"That's how it is, isn't it? You always think there's one more peanut butter left" - Michonne
“First Time Again” could not have been more aptly named. For The Walking Dead's Season 6 premiere, the show decided to rehash almost everything that has happened before, while it threw the characters into an all too familiar situation. The settlement is in some sort of indirect harm - if these zombies aren’t cleared out, we cannot have any peace of mind and the characters are basically the same - Rick is a hardened survivor, but he’s still generally an upstanding person at his core (no matter how much the show would like you to believe otherwise); and the Rick and co. must either assimilate the new group or leave them behind - Carter was not long for this world. The only thing that has changed is the amount of zombies and the way they must be exterminated. “First Time Again” is the same old gun just polished into a sheen so bright the show hopes to blind you from its similar situations.
I’ve been doing The Walking Dead recaps for a long time now. I wanted to give it another chance, hoping to shed my biases and give Season 6 a shot. But “First Time Again” made it pretty hard to forget everything that has happened in the history of the show. Luckily it did this very well with a combination of shared memories familiar storylines in the flashback sequences.
The flashbacks, presented in black and white (TWD loves its black and white, having re-released all of its episodes in black and white), served as a reminder for the audience of what happened last season as well as Rick and Morgan’s history and some of the show’s history. Rick’s initial caution when Morgan shows up made sense as a show of faith in the community, though I don’t necessarily buy that he doesn’t initially trust him. Morgan’s reintroduction brings a much needed balancing force for Rick and the group and is a welcome addition. Morgan already seems to fit pretty well in with some of Rick’s group, though it may take some time for others (i.e. Carol) to warm up to him. Morgan also gives Rick a balance with the man he used to be to how the show wants you to think of Rick now - the non-trusting, overcautious survivor who seems to be sliding into a violence. Hopefully Morgan sticks around longer than just a couple episodes, the consummate nomad hopefully settles down in Alexandria.
Outside of the interactions with Morgan, the storyline in the flashbacks was basically a reiteration of last season’s storyline. Carter, who was a resident of Alexandria this whole time yet never made his presence known, still doesn’t believe they should follow Rick but also doesn’t have any of the survival techniques. Sounds pretty familiar. The flashbacks do introduce us to Heath (Straight Outta Compton's Corey Hawkins), an Alexandrian who has been out on a supply run for the entirety of Rick and co.’s stay, and they show Deanna as figurehead leader going along with whatever Rick says.
Throughout the show, the flashbacks are spliced between the “present day” zombie herding mission that is not revealed until midway through in a flashback. In a flashback, Rick and Morgan stumble across a quarry filled with zombies being tenuously held back by a few semi-trucks blocking off the exits - remarkably similar to the original camp from Season 1. Eventually we find out Rick wants to be proactive and lead these zombies away from Alexandria so they won’t be overrun in the near future. Thus comes the segments happening in the present.
Unfortunately, this zombie herding isn’t the most interesting, especially since the audience doesn’t know what they are trying to accomplish and why they are even doing it.
During the herding, Nicholas (the guy who got Noah eaten and tried to kill Glenn in the forest) gets redemption, Sasha seems to be less suicidal, and Rick gets to kill Carter, who has his cheek chewed off by a zombie. The Rick mercy killing is silently questioned moment between Morgan and Michonne, but it only made sense. Outside of those things, it was fairly uninteresting until the end in which a horn sounds in Alexandria and leads half the zombies to it.
“First Time Again” suffered from being a season premiere. There was really no reason for the episode to be twice as long or for the stories to go on simultaneously aside from the fact that TWD wanted to do something big. Sure, an episode of just the flashback segments would have been pretty tame, even by TWD standards, but it would have at least built some tension for the episode in which the zombie herding would have occurred. Likewise, the zombie herding segments also weren’t interesting because they were fairly uneventful and because they lacked tension due to the audience not knowing what was happening. Cutting up the two stories and splicing them together tried to create some excitement in the two typical and somewhat boring stories happening but felt sort of cheap midway through the episode, much like the cliffhanger at the end of the episode.
What is yet to be seen is whether “First Time Again” feels so familiar because it was meant to or just because everything is old hat by Season 6 of The Walking Dead. We’ve already seen a farm overrun, a prison blown up, and a fortified camp of cannibals. There have been characters who have died, those who continue to survive despite themselves, and everything in between. Aside from finding a cure for zombism or finding a utopia that Rick and co. actually ruin there seem to be few novel ideas left for The Walking Dead to try. Perhaps the point has been reached where the show’s stories will be akin to the characters of the show’s namesake.