With “Bury Me Here,” The Walking Dead snaps back to its default position for this season, focusing on how Rick's group and their allies are getting motivated and ready to engage the Saviors. The dialogue gets reset too, laden with expository or aphoristic speeches, so Richard's (Karl Makinen) suicide-by-Morgan death galvanizes other key players to commit to the cause—but only after Richard has portentously warned Morgan (Lennie James) that he will live to regret it if he doesn't abandon his dream of pacifism, then spouted one of those geysers of backstory that always signals a character's death.
That kind of talk-as-lecture and heavy-handed foreshadowing is baked into this show's DNA, but the dialogue for most of this season's second half has been much subtler and more supple, more like life and less like something you'd hear in an unironic superhero film. It was enough of a shift to make me wonder if the showrunners might have decided to rework the dialogue too, when they agreed to dial down the sadistic violence after losing so many viewers with this season's premiere. Their new commitment to downplaying gore registers as a benediction when Benjamin (Logan Miller) is shot and bleeds out, which plays as a muted, unsensationalized tragedy. We hear but don't see the gunshots that down him, and we don't witness his death or the mercy-spiking of his brain to keep him from returning as a walker.
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