The Walking Dead: ‘Say the Word’

The question coming into ‘Say the Word’ was how would The Walking Dead respond to the crazy, unexpected, triumphant episode we saw last week? And the answer was with an episode that was just kind of there. It wasn’t a bad episode by any means, heck in the context of season two this would have been great, but here we got an episode that was just what it was: an hour of zombie entertainment. The Walking Dead has officially figured out what to do with the show. Obviously after the events of last week if was a necessity to take a breather; so instead of having all the characters stand around and talk about their feelings, we got a zombie slaughter fest and a few good teasers to set up future events.

This episode had a lot of similarities to Lost. Not only in the overall structure of building a low-key episode right after a fast paced one, but there were a couple details that reminded me of that other group of survivors. The first was the weirdness of seeing “normal” life in this show were we’ve become accustomed to seeing brutal incivility. Andrea and Michonne mingling around the quaint town of Woodbury was just like when we first saw “the others” houses for the first time and how incomprehensible it was for us to grasp that this structure was possible in these surroundings. The second was how the episode ended. Lost was the king of doing this: filling an episode with plot devices and just when fans would start to mumble about how “slow” this episode was they would drop a bomb like having a phone mysteriously ring and leave that nugget as a cliffhanger.

I actually really liked the pairing of Darryl and Maggie as they went in search of baby formula for little “Asskicker” as Darryl so fondly named Lori and Rick’s baby. Let’s give some major credit to Darryl too for being the first one to figure out immediately that the newborn will actually need to eat in the near future and taking the initiative to go see if he can find anything. The convenience of finding it was a little ridiculous but I’d rather they get the formula easily than just ignore the issue all together.

Over in Woodbury we got some more weirdness. First the Governor is collecting zombie heads for his own personal aquarium, then we find out he has his very own Life Size Zombie Barbie (from Mattel).  I know that Michonne probably has the right intentions to leave this messed up town, but from the perspective of her and Andrea I just don’t see how you can down running water, electricity, and protection provided when you know the rest of the world is as far away from providing these things as you can be. Overall, I don’t think I quite care enough about the Andrea/Michonne relationship to justify the amount of screen time that was devoted to their debate. I know this tension should be there but considering we just skipped over the first seven or so months of their adventures I can’t bring myself to invest in it.

A few other thoughts:

• We got ourselves a crazy Rick Grimes here. Last season I though Andrew Lincoln was one of the worst actors to be the lead of an ensemble cast on television. So far this season I’m finding myself rooting for him to get so Emmy recognition. Really enjoying play all these different emotions over a short period of time.
• The Governor’s notebook was pretty detailed and included lots of markings, page after page. I have a feeling we’re going to find out more about how to deal with the zombie epidemic in the near future based on his findings.
• For the second straight episode we learn more about T-Dog in one sentence than we did throughout the entire series beforehand when Glen tells Rick about how he had driven busses full of the elderly when the outbreak first started.
• I have a strong feeling that Merle’s dream was to be some sort of WWE wrestler with people cheering him on, which is why I found Zombie fight club to be a great achievement for the character.
• “Hello dinner.”

What did everyone else think? Comments are always welcome.