About this ep, I wrote that Morgan's "all life is precious" ideology is "content-free," but while "Here's Not Here" was meant to establish where Morgan got it, the ep actually does nothing to establish WHY he picked it up from Eastman. Eastman is a nice guy and brings Morgan back to his senses after he'd practically lost his mind but that doesn't really constitute any reason to adopt Eastman's philosophy.
Indeed, Eastman himself is given no clear reason for having adopted it. As the ep proceeded, we learn that Eastman slowly starved to death an evil psychopath who had murdered his family. Eastman says doing this didn't make him feel any better but he still did it. He seems to have adopted the "all life is precious" philosophy in the wake of this in order to find inner peace (though it doesn't make a lick of sense, considering what he'd been through) but he's a fellow who has spent nearly the entire zombie apocalypse in a remote cabin entirely isolated from what was happening in the rest of the world. Outside the confines of the little world he's built for himself, it's often kill or be killed and his view is delusional. Entirely incompatible with reality.
Morgan, on the other hand, is, by this point, well aware of what happens outside that little fence that keeps in Eastman's goat. He knows the score. In a 90-minute filler episode, there's never any connection made between Morgan and what Eastman was preaching, no insight, no moment at which Morgan came to see it as a better way, no incident that provided Morgan with any reason to see wisdom in it or to want to make it his own. The two never even have a conversation wherein the state of the world is discussed in relationship to this philosophy. That would require a greater depth than is present in martial arts movie clichés, a depth TWD's overbearingly pretentious writers are entirely incapable of providing. Morgan's adopting Eastman's view is utterly arbitrary, the character suddenly turned into an entirely new character solely because of temporary plot needs. Which is, of course, TWD's usual m.o.
Worse, it can be read as a very serious reduction of the character. Morgan, when he was introduced, was a fellow who just couldn't bring himself to kill the zombie that had once been his wife. It made him very human. It's the reason the character became so beloved. Later, in "Clear," it was revealed that he'd continued to put off killing the creature until, one day, it killed his son. In last night's opus, he senselessly murdered a fellow but--entirely arbitrarily--didn't pike the fellow's brain. The fellow Morgan murdered came back as a zombie and bit Morgan's Jedi sensei. One can see this as being Morgan's fault for killing the fellow but given Morgan's recent actions, the reading of it that screams to the viewer is that this was another situation with which Morgan failed to properly deal and that came back with disastrous consequences--if he'd have piked the fellow in the brain, Eastman would still be alive. Toward the end of last season, one of the Wolves turned up at the now-"enlightened" Morgan's camp. He announced his intention was to take everything Morgan had, including his life. Morgan allowed the fellow to live; the same fellow later came back with his Wolf buddies and carried out horrendous atrocities against the Alexandrians. When Morgan faced those marauding Wolves in "JSS," he stood around like a naive idiot who had never lived so much as a day in this zombified world and didn't know what to do, trying to reason with them at the very moment they were committing gruesome murders he could have prevented. When he faced down the final group of them, he told them to run away and allowed them to escape. Minutes later, story time (in "Thank You"), they attacked and tried to kill Rick. In arbitrarily imposing this "all life is precious" business, the writers have not only reduced this once-very-human fellow to a one-note caricature, they've now made him ideologically committed to being nothing more. Morgan, the dumbass who gets others killed because he can never learn his ONE lesson.
Indeed, Eastman himself is given no clear reason for having adopted it. As the ep proceeded, we learn that Eastman slowly starved to death an evil psychopath who had murdered his family. Eastman says doing this didn't make him feel any better but he still did it. He seems to have adopted the "all life is precious" philosophy in the wake of this in order to find inner peace (though it doesn't make a lick of sense, considering what he'd been through) but he's a fellow who has spent nearly the entire zombie apocalypse in a remote cabin entirely isolated from what was happening in the rest of the world. Outside the confines of the little world he's built for himself, it's often kill or be killed and his view is delusional. Entirely incompatible with reality.
Morgan, on the other hand, is, by this point, well aware of what happens outside that little fence that keeps in Eastman's goat. He knows the score. In a 90-minute filler episode, there's never any connection made between Morgan and what Eastman was preaching, no insight, no moment at which Morgan came to see it as a better way, no incident that provided Morgan with any reason to see wisdom in it or to want to make it his own. The two never even have a conversation wherein the state of the world is discussed in relationship to this philosophy. That would require a greater depth than is present in martial arts movie clichés, a depth TWD's overbearingly pretentious writers are entirely incapable of providing. Morgan's adopting Eastman's view is utterly arbitrary, the character suddenly turned into an entirely new character solely because of temporary plot needs. Which is, of course, TWD's usual m.o.
Worse, it can be read as a very serious reduction of the character. Morgan, when he was introduced, was a fellow who just couldn't bring himself to kill the zombie that had once been his wife. It made him very human. It's the reason the character became so beloved. Later, in "Clear," it was revealed that he'd continued to put off killing the creature until, one day, it killed his son. In last night's opus, he senselessly murdered a fellow but--entirely arbitrarily--didn't pike the fellow's brain. The fellow Morgan murdered came back as a zombie and bit Morgan's Jedi sensei. One can see this as being Morgan's fault for killing the fellow but given Morgan's recent actions, the reading of it that screams to the viewer is that this was another situation with which Morgan failed to properly deal and that came back with disastrous consequences--if he'd have piked the fellow in the brain, Eastman would still be alive. Toward the end of last season, one of the Wolves turned up at the now-"enlightened" Morgan's camp. He announced his intention was to take everything Morgan had, including his life. Morgan allowed the fellow to live; the same fellow later came back with his Wolf buddies and carried out horrendous atrocities against the Alexandrians. When Morgan faced those marauding Wolves in "JSS," he stood around like a naive idiot who had never lived so much as a day in this zombified world and didn't know what to do, trying to reason with them at the very moment they were committing gruesome murders he could have prevented. When he faced down the final group of them, he told them to run away and allowed them to escape. Minutes later, story time (in "Thank You"), they attacked and tried to kill Rick. In arbitrarily imposing this "all life is precious" business, the writers have not only reduced this once-very-human fellow to a one-note caricature, they've now made him ideologically committed to being nothing more. Morgan, the dumbass who gets others killed because he can never learn his ONE lesson.