the core conflict remains: Can Dee really keep Lydia safe in a world like this?

It’s here where the episode feels a little at war with itself. We’re not exactly supposed to like Dee, let alone agree with her isolationist philosophy. After all, most viewers will know that Dee goes on to become one of the franchise’s big villains — and even in this prequel, she’s not exactly a fun or pleasant person to be around. And yet … what exactly was she wrong about here? Billy was a duplicitous psychopath, just as she predicted. Brooke’s hopeful, trusting nature did lead to the deaths of everyone she cared about. If Lydia is torn between Dee, her actual mother, and Brooke, the mother she would rather have, it’s clear that Dee is the one who can make sure she survives.

To the show’s credit, the episode ends with a pretty dark counter to this grim worldview: If Lydia has no choice but to live like Dee, does she even want to survive? Dee, after witnessing her daughter’s inability to strike back at the zombies trying to eat her, concludes that Lydia might not be suited for survival in the apocalypse after all. As Lydia mumbles about hearing the trees and fairies talking, Dee draws a knife and prepares to kill her daughter, then herself.

Until they’re interrupted by a group of survivors clad in zombie skins. It’s not much of an ending — but then again, it’s not supposed to be one. For the first time in Tales of the Walking Dead, we’re watching a story that doesn’t stand on its own. If you want to know what happens next, there are two whole Alpha-centric seasons of The Walking Dead waiting for you.

Stray bullets:

• I’m curious to hear what those who saw Samantha Morton on The Walking Dead thought of this extended backstory. Does this episode fit convincingly into the Walking Dead franchise’s larger continuity? Does it add any richness, meaning, or depth — or even just interesting new information — to Alpha’s overall arc? If you have thoughts, leave them in the comments below.

• Brooke’s ambiguous fate at the end of the episode makes me wonder if she might eventually get her own Tales of the Walking Dead episode, exploring what happened to her after she lost everything (and, at the hands of Dee, gained a gaping facial wound) in the wake of the riverboat collapse.

• In the brief time we spend with him, Billy does a lot of bad stuff, but let’s not overlook the moment when he casually announces he’ll demote Brooke from group leader to Head of Pep. What an asshole.