June, living alone in the wilderness, attacks PADRE Collectors and cuts off their trigger fingers. She meets a desperate father, Adrian, who is searching for his daughter, Hannah. During an ambush, June discovers Dwight, Sherry and their son Finch, who has appendicitis and needs surgery. June reluctantly agrees to help and takes them to an abandoned lab. Joined by Adrian, June admits she performed experiments with radiation to find a cure to bite infections after having deduced that Alicia had survived due to her previous exposure. However, the radiation levels were fatal to her test subjects, causing June to abandon her research. After finding Hannah amongst the test subjects, a devastated Adrian allows himself to be devoured rather than live without her.
June saves Finch and decides to flee PADRE with Dwight and Sherry. They are caught by Shrike, who cuts off June's trigger finger and has Finch bitten by an undead Adrian in order to motivate June to resume working on a cure. Elsewhere, Morgan admits his guilt over something he didn't do in his past is holding him back in his relationship with Mo. Madison helps Morgan escape, remaining behind and ordering him to go fix whatever it is.
"Blue Jay" seeks to distance itself from the tendencies of the previous episode. While "Remember What They Took From You" featured a more fast-paced narrative and was filled with events, "Blue Jay" takes the opposite approach and focuses on a more contained and closed story. What might initially seem like a negative point for breaking the season's rhythm turns out to be a significant success.
The episode begins with a beautiful sequence of scenes where much is shown and little (basically nothing) is spoken. The scene contains no dialogue, just ambient sounds, and displays the daily life of June (Jenna Elfman). It's worth noting the changes in the appearance of this character, who seems to have received more attention from the production, as one of the biggest criticisms regarding the previous episode is the lack of visual changes in the characters after a seven-year time jump. June looks completely different from the last time we saw her, and the changes involve not only her appearance but also her personality and psychology.
The character appears to be tormented by a kind of trauma and internal conflicts, and this is exposed in the episode in a way that isn't gratuitous. Jenna Elfman conveys all these emotions and feelings with the finest details of her exquisite performance in this episode, whether through her body language that seems rougher and more aggressive yet still retains the essence of the person she once was, or through her gazes and facial expressions that tell us everything the character seems to be feeling without the need for expository dialogue.
The episode well handles the mystery surrounding the character and what might have happened to her during these seven years. This agonizing mystery is fueled through the actions the character takes in refusing to help a father who wants to find his daughter, something the character would never do in the past, considering June has always been portrayed as a good and humanitarian person. Not only this act of negligence says a lot about what the character has become, but how she faces and conflicts with herself in a simple scene where the character is sitting thinking about all this. These small details of acting enhance June and show a great effort and dedication by Jenna, who over the seasons has proven to be one of the best (if not the best) actresses in the entire series, and who has won the hearts of fans with this rich and complex character.
In addition to featuring an exquisite performance that carries and highlights the episode as a whole, "Blue Jay" is also rich in technical successes, from its evolving soundtrack, which has been improving since the previous episode and becoming ever better, to the new image resolution aspect that gives a cinematic air to the series, including the editing and montage that, although slow, never make the episode feel massive or dragged, and the beautiful cinematography of the episode that maximizes its settings to extract the most beautiful shots. The entire setting of the abandoned train is technically meticulous from its exterior and especially its interior.
The episode's cinematography cleverly uses the nighttime setting and utilizes lights to further enrich its composition. All the external takes of the train showing that small horde of zombies slowly approaching are beautiful and brought a slight nostalgia for when the main series used more open environments to show the vastness of the zombies, something that was very well done in the second season of The Walking Dead, during the farm era.
The episode also boasts impeccable direction by Heather Cappiello, who here returns to direct her fifth chapter in the series and can be said to be the best among all she has directed. Not only for having extracted one of the best performances of Jenna Elfman in the entire series, but also in the competence and delicacy she possesses in scene management.
Certainly, the most striking point of the episode is the fact that it addressed the idea of a cure, but not just mentioning it as other series in this universe do, but also coming as close as possible to it actually existing. After Adrian learns about the whereabouts of his daughter, he threatens June and she reveals the details of the experiments that were conducted in that car. And all this was initiated due to events with Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) in the previous season, the idea that radiation might contain the zombie infection was what generated this whole series of experiments.
Throughout the explanation, June asserts that radiation can contain the infection, but the high level of it might end up harming the person even more. This is the first time we have an affirmation that it is possible to survive the zombie infection. This plot should be better developed in the upcoming episodes, however, it is worth mentioning that working on a theme like this, in this case, the cure, is entering a somewhat delicate territory. This part of the episode is not a negative point in itself, nor positive; everything will depend on how the season will work this idea in the upcoming episodes. If this turns out to be true and they do not know how to dose and make it credible, this will indeed be a huge negative point and a real problem for The Walking Dead Universe, as it is a plot that would encompass not only Fear but also all the other series.
0 out of 0 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
