The Walking Dead's Season 11 premiere is available Sunday, Aug. 15 on AMC+, one week before it officially airs on AMC on Sunday, Aug. 22. The below review contains discussion of some of the plot points of the premiere, but no major spoilers.
The Walking Dead's season eleven premiere, "Acheron: Part I," isn't exactly cut from the same lackadaisical cloth as season ten's extra pandemic episodes, but it also doesn't feel like a vital, proper kickoff for what's to be the long-running show's final season. Often, season openers go big and deliver a certain amount of goods to get viewers primed and ready for the exciting storylines ahead, but this starter felt lackluster, small in scope, and too much a part of the post-Whisperer War malaise.
A better move would have been to release Parts I and II on the same night, as just the first half of this particular trek, involving Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) loudly airing their grievances during a dangerous underground shortcut through D.C., would land a hell of a lot better if you got the whole story up front. At this point, Maggie's hatred of Negan is five years old in our time and six or seven years old in the show's time -- and also, she already spared his life back in season nine's "What Comes After," when Lauren Cohan left the series for ABC's Whiskey Cavalier. Any plot to kill Negan she might have now feels like a backstracking of sorts, or at least a storyline that should've been touched on long ago.
This isn't to say there isn't material to explore between Maggie and Negan now that the latter is fully integrated into the group (though still a bit of an outcast), but it should not be the front-and-center focus of the series. And if that years-old conflict really is the most interesting focal point the writers can come up with, that's not a great sign. Post-Rick Grimes, the efforts to steer Daryl (Norman Reedus) into the leader of the series never quite worked, so now there's an overall floating, formless feeling to the saga. One upside here, at least, is that both Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan are in top form as Maggie and Negan erupt in vehement arguments, which is certainly better than a silent glowering contest.
Undoubtedly, Maggie and Negan will get through this crucible and come out the other side with an uneasy understanding. So why underestimate viewers by delivering tired cliffhangers and killing off D-level chum? In an opportune time to ramp everything up and pull no punches, we're getting mid-card stories.
Most super long-in-the-tooth shows undergo a form of shrinking, in both audience and production, and it hits The Walking Dead universe, with its large ensembles, in some very specific ways. What we see in these later seasons (and Fear the Walking Dead is doing this too) is tighter-cropped shots, a sameness to the scenery (a ton of nebulous, nondescript woods that confuse our own mental geography), a rotating in and out of cast (either with character-focused episodes or just people vanishing for weeks), and waaaayy more interiors (and an increase in green screen). In each case, in a small way, it makes the show feel less epic and more disjointed.
"Acheron: Part I" starts off with an example of some of these side effects. It's a big action set piece, evoking the famous Raiders of the Lost Ark "Well of Souls" snake scene, but in its own way, it's classic late-stage Walking Dead, in that it's ultimately hollow. It's inside, darkly lit, and hard to follow. Sure, it's interesting to see a bunker full of walkers taking a joint nap (a decade into the zompocalyse means zombies can go into power-saving mode, it appears) but, despite the carnage, the sequence feels tiny and tacked in. It's not altogether random, of course, as the purpose of this mission is to get food to feed the starving remnants of Alexandria and Hilltop, but even starting your final season with everything in desperate shambles -- and major characters actively opting out of dangerous missions because, er, why do anything anymore? -- has a big bummer vibe.
The B-story here, which is the angle that is actively leading us toward something new, didn't exactly light any fires either. Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Princess (Juanita Sanchez), and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) dealt with the Commonwealth's auditors for an exciting round of incessant questioning ("How many bowel movements do you have a day?"). No big or notable moves here. We learned the Commonwealth is hyper anxious, uber secure, and probably abusive and cruel, but we knew that already from season ten's "Splinter." It's a shame that those extra six episodes last season couldn't have positioned the series, story-wise, to have a better premiere. The Commonwealth arc, which is to be the show's final hurrah, is already a trudge. The Negan flashback episode was quite good, but his current drama with Maggie isn't enough nourishment for a show that needs a big kick in the pants for its final act.
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