"La Doña" takes The Walking Dead deeper into horror territory than it's arguably ever been, blending the usual undead gore with the soul of a ghost story and a whiff of psychological torment. Idalia (Daniella Pineda) and Eric (Danny Ramirez) take refuge in a house belonging to Doña Alma, but their stay takes a turn for the sinister after the enigmatic host dies suddenly.
Tales of the Walking Dead makes a pretty good fist of kicking into a higher gear of horror. The smattering of religious iconography sets an appropriate tone, and the Blumhouse-esque jump scares are surprisingly eerie, with Alma's fog-covered ghost screaming "intruder" in a banshee's wail particularly disturbing. Even the quirky addition of a parrot isn't as silly as it could've been, with the scared animal's "what did you do?" line actually quite unnerving. Tales of the Walking Dead should've stopped at foreboding birds...
Like far too many horror movies, Tales of the Walking Dead fails not in the build-up, but the payoff. The downward turn comes when Idalia's hallucinations make her see Doña Alma's crucifixes come to life. A small army of T-1000 Jesus figures clamber off the walls and begin attacking the house's new occupant. It's essentially the green army men jumping all over Woody from Toy Story. "La Doña" isn't a Pixar animation, however, and the scene isn't supposed to be funny or cringy. And yet the image of tiny metallic Jesuses attacking someone can't help but be funny or cringy, and it's not just a matter of questionable CGI - the sequence completely undercuts whatever creepiness Tales of the Walking Dead had been building until that point. The holy bombardment isn't the only scare tactic that doesn't come off in "La Doña" either - the blinking peacock feather wallpaper is almost as baffling.
Tales Of The Walking Dead Episode 6 Deserved A Definitive Ending
Not for the first time in Tales of the Walking Dead's six-episode run, "La Doña" ends in ambiguous fashion. Idalia and Eric descend into a melee of mistrust and violence, and are consumed by the tree roots running underneath Alma's house while the reanimated corpses of their victims watch on. Obviously that's not what really happens. Tales of the Walking Dead episode 6 is almost certainly the result of two guilt-ridden and traumatized survivors succumbing to illusions in the house of a supposed witch, but "La Doña" never actually shows what does happen to Idalia and Eric, ending on an unsatisfying note. If this were a Blumhouse horror, its sequel would be straight-to-digital.
Ambiguous endings can be a wonderful thing in TV and film - but only when done right. Christopher Nolan's Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb is dreaming or awake. This frustrating conclusion works so well because the ambiguity compliments Cobb's character arc. He no longer cares whether his surroundings are real. Tales of the Walking Dead's open-to-interpretation final scene in "La Doña" doesn't enhance the story, but simply allows the spinoff to use crazy, out-of-the-box horror without needing to explain it in the context of The Walking Dead's universe. A shame, because with a clearer finale and fewer unintentional Toy Story tributes, "La Doña" could've been a horror highlight for Tales of the Walking Dead.