The Walking Dead: ‘Prey’

This week The Walking Dead posed a myriad of questions that could leave us pondering their answers for quite some time: Did The Governor install a tracking device into Andrea? Why can The Governor’s truck only go 10 mph? Are black people the only characters on this show that are a bad shot with a rifle? Will Andrea realize she couldn’t have been vaguer in explaining to Tyreese why The Governor is a “bad man”? Of the previews for shows during commercial breaks are we more excited for Mad Men or Urban Tarzan? Hopefully someday we may know the answers to some of these but for now I’m chalking this up as one of the all-time stall episodes a series has ever attempted.

We start the episode off with a flashback of Andrea and Michonne having a “girls night” around a camp fire, presumably not long after Michonne first saves her after the incident at the farm. This was clearly an attempt to show us why we should care about this relationship that was developed over several months off camera but all it did was indicate that would we need a flashback during the flashback in order for Michonne to tell us anything relevant of her past. I would have had no issue with an entire flashback episode if it had come much earlier in the season, but this late in the game a two minute segment is all anyone would have put up with.

Speaking of people who could do with a flashback episode(*), Tyreese attempts to explain a year and a half worth of events into a minute of dialogue, and while I appreciate the effort of Chad Coleman acting it out this was beyond forced. With Andrea and Milton having second thoughts on The Governor the show needed to keep some people around in Woodbury who we actually care about and have a moral conscience but we simply haven’t spent enough time with this group to feel invested in them in that way. I so want to care about Tyreese and his sister too but it’s not fair for the show to rely on the comic book mythology of the characters as justification to why we find them fascinating. They have to earn that by showing us.

(*)Well I’d almost say every character in this show could. Mostly I would be curious to watch The Governor build up a town in an apocalyptic world and watch his transgression from regular Joe to maniacal lunatic. Plus Milton would be along for the ride!

But the majority of ‘Prey’ focused on our cliché demented villain chasing down our not so cliché damsel in distress. And by “not so cliché” I mean that I wasn’t necessarily rooting for her to get away. Although Andrea has been salvaged much more than Lori had been able to, she still constitutes a major problem because you can bring back a worthless character only so far. The Governor’s pursuit of Andrea had a couple of good moments like when she unleashed a staircase full of zombies (my new indie band name) and I was legitimately caught off guard when The Governor pounced her mere inches away from the freedom of the prison.

However, two semi good moments do not a quality episode make and it has become abundantly clear that this season needed to be 13 episodes as opposed to the 16 order it got. This was stall tactics done horribly wrong. We’ve all know since episode two of this season that we were headed to a major showdown between Woodbury and our loveable(?) group of survivors holed up in the prison. There’s an old saying in storytelling: “it’s about the journey, not the destination,” and The Walking Dead is managing to stay steadfast on doing the exact opposite. This is a show that writes finales first and moves just enough pieces around in-between the beginning and the end to set it up. I have fairly little doubt that the finale will be an excellent hour of television but I will continue to wonder if there is much point in watching every episode of this show when we get essentially throw-away segments like this.

Other moments of note:

• The Governor has his very own torture chamber filled with shiny new tools. I don’t believe Andrea has any useful information for him so should he torture her it would be purely for sport.
• Milton is slowly, very slowly, turning out to be a good introduced character. I hope he somehow makes it out in the finale and teams up Rick and the others next season as it would be fun to watch him adjust to their ways. Also, the results of him lighting the zombies on fire makes it into the top 5 grossest Walking Dead moments to date.
• The scene where Andrea is attacked by walkers in the forest was a stretch even by this shows standards. I didn’t realize zombies were both quiet enough to sneak up on someone without them hearing and also strong enough to pin a living person with one arm that no longer has muscle mass.
• I’m thinking The Governor was a fan of The Wire as he was “pulling an Omar” by whistling as he stalks his prey.

What did everyone else think? Comments are always welcome.

The Walking Dead: ‘When the Dead Come Knocking’

I’ve been really slacking on the blog lately and I don’t have a good reason why. So I’m going to try and rapid fire some reviews out there but I’m most likely going to keep them quick and short.

In continuing what has been a superb first half of the season, ‘When the Dead Come Knocking’ was filled with solid action and plenty of character moments that have amped up the intensity even further headed into the mid-season finale where we’ll undoubtedly get our first taste of Rick and the gang versus The Governor and Merle.

This episode had plenty of terror in it and very little came from zombies and Merle and The Governor play a game of bad cop/insanely creepy cop to the captive Glen and Maggie. I’d hate to get interrogated by normal Merle, but a Merle with a knife-hand and hit pet attack zombie? Yikes. Glen is somehow able to man-up and battle way his through it all, showing how tough he has become since the outbreak. The Governor uses different techniques on Maggie as he continues to show us that we shouldn’t assume he reached a mentally unstable, absolutely psychotic low until he actually dies.

Back at the prison, Michonne meets our survivors for the first time while bearing the gift of baby food. After Rick decides to help her and lets her in to recover from her injuries, Michonne informs them that Glen and Maggie have been taken hostage in the town of Woodbury. After receiving some apparent miracle potion, Michonne is ready to go and she, Rick, Darryl, and Oscar embark on a rescue mission to get their group back. After getting swarmed by a hundred zombies in the woods surrounding Woodbury, they make their way into the cabin of some guy who had been apparently sleeping for the past 408 days as he was unaware of what zombies are. Michonne shuts him up quickly and, in true The Walking Dead fashion, he gets to become a nice meal for us all to watch.

Also, Andrea and Milton get to watch an old man die and become a zombie.

What did everyone else think? Are you excited for the mid-season finale? Comments are always welcome.

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.

The Walking Dead: ‘Killer Within’

“It’s so easy to do the wrong thing in this world.”

Lori Grimes was far from perfect. And by far from perfect I mean if she was standing on the top of Mount Everest, then perfect would be in an underground bunker in the heart of Louisiana. But she was also smart enough to accept that she had made too many mistakes, that she was so imperfect that at this point there was no way to reconcile herself. So she sized up her remaining options and did the only positive thing left that she could do. Let go.

As much I hated the character because her constant inconsistencies, poor judgment on just about everything, and being a detriment to the rest of the group’s success; that was a highly emotional and well executed death scene to say the least. Lori takes her last moments on this now apocalyptic Earth to confess to young Carl how easily the world can change you, and that change will probably be for the worst if you allow it. Then after Carl has heard enough of her blubbering after Lori delivers the baby and dies from blood loss, Carl is forced to put her down with his trusty sidearm. So in a span of about 5 minutes he is forced to watch his mother in labor, get gutted, and has to finish her off himself. Hopefully Herschel has some psychiatric experience from his past.

So as we lose someone who whines a lot and is much more a hindrance than they are useful in terms of helping in a zombie apocalypse, we gain another. The birth of the newborn will certainly bring about a whole host of problems for our survivors going forward, but that wasn’t even remotely what was going through Rick’s mind when he first saw it. And give credit to Andrew Lincoln for this one because that was some amazing acting, especially at the moment when he knelt down and screamed “Oh Nooo” when he saw Carl and was able to put all the pieces together about what his son just had to endure. I would not want to be a zombie in the path of Rick anytime soon.

What made this episode really special though is that Lori’s death came as an even bigger surprise seeing as it was the second death of a “main” character in the episode. The great Theodore “T-dog” Douglass also bit the dust in this one. What made the character so special to me was that the name “T-dog” was somehow less absurd than the actor’s actual name “Iron E.” Unfortunately it was clear early on in the episode that he wasn’t long for this world, what with him speaking up for the first time ever and the emergence of another black actor. For whatever reason there’s an unwritten rule in shows like this that you can’t have two actors of color sharing the screen.  But considering how little the show made us want to care about him at least he got a cool death out of it and was able to sacrifice himself for the team.

In other news, we got some more insight at what’s going on in Woodbury. Merle has his little heart set on finding his baby brother, but the Governor doesn’t seem very interested in allowing him to try and accomplish this task. Andrea and Michonne continue their disagreement as to whether or not they should stay or go. Personally, considering they  haven’t actually seen any shenanigans going on from those in charge in here, I don’t see how you can justify leaving the only town left in the world that has electricity and protection available to them based solely on a “gut feeling.”

This episode was able to keep the season three hot streak going for the show and actually has a strong argument for best episode the series has ever made. Things are going to change drastically for a main group in the immediate future as I’m sure Rick will go off the deep end, especially since this whole mess started from him chasing that prisoner Andrew out into the yard without actually finishing him off. I made the mistake of forgetting that in any kind of action or sci-fi show you have to assume that unless you actually see a person die on screen, there’s a good chance they’re still alive.

A few other thoughts:

• Setting up a trap?
• Glen had a super underrated episode considering all the other messes that happened. Not only was he able to score some guard tower sex, but also had one of the better zombie kills to date by straight up slicing off one their heads with his machete. Plus he foreshadows all the craziness by asking: “Oh man. Can’t we just have one good day?” at the beginning of the episode.
• I hope this isn’t the last time we see Herschel take out a zombie with his crutches.
• “How come we never hooked up?” –Merle is really one with words.
• The Governor tells Andrea his name is really Phillip. Yeah I’d go by “The Governor” too.

What did everyone else think? Comments are always welcome.

The Walking Dead: “Sick”

As of twenty four hours ago I was all but sure that I wouldn’t be able to watch The Walking Dead until Monday when it became available on other platforms because, as a Dish customer, AMC has been blocked out since before Breaking Bad started airing its’ fifth season. But then when all hope appeared to be lost, it turned back on like Hershel getting revived after he had been all but left for dead.

Speaking of which; by my count Lori has now made out with 34 different men since the zombie apocalypse has hit. After getting upset at Carl for being the first Grimes family member besides Rick to something useful when he retrieved medical supplies from the infirmary, Lori was able to channel her jealous rage and concentrate it at saving our now beloved old man Hershel. I’m really glad that they were able to save Hershel in this way because that was a thing about zombie movies that had always bugged me in the past when one of the characters would get bit on the ends of one of their limbs. I’m glad Rick had the common sense to chop off the diseased leg before it had a chance to spread to the rest of his body.

Sorry, I got a little ahead of myself there. Let’s get back to the point of when that leg got the ax. After Rick performs surgery our gang is greeted by five inmates that had been trapped in the prison’s cafeteria for ten months, completely cut off from the outside world. The newcomers are curious to say the least. First about who are these nut jobs that came bursting through their door and cut off this old dude’s leg? Secondly, they have been completely out of touch to what has been going on in the world since the outbreak. Clearly Rick and the gang can’t begin to express in words what the world has become. How civility and understanding no longer exist as they once knew it. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Rick doesn’t have the patience or time to deal with attitudes that aren’t along his lines.

And that is why I’m so very proud of the show for the scene where Rick faces off with “new Shane.” In my head I’m already thinking “oh great, Tomas is another bull-headed foe that Rick is going to have to keep at bay for the whole season.” But then they did something so great, something this show has been so hesitant to do in the past. They realized they had a problem and they took care of it. The show runners realized that this kind of character arc didn’t work in the past when we were forced to watch Shane and Rick for an hour 12 times last season. And just like the show runners, Rick too realized this is nonsense so he stared him down, and then he put him down. The zombies are what drew everyone into this show, but scenes like a pissed-off, machete wielding Rick Grimes taking out trouble makers is why we want stick around and watch this story out. Well done The Walking Dead. Well done.

In continuing the new theme of the show having all of its characters do useful things, we see Carol go hunting for some human cadavers to experiment on for when the time comes that Lori needs her C-sections to deliver baby Shane Rick. And when she starts to cut open one her many potential test subjects, we get the view of a something or someone watching her from behind some trees. I won’t speculate too much on this, but based on what I’ve heard from casting news I have strong hunch of what that may be.

What did everyone else think? Comments are always welcome.