I liked most of the episode until the end. Why the fuck did Morgan and Strand let Teddy and Riley go? One of them should be fucking dead, and the other should have been interrogated so they can at least
try to figure out where Alicia is. And so much of the dialogue felt really stilted all throughout the episode, though that's just a staple of Chambliss and Goldberg's
Fear at this point I guess. Ugh. Also think Strand was really poor this episode, it's like the writers don't know how to use his personality except to make him "do bad thing that makes him look like he's only covering for himself, then spend time trying to redeem him," rinse and repeat. It's frustrating, because we've seen how great Colman Domingo can be on this show when he's given good material to work with.
Also, this episode really intensified something that's been bugging me about this season for a long while now: they rely way too much on telling us what characters are doing / have been up to instead of actually showing us. There have been so many instances of it this season:
- Strand going behind Virginia's back to gather an army against her, without actually showing any of it
- Basically the entire creation of Morgan's town (unless I'm misremembering, they don't really show us any part of them actually building it up)
- We haven't seen Lawton at all since Virginia died, despite Strand being its new leader, and despite Daniel (and June?) living there
- We haven't seen June's new hospital
- We haven't seen Daniel during his stay at Lawton, where he's supposedly trying to get better with June's help (June hasn't even mentioned the man since that episode, and Daniel appeared briefly in this one as if nothing happened to begin with)
- Althea leaving the group to find Isabelle (I assume), yet she just… vanishes. We don't get to see her as she leaves
I want to love this show so badly, and I have enjoyed it a lot more this season compared to 4 and 5, but it's still so damn uneven, and if you think about an episode for more than a few minutes, it just falls apart and makes you mad. Ugh. They've at least brought the quality back up to a level where I'm sort of looking to new episodes again, but it still isn't great. Nowhere near as good as the first three seasons, and while I know it isn't entirely a fair comparisons since they're basically two very different shows that just share the same name, it doesn't change how I feel about it.
I hope the season ends on a high note, but I doubt it. Chambliss and Goldberg are seemingly good at coming up with cool ideas from time to time, but that's very hit or miss, and the writing is fucking bad most of the time.