It’s been nearly 40 years now, but you’ll still get people telling you they believe it..... no, not that we’ll ever get another great Star Wars film, but that Elvis Presley is still alive. Despite all the evidence pilling against it, many lifelong devotes to The King will still claim that somewhere out there, his heart is still beating and his hips are still shaking (or if the Men In Black are to believed “Elvis is not dead, he just went home”). There’s no greater sign of love from a fan base than refusing to accept its demise despite the all too obvious reality. The Browncoats that never gave up trying to save Firefly and still dream of a return (13 years and we’re still flying), those that believe Jon Snow still has a few more nothings to know yet, and the X-Files fanatics tthat pleaded for a comeback and got it!
Last week, the Internet was abuzz with posts and features from The Walking Dead fans that refused to accept their beloved “go to town guy” Glenn was gone. Truth or logic aside, you have to admire the love, and only time will tell whether such faith will be rewarded. Unsurprisingly, we don’t get the answer this week. In fact, we get something much better: the story of Morgan’s journey from madman to monk in the time passage of his screen absence, and it’s a bloody good one!
Here’s Not Here – While wondering through the woods and “clearing” anything that crosses his path, Morgan stumbles on a cabin inhabited by a man named Eastman (John Carroll Lynch – Body of Proof). Over time and some captivity, Eastman teaches Morgan the value of life and the ways of Aikido.
So after the frantic and desperate tone of the last two episodes, the positive and redemption based story of this week feels like a comforting stroke after a few hard slaps, the pleasure following the pain if you will. It’s a narrative hampered by the foresight of a prequel as we already know Morgan goes Jedi by the end, but is frequently downright compelling in showing the many difficult stages of Morgan’s transition. Lennie James’s performance is outstanding as he takes us right back to the delusional basket case we saw in Season 3. There’s a wonderful twisted logic to his early existence of “clearing” any walkers or humans he meets: that he kills to live, almost like an addiction. Director Stephen Williams does a great job of taking us inside Morgan’s mindset with the recurring “mad mode” fuzzy camera technique, like Kill Bill’s Ironside siren sound before The Bride gets rather bloody. As well as presenting his earlier self in a different mental state; it’s also great audience embedding. There’s a very good chance we’ll see this technique again later this season to show Morgan snapping out of his peaceful ways. Similarly, the lighter musical score used to show the new positive thoughts slowly creeping under Morgan’s skin is a great touch even when it just involves him staring at a goat. There’s an excellent feeling of gradual progression to Morgan’s recovery as he inches back towards his original self before moving beyond it. The best example is when chooses to go back into the cell despite being offered to come out and sleep on the sofa. He’s just in touch with his problems enough to understand he isn’t ready for that level of freedom yet and so willingly stays confined.
As much as we enjoy watching Morgan being born again, the real star of the episode is Eastman as his poor cheese-making Yoda. He sells the ideas of Morgan’s rehabilitation without feeling like a lecturer, and in fact, maintaining a respectable level of comic relief (“Kill me.... well that’s a stupid name, you should change it”). His background as a psychological evaluator feels right, not just for his ability to help Morgan through his PTSD but his desire to. This is also well combined with Eastman’s own experiences of loss and inhumanity as we ultimately come to see him living the same story as Morgan, just a few chapters ahead. There’s a nice composition of both psychology and spirituality to his techniques and his actions deliver some good surprises in delivering his ideals of all life being sacred. None of which says it better than his walker cemetery. Sheppard Book once said that, “How we treat our dead is part of what makes us different to those that did the slaughtering” and here, we see Eastman honouring that by burying any walkers he must kill as the people they were, not the monsters they became. It becomes a wonderful metaphor for the central philosophy: all life is precious, even the dead. The Aikido training scenes are also a real highlight as the riverside location is utterly gorgeous to behold.
The extended length may be a bit of an over indulgence; the longer journey is good but it would have been just as satisfying compressed to a regular episode. The only big issue here is not the episode itself but its timing. With so much left hanging after the last couple episodes (Glenn? Rick? Where have The Wolves gone? Is the super herd gone), AMC have basically torn a page out of South Park’s construction paper playbook to give us it’s own "Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus”. It’s an enjoyable but deliberately unrelated episode to further string on existing cliff-hangers much to audience frustration. The only small answer supplied of Morgan and his familiar Wolf adversary is merely confirming what most already suspected. Especially given the extended run time, the show could have left us at least something more on the other storylines. Now with four episodes remaining and as many split group stories in place, it looks like the rest of these autumn episodes will be very isolated affairs before reuniting for the mid-season finale.
It might be the episode we need rather than the episode we want, but with the outstanding chemistry of its two leads, a lot of brilliant emotional material in this tale of two men, and a goat, there’s only so much Glenn-gripping you can really justify. It could be considered stretched, but there’s enough interests in the characters to prevent any dragging, and despite the pacifistic approach, it features some great fight scenes. Above all else, Here’s Not Here makes one thing very clear. Bringing Lennie James and Morga was one hell of a good call by the showrunners, but if they pull this trick again next week, they’ll be taking a lot of stick beatings for it.