The Latest ‘Tales Of The Walking Dead’ Is A Confusing Disaster

What a very strange episode of Tales Of The Walking Dead this last one was.

I’m not sure how to even summarize or recap such a bizarre, jumbled episode. It seems that AMC is shooting for creative approaches to these one-off episodes, but can’t quite back any of them with a very good script. All the classic Walking Dead mistakes are present week after week.

I didn’t review last week’s episode mainly because I found it so forgettable that I simply forgot. It was about a guy making a nature documentary about zombies in the middle of nowhere, in a place called the Dead Zone (that’s kind of an interesting concept) who “doesn’t work with humans” which makes you wonder what the point of this documentary is—not to mention where he’s getting power to power everything. I swear, this zombie apocalypse never runs out of electricity!

An annoying girl shows up to ruin his plans and she basically doesn’t stop whining and guilt-tripping him for the rest of the episode. Eventually she goes off to find her people who are directly in the line of an incoming herd of zombies and she dies. Which thankfully shuts her up. There’s some nice moments and some reasonably decent cinematography throughout the episode, but overall I didn’t care much for either character and was happy when the episode ended. The last bit, with the scientist walking through the newly dead caravan of fools, was the best.

Okay, now on to ‘Davon,’ the penultimate episode in this little spinoff experiment from AMC.

Clouded Memories Gimmick, Let’s Go!

The episode opens on Davon, the titular character, waking up with a head injury and amnesia. He’s handcuffed to a zombie with a melted face (cool special effects there!) and smashes her head in. He starts hallucinating that she’s talking to him, calling him a murderer. He soon realizes that he’s being hunted by townspeople.

Davon is played by Jessie T. Usher who plays A-Train on The Boys. Thinking about The Boys was probably my favorite part of this episode.

Anyways, he starts having flashbacks. The woman is Amanda, a French Canadian woman who rescued a wounded Davon seven weeks earlier, along with her sister Nora. We keep getting little flashbacks to these characters as Davon makes his way through the present timeline.

I’ll stop to note that I have mixed feelings on how this episode was shot. On the one hand, it had some of the prettiest cinematography in all The Walking Dead, with some truly lovely, haunting shots like the flashback when Davon and Nora stand talking in the rain. On the other hand, the flashbacks are mostly flickery, shaky affairs that are intended to be disorienting, but which grow old quickly.

In any case, eventually Davon finds a zombified little boy in a secret room in Amanda and Nora’s house. Through flashbacks, he realizes that he stumbled on this room and helped Nora’s son, Garen, get free. He and the other boy were handcuffed to posts in the room. Amanda finds him there and tries to catch Nora’s fleeing son, but he stops her, cuffing himself to her, before she falls into an ill-placed pan of what appears to be battery acid and melts her face off.

The townspeople capture Davon in the present and accuse him of killing their children, demanding to know where the missing kids are and for him to confess. He still can’t remember fully what happened, but fortunately they devise the perfect method of killing him—a Rube Goldberg machine worthy of Fear The Walking Dead! Rather than just burn him at the stake, the French Canadian weirdos put him in a van that they slowly begin to crush with an excavator. So naturally, he’s able to escape—especially since he remembers just then that Nora’s son escaped and pleads with her to stop the slow-motion execution and soon the town breaks out into a chaotic melee between those who want to kill him and those who want to wait.

I should note at this point that these people are very weird, though this weirdness is never really explored or explained. They wear clothes that make the whole thing feel like it takes place 150 years prior. We’re in the middle of nowhere in Quebec and it all feels very much like a past era. It’s a cool setting but the way the episode is structured means we only get glimpses of it and it all feels kind of wasted on the lousy script.

Anyways, Davon escapes and follows Amanda’s son, Arnaund, who we only just met during the near-execution scene, and learns that he has Garen chained up in a nearby cabin. Through some exposition and another flashback, we discover that Amanda was helping her son kill children because—like so many other Walking Dead characters in the past—he thinks that this is somehow a mercy, saving them from the hard zombie apocalypse life. “Murder is mercy,” Amanda kept saying, clueing us in to her lunacy.

It’s not much of a revelation, given that we were introduced to the murders quite late in the episode and to the murderer only near the end. The structure of the episode, built almost entirely on the “missing memory” gimmick, undermines the mystery itself. A more traditional approach, where Davon had to actually figure out who killed the kids rather than just slowly remember as his memories came back, would have been more satisfying, as we would have been along for the ride the whole time.

But writing an actual mystery with clues and foreshadowing and a sense of “whodunnit” requires a lot more work than using a cheap gimmick, and if there’s one thing that’s become clear with this franchise as a whole, it’s that hard work is not on the menu. Gimmicky shortcuts, on the other hand, are what we’re served up time and time again.

But hey, it’s a zombie show right? Who needs plausibility?

This was a confusing, at times beautifully filmed, episode about characters we never once care about even a tiny little bit. The setting was cool and a nice change but ultimately led nowhere. Davon survives in the end and abandons the bizarre town and its unpleasant inhabitants while uttering a phrase in French, “Je varrai” which means “I will see” which is cryptic enough to keep viewers guessing, but not a very satisfying ending either.

All told, I give this one a “meh.” Its saving grace was the nice cinematography and A-Train. The rest, a jumbled and confusing mess.