What exactly is happening with The Walking Dead's running times this season? To my recollection, the show's never done extended episodes outside of season premieres and season finales before, but the already slow-paced seventh season is deploying them at seemingly random intervals. Episode 4 was a full 90 minutes long, and felt it, but at least that was an episode that caught us up with Rick, Michonne & co. for the first time since the traumatic events of the season premiere. Next week's episode is another 90-minute special, but it also looks set to be the culmination of a lot of slow-built tension, as Carl and Jesus arrive at the Sanctuary to confront Negan.
All this week's episode "Swear" has to justify its extra-long 70 minutes is Tara, a character who we last saw midway through Season 6. She's been gone so long, in fact, that she doesn't yet know her girlfriend Denise was killed last season. We learn that after Tara and Heath headed out on their supply run last season—inadvertently dodging a Negan-shaped bullet as they left Rick's group behind—they were separated during a zombie attack on a bridge. Tara washed up on a beach and found herself in the midst of yet another group of survivors—a group unlike any we've seen before, because it's made up entirely of women.
In a season that feels defined more than ever by toxic masculine energy, thanks not only to Negan but his various deputy Saviors, this is a refreshing shift. And the two things are directly related, because the group didn't purge themselves of the Y chromosome deliberately; Negan slaughtered all their men and all their boys older than 10 when they resisted his control. Which leads you to wonder whether Negan's warped version of a chivalric code forbids the killing of women, just like it forbids having sex with a woman unless she says yes (though we've already established that "yes" often comes under duress).
Though Tara's initial meeting with this new Oceanside group is less than friendly—and proves yet again that little girls on this show should be approached with caution—it's ultimately a hopeful encounter thanks to a sympathetic member of the group named Cyndie. The Oceanside crew have orders to kill any intruder on sight, including humans, and even after escaping the initial shoot-first response, Tara does not end up finding a new home for herself at Oceanside.
Heath may or may not be dead at this point, but one of the episode's key moments was his uneasiness about Rick's gang and their trigger-happy approach to the Saviors. "Nobody's in this together, not any more," he says. "That's me, that's you, that's anybody who wants to stay alive." Anybody who's seen more than a few episodes of The Walking Dead knows the refrain by now—that the apocalypse has warped everyone who survived it so profoundly that it's hard to tell the humans from the monsters—and after all that's happened to them since, it's nice to be reminded that Rick & co. aren't exactly innocent. "I know we must seem monsters to you," says Oceanside's leader Natania to Tara later on, wildly underestimating how widespread the "kill on sight" approach actually is.
After Cyndie foils a murder plot and allows her to escape instead, Tara returns to Alexandria and receives the news of Denise's death via a weirdly rushed montage. This is actually the moment that makes this 70-minute running time seem truly weird, because if you're going to bring Tara back into the show's fold with an extended solo episode, wouldn't you spend longer than three damn minutes on this kind of devastating, emotionally transformative news?
Next week is the penultimate episode before the mid-season finale, and it'd better make those 90 minutes count, is all I'm saying.
