The Walking Dead: Season 5 and a community in crisis
Looking back at The Walking Dead season 5 episode “Coda” we see an example of a bad community in crisis, which is a first for the show.
In the world of The Walking Dead there are usually good guys and bad guys and they live in their good guy and bad guy communities. It’s usually pretty cut and dry. You couldn’t have vegetarians at Terminus, for example. But when it comes to season 5 of The Walking Dead, the community at Grady Memorial is the first good example of what happens when the balance of power is out of whack.
Officer Dawn Lerner (Christine Woods) is the leader at Grady Memorial, but all it would take is one wrong move for her to be taken out. She’s sitting on top of a powder keg with a bunch of officers who want to see things running in a different way and she’s torn between doing the right thing and appeasing the bad officers to keep the peace.
Dawn knows she’s in a corner, trying to do what’s right and trying to keep the peace. At Grady, doing what’s right doesn’t necessarily intersect with keeping the peace. There are some bad people at Grady taking advantage of the situation and getting away with heinous things, and she can’t stop them because it only makes things worse. But she knows it’s happening, so she tries to keep the heinous things to a minimum and it’s a constant struggle. No one can be trusted because the officers in charge have created an environment of mistrust. With Dawn’s death, it can be hoped that things will change.
We hadn’t seen an example of a power struggle within the bad guy communities until we arrived at Grady Memorial, and it’s not likely that we’ll see the same kind of struggles with the Scavengers or the Saviors. And we certainly didn’t see unrest in Woodbury or Terminus. Grady Memorial was a very different scenario, and that’s what makes it fascinating. You can imagine Negan, Jadis, Gareth and the Governor squashing insurrection early on, so seeing a power struggle this advanced is fascinating.
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I’d like to see a return to Grady at some point if the story happened to return to Atlanta. It would be interesting to see what has happened at the hospital since Beth’s death. Have things improved? Who is in charge? Is there peace or are there still struggles? So many questions, but we’ll likely never find out the answers.