The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series – A New Frontier Episode 3: ‘Above the Law’ Review
The third episode of Telltale Games’ latest season of The Walking Dead shuffles on familiar soil, and doesn’t really go anywhere, but it still manages to have some interesting moments in its brief stay.
Our protagonist Javi Garcia was last seen risking his neck to get medical aid for a member of his group by pleading at the gates of a faction that had murderous intent the last time they crossed paths. We left on a juicy revelation that connects the faction to Javi’s group, and mistrust, as is a staple of any post-apocalyptic story, permeates the majority of this 70-minute episode. Being behind what he considers ‘enemy lines’ brings a fraught tension to Javi’s exchanges with the residents of this faction’s (the titular New Frontier) homestead. In particular, the threat of splitting up Javi’s own posse for the foreseeable future is present thanks to the events of this episode.
Still, Javi’s story is bogged down in some of the more tiresome squabbling and politics of the post-apocalypse genre, and the result is a dilution of what should be some truly high-impact scenes on an emotional level by familiar scenes such as ‘uneasy alliances’, ‘rogue trigger-happy subordinate prods our hero’, and the all-time classic ‘kid does something dumb’. I know I’ve seen these things play out countless times, in various mediums (in The Walking Dead itself multiple times!) and to be honest, it gets harder and harder to care, even if you buy into the plight of the characters involved. Javi is extremely likeable, so you can just about root for him, but his entourage aren’t quite so endearing, thus there’s far less emotional turmoil being expounded for them.
The internal politics of the New Frontier also suffers from scenario fatigue. If you’ve seen or read anything of The Walking Dead before, you could predict the story beats of any interaction with a newly-discovered community with such precision, you’d think you were the strange offspring of Mystic Meg and Dave Meltzer. Again, it isn’t an inherently bad place to go, but it needs a fresh take to get the player involved. And most disappointing of all, the outcome of this whole scenario is basically repeating the same mistakes all over again in increasingly silly ways. The human drama is just enough to keep interest levels fuelled for the remainder of the series, and Javi is pretty much the only reason for that in the main part of the story.
Just as it looks like we’re heading into middling Telltale territory once again, Clementine shows up once more and steals the whole bloody show. Somewhat understandable given the player’s connection and history with her, but the setup for her in this season, leaving a few years of the unknown to throw players off of what they thought they knew about her.
As with previous episodes, we get glimpses of what happened in the time we’ve been apart from Clementine in the form of flashbacks and this episode’s one pulls at the heartstrings massively. Clem’s harder edge is becoming more and more understandable with each return to her recent past, and it only causes further doubt and suspicion over what kind of person she is now. While Javi is stuck with a duffer of a story here, Clem’s brief time in the sun shines brighter in terms of writing and acting and brevity. It’s the episode’s saving grace, but it does also remind you how tragically ordinary the remainder of the running time is. At least it gives us a truly enticing hook for the future of the season, because the actual ending is a touch too meek to do that job.
This episode is typically mid-season in many ways, not wanting to keep up the grim pace of the opener, nor able to drop enough info to ramp it up again either. It has to excel at storytelling, and sadly it’s a mixed bag that shows a glimmer of promise in its leads. I’m certainly more confident in the series having a spike again in the next episode as we head towards the conclusion, but after waiting three months for an episode that is largely plodding filler means the reinvigorated excitement provided by the first two episodes is feeling a little flattened now.