The Walking Dead 1009, 1010 preview: Classic horror, surprises galore
The Walking Dead 1009: “Squeeze”
Director Michael Satrazemis is the man credited with bringing horror back to the franchise in season 9 when he introduced the Whisperers on a dark and eerily foggy night. That night, of course, was when we lost Jesus but gained a terrifying new villain in the Whisperers, and things have never been the same since.
“Squeeze” takes many of those classic horror elements and amplifies them with the addition of hundreds (if not thousands) of hungry walkers lurking in the dark. Cave horror stories are particularly tense because they play on a number of common fears at one time: Fear of the dark, claustrophobia, hidden threats, jump scares and tight spaces where any number of things can go wrong.
“Squeeze” is a first class escape story, but escape is never easy in the world of The Walking Dead. This is a lesson learned the hard way in 1009.
A word of advice: Turn up the brightness on your television before watching because “Squeeze” is Game of Thrones-level dark. However, there’s a lot to be said about how Satrazemis utilizes the darkness to ratchet up the tension in painstaking increments; since you can’t really see what’s coming, it makes every sound even more important, and every flash of light comes with some new threat. Whereas the darkness in Game of Thrones was annoying, the darkness here is a clever technique that puts the viewer in the cave. It’s pretty darn brilliant: First the fog, now the darkness.
(Case in point, if you’re claustrophobic then you might watch with a friend or stuffed animal because the episode could absolutely trigger an anxiety attack)
Watching Daryl, Carol, Connie, Magna, Jerry, Aaron and Kelly working to solve the cave predicament is fun. I’m not going to spoil what happens, of course, but this fast moving episode will have you on the edge of your seat the entire time.
This is probably one of Norman Reedus’ finest episodes of the series and Melissa McBride absolutely delivers an Emmy-worthy performance. Lauren Ridloff and Ross Marquand are incredible, you’ll want to hug Cooper Andrews and Jeffrey Dean Morgan has a speech that will change the way you think of the big bad leader of the Saviors forever. These are but a few names on the long list of incredible performances in “Squeeze.”
One last note about “Squeeze”: The episode reveals the depths of Alpha’s depravity, and it reinforces the notion that no one is safe now that the show has departed so significantly from the comic book source material.
Shining Stars of 1009: Carol, Alpha, Carol and Daryl, Carol and Connie, Negan, the cave group as a whole and [OMG] REDACTED AND REDACTED!!!!!