I’ve been very impressed with the first two episodes of season six of The Walking Dead, which have been pretty much nonstop action between twin walker and Wolves assaults, with more walkers to come tonight as Rick tries to salvage the mess of his original plan from the premiere.
Yet there’s been one problem with the show since it ended last year, and it’s come from a most unexpected place.
I’m talking about Morgan, the season one character on The Walking Dead who fans have been waiting literally five years to see return to the main cast. We ran into him briefly after he had gone a bit crazy from losing his son, obsessed with trapping and clearing zombies, but now he’s evolved into some kind of zen Buddhist monk, complete with expert bo staff skills. He’s also become the poster child for non-lethal violence on the show, something that is already rubbing many the wrong way, both the characters in the show and the fans watching it.
Morgan has been particularly benevolent toward the Wolves. In season five, we saw a scene where he was cornered by a pair of them, yet chooses to only knock them out instead of killing them. That I can maybe understand, but then we saw the full extent of his pacifism on display last week as he refused to kill any Wolves, even as they were running through the town with machetes and knives, butchering anyone they came across.
In contrast to Morgan was Carol, who went undercover as a Wolf and shot and stabbed anyone who got in her way without a second thought. One of the most significant examples of this disparity of styles is when Carol finds Morgan delicately tying up a Wolf prisoner, she simply shoots him in the head and moves on to save others.
Morgan, meanwhile, does other maddening things, like letting a big group of Wolves simply run away and live to fight another day. We see him feel some pang of regret as he sees one grab a pistol on the way out. Eventually, Morgan is flung into an intense fight against one of the Wolves he let go last season, and the implication is that he finally does break his new vow and kill that one. But that hasn’t been confirmed, and I’m not fully convinced we won’t see that Wolf as prisoner later.
It’s more than a little irksome to have been waiting to see Morgan return after so long, and now have him be the character who is preaching morality and making life-threatening decisions in some stupid quest for peace. This is not the world for that, and Morgan risks dragging the entire group into the trap that the CW’s Arrow has fallen into in recent years.
For those who follow the DC Comics show, Oliver Queen, aka the Green Arrow, originally showed up in season one using newly acquired bow-hunting/fighting skills to straight up murder criminals in Starling City, names on a list provided by his now-dead father of people who were utterly corrupt. After years of watching Clark Kent gingerly throw enemies into walls on Smallville to avoid killing anyone, the brutality was sort of…refreshing.
But eventually, Oliver changed his tune. His friend Tommy found out he was a murderer, and the guilt of it caused him to change his ways, and since then, the show has employed all manner of stun arrows, rope arrows, shock arrows and what have you in order to avoid Oliver simply shooting people in the heart like he used to. That’s all well and good, but eventually this started to manifest itself in stupid and comic book-y ways. Oliver’s newfound sense of moral obligation not to kill people means he even lets ultra-baddies like Slade Wilson live, a man who murdered Oliver’s own mother right in front of him and his sister. Wilson is imprisoned, but of course, naturally escapes and wreaks more havoc.
But in the past two seasons now, Arrow’s obsession with killing and not killing has just gotten weird, and it’s almost completely consumed the show. In season three, Oliver was careful not to even kill a henchman for weeks, but then suddenly when the League of Assassins comes to town, it was totally fine to kill those acolytes without a second thought. Now in season four, we’re in this weird situation in season four where Oliver doesn’t kill anyone, his partner Diggle is now a masked hero and seems fine with straight up shooting people during missions, and Oliver chastises his sister Thea (Red Arrow) for doing something as Batman-esque as breaking a bad guy’s arm during a confrontation. It’s absurd. This obsession with not-killing and the arbitrary breaking of the rules whenever it’s convenient is sinking the show.
All this is to say that I don’t want the next season of The Walking Dead to turn into some big Rick/Carol vs. Morgan debate about the sanctity of the life of psychotic murders who would invade a town and start chopping up housewives with machetes. Morgan has already put everyone at risk once by letting the two Wolves go when he first met them. Then he’s let five more go after the attack, and now one of them has a gun. This is Lori-level stupidity, but coming from a long-awaited player who should be one of the show’s biggest badasses.
It’s even worse because though it’s also based on a comic, The Walking Dead is set in a more realistic universe than Arrow (zombies aside). Decisions like this seem even more out of place as a result, because there isn’t this overarching need to conform to some DC sense of “good guys don’t kill.” We are well past that now, as everyone’s favorite characters are Daryl, Carol, and Rick who have racked up the highest human body counts of anyone. Introducing Morgan now as some kind of peace-and-love moral leader is just going to insert conflict into the show that isn’t interesting and no one wants to see.
There’s a place on The Walking Dead for characters who aren’t insta-murdering badasses. But I would prefer the cowardice of Father Gabriel or how clearly Tyreese was damaged by the death of children to…whatever the hell is happening with Morgan. His character transition makes no sense, and his policy of “let the bad guys go” is outright suicide, and by this point in the show, the audience clearly knows that.
I certainly think there are many moral debates to be had in the horrific world of The Walking Dead, but they have to be framed properly, and zen monk Morgan coming out of nowhere to endanger everyone with his misguided ideals about how cannibals are people too doesn’t really have a place in this stage of the show. They, the group, and we, the audience, have been through too much at this point to take that kind of thinking seriously.
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