Carl – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

The Walking Dead: Season 3, Episode 12–Clear

“You will be torn apart, by teeth or bullets. You and your boy.”

The luxury of a longer season this year allowed The Walking Dead to try something new this week – essentially a standalone episode (albeit still connected tangentially to the main plot) featuring only three of the regular characters and none of the regular settings. And, even in a show that’s gone from strength to strength this year, it was a bit of a standout; focused, intense, allowing three very important characters room to breathe and grow, while still not stinting on the horror and the thrills. It also, surprisingly, dealt with a loose plot thread we might all have forgotten, one from way back in the show’s first ever episode.

In a nutshell, this was an entire episode dealing with the quest for guns and ammunition mooted by Rick last week. Along for the ride, as proposed, were Michonne (to get a feel for how reliable she might be) and Carl (small, but hard enough to be backup in case Michonne proved to be as loose a cannon as Merle). In the course of this hour, all three got a chance to develop – even Rick, confronted by an old friend who was even more broken than he is.

That old friend turned out to be none other than Morgan Jones, played as before by Britain’s own Lennie James. Together with Andrew Lincoln and David Morrissey, this show is plainly a victim of the current trend in Hollywood to make serious TV drama with British actors pretending to be American.

To be honest though, Morgan’s return wasn’t that much of a surprise once we’d established exactly where the trio had gone to look for weaponry – Rick’s home town. This became clear as he searched the now empty police weapons locker, stating, “I used to be the police in this town”, though eagle-eyed viewers with sharp memories might have picked up on the ubiquitous signage saying “King County”.

It did make sense, as Rick knew where all the guns and ammo were in that town, but you had to wonder how small the circles were that he’d been moving in. I don’t have much of a sense of Georgia geography, but the gang have been to Atlanta, then to Hershel’s farm, then the prison (within walking distance, it seems, as is Woodbury), and now back to King County. Perhaps they might have better luck a little further afield, as that seems like a similar radius to, say, Kent.

Be that as it may, the trip there set the scene – and themes – for the episode. Michonne drove, sitting stony-faced and silent, as ever, while Carl fidgeted in the back and Rick looked grim in the passenger seat. Their determined ignorance of a frantic hitch-hiker showed us right away that (if we hadn’t got it by now) Rick is no longer the compassionate, eager to help ex-cop. Survival is more important, and nobody is to be trusted.

Which makes it all the harder to understand his choice of vehicle. Honestly, in a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with wreckage, why is he driving that suspiciously clean Hyundai Tucson? Could it be that Hyundai have offered the show promotional consideration? And why didn’t he at least get the four wheel drive version?

Still, the Hyundai’s limitations gave rise to the first of several impressive set pieces throughout the hour, as it got bogged down in the mud trying to drive around a corpse-filled pileup. Walkers were soon all over the car; and it was a blackly amusing measure of how accustomed they all are to this that they just resignedly got on with the business of slaughter. We didn’t even need to see the details onscreen; we can take it as read now that Rick, Michonne and even Carl can deal with this.

As they plainly could when they reached the town and found it full of graffiti saying things like “TURN AROUND AND LIVE”. Plainly someone had laid claim to the place, and it didn’t take much guessing to figure out who the masked figure blazing away at them with a sniper rifle could be. Incapacitating him was, as with the Walkers, taken very much in stride (with some timely intervention from Carl), and the mask was pulled off to confirm that this was indeed Morgan.

The show had drifted yet again to its comic book origins, in which the gang passed back through the town and found Morgan starving and insane, his son having turned and being kept in chains. That aspect was left out – too similar to the scenario with the Governor’s daughter so recently, I’d guess.

But Morgan was certainly no longer in his right mind. Holed up with enough weaponry to equip a small army, he’d been decorating the walls with random apparent nonsense – the word “CLEAR” repeated over and over, along with the heartbreaking revelation of his son’s fate – “DUANE TURNED”.

Scott Gimple’s clever script split the group into two pairs, giving both the opportunity to spark off each other in some intense scenes. Left to look after Morgan, Rick had to deal with the man’s frenzied hostility and madness before convincing him that he wasn’t “wearing a dead man’s face”. This led to a pair of superb performances as Lincoln and James’ characters unburdened to each other everything that had happened since they last met.

Morgan’s son Duane (named, as in the comics, after Duane Jones, star of Night of the Living Dead) had been bitten by the Walker that used to be his mother – the wife Morgan had found himself unable to shoot at the end of that very first episode. Not unnaturally, Morgan had blamed himself, but couldn’t bring himself to commit suicide, begging Rick to do it for him.

Rick, for his part, explained the loss of Lori, but still found enough optimism to encourage Morgan to join his group because, in the coming fight, “we’re going to win”. Perhaps seeing someone whose mind was even more broken than his own shocked him back to a more rational state of mind.

Carl, meanwhile, had taken off on a mysterious errand that was plainly more than the quest for baby supplies he told Rick. At first I groaned – were we back to the Carl of last year, who kept stupidly wandering off into mortal danger when no one was looking? But no, it turned out he had a good reason; he wanted to find the last remaining photo of his parents together, hanging in a local bar.

Accompanying him was Michonne, and their mutual distrust found an outlet as Carl immediately tried to ditch her. But Michonne’s not that easy to ditch, as Merle could have told him, and she was back with him within moments, the pair uneasily cooperating. The bar having turned out to be chock full of Walkers, they had to work together to achieve Carl’s objective; as they did, you could see their distrust gradually turning into a bond of friendship and respect.

It also allowed Michonne to open up a bit from the taciturn, closed-in character she’d been, as she revealed what she’d got when she went back into the bar to slaughter more Walkers (again offscreen). It seems she has a taste for kitschy cat ornaments!

By the time Carl confided in Rick, “I think she might be one of us”, she was comfortable enough with her new friends to confide in Rick, and maybe help him out a little. She told him that she knew he’d been seeing – and talking to – dead people, and made him feel a little better about it by revealing that she’d been doing it too, talking to her dead boyfriend.

Morgan couldn’t be persuaded to join the gang, so Rick left him in his fortified town, alone but with some of his nihilistic guilt alleviated. At that point it became clear what “CLEAR” meant – Morgan was going about the lonely business of clearing the town of Walkers, burning them on the pyre the group had seen on their way in. It wasn’t a happy ending, exactly; but neither did it feel too sad.

This distinctly out-of-format episode was one of the best this year (a tough task, given how good the show has been). Self-contained, deep, and with four amazing, intense performances, it gave me a lot of confidence in writer Scott Gimple, who’s soon to take over as showrunner from Glen Mazzara. It also (finally) gave some real depth to Michonne, that hopefully goes some way to countering the criticism of her as a two-dimensional comic book figure. Given the chance to do more than look surly and swing a katana about, Danai Gurira proved she’s every bit as good an actor as the rest of the ensemble, and her chemistry with Chandler Riggs’ increasingly earnest Carl was a highlight of the episode.

Next week, it’s presumably back to the story proper, as the trio return to the prison with an awful lot of guns. Looks like they may need them. But this was such a good episode, it actually felt good to have a bit of a break from the ongoing saga of the fight with Woodbury. Let’s hope the show has a chance to do a few more standalone episodes next year.

The Walking Dead: Season 2, Episode 12

SPOILER WARNING – I’M GOING TO TRY AND REVIEW THESE EPISODES AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE TO THE ORIGINAL U.S. TV BROADCAST. IF YOU’RE IN THE U.K., AND PLANNING TO WATCH THE BROADCAST ON FX THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, BE AWARE THAT MAJOR PLOT POINTS WILL BE DISCUSSED!

Better Angels

With the season end in sight, this week’s Walking Dead suitably ramped up the tension in another gripping episode that seems to demonstrate a show regaining its form. Brilliantly paced, Evan Reilly and Glen Mazzara’s script built from a slow burning character drama to a climax that’s been seemingly waiting in the wings for weeks.

First though, the gang had to mourn Dale after his shock death last week. The show’s cold open nicely intercut Rick’s eulogy at his graveside with an incredibly brutal and graphic zombie hunt. As Rick solemnly intoned that he was going to do things Dale’s way from now on, a close up on Shane showed him looking distinctly unimpressed. The zombie hunt flashed through the ceremony, showing Shane’s preferred method of doing things – brutally, pragmatically and finally. The effects here gave us some top notch gore, as walkers were dispatched in some inventive, non-gunfire ways.

There was some time to take stock, as Rick set about organising the proper fortification of Hershel’s farm – something that they might sensibly have done some time ago. Having resolved to follow Dale’s moral compass, Rick was still set on reviving the plan to release the hapless Randall a long way from the farm, and from his well-armed comrades. He plainly didn’t trust Shane to help him with this, choosing Daryl instead. A sensible choice, but one that Shane saw straight through; as they argued the toss, it was interesting to see Shane as the calm one for once, with Rick acting like an arrogant hothead who knew all the answers. This, surely, was what precipitated the later, tragic events of the story.

First though, Carl confided in Shane that he saw himself as responsible for Dale’s death, by failing to kill the walker he taunted last week. Shane’s advice on this was as pragmatic as ever; it wasn’t Carl’s fault, but he should keep the gun and learn how to protect himself. The grownups wouldn’t always be there to watch out for him. Actually, by the end of this episode I was beginning to wonder whether anyone was keeping an eye on him at all!

Rick having finally taken Shane’s advice on talking to Carl, there was a touching father/son bonding scene, in which Rick almost tenderly outlined the new realities to his son. It was interesting to note that, after having proclaimed he’d do things Dale’s way, the thrust of this was Rick’s firm persuasion that Carl really should be armed. There was much debate after last week’s episode as to whether Dale’s pre-apocalypse, ‘civilised’ approach was the wrong way to go with the way things had become; it looks like Rick has decided that civilisation has to be tempered by the brutal realities of the situation. He continues to develop as a character, much as he does in the comics, and Andrew Lincoln was particularly good this week with some very strong material to work with.

Sarah Wayne Callies got some good stuff too, in a significant scene with Shane in which Lori finally acknowledged her own responsibility for the impossible situation between him and Rick. Lori’s been arguably the most annoying character this year, presumably intentionally; selfish, indecisive and occasionally incompetent at basic self-preservation. Seeing her finally admit some of her own shortcomings was a surprise, and the scene with Shane felt like the beginning of some kind of closure.

In hindsight, a lot of the early part of this episode was indeed building up to closure on Shane. The fuse was lit as he stalked into the barn where Randall was tied up, then began flipping out and smashing himself on the head. After weeks of gradually unravelling, it was plain that he’d finally, completely, lost it, and this made for interestingly tense viewing as I genuinely couldn’t tell which way he was going to jump. As he led Randall through the woods, encouraging him to spill all about his gang, I really believed that Shane might take the step of joining them. So it took me quite by surprise when they disappeared behind a tree and a distinctly nasty, neck-snappingish noise was heard.

And then, as Shane smashed his head against a tree, his plan became clearer – he was faking Randall’s escape. But why? Plainly he was up to no good, but even here it was hard to see what he was hoping to gain.

It all came to a head in one of the tensest scenes the show’s done, as Rick and Shane came to a desolate, moonlit field near the woods. Director Guy Ferland gave the scene some excellent visuals as Rick and Shane stood silhouetted facing each other, the moon high behind them, as if reaching the final showdown in a classic Western. The implication was clear, and Rick, a trained cop after all, figured it out quickly. “So this is where you’re going to do it then?” he asked, knowing that this was Shane’s endgame. “Good a place as any,” Shane replied laconically. The showdown vibe was unmistakeable; that same laid back attitude the antagonists display at the end of every Sergio Leone movie. I fully expected a long, drawn out standoff with increasingly close shots of the actors’ faces interspersed with shots of fingers twitching near triggers.

And what we got, cleverly, was something quite different. Having built up that vibe, the script switched tack as Rick went into classic ‘police negotiator’ mode, trying to persuade Shane that, if he only gave up the gun, all this could be forgotten and they could move on.

This was certainly the ‘Dale-like’ thing to do, and was reminiscent of the more peaceable philosophy of heroes like Jean-Luc Picard or the Doctor. It was also, in light of Shane’s increasing insanity, plainly the absolute wrong thing to do here. This played out for a tense few minutes, until Rick took the step of holding out his gun to Shane. At this point, I was prepared for two outcomes; Rick getting killed (unlikely), or Shane accepting his terms and condemning the viewer to more endless weeks of seething tension between them.

Instead, I was again genuinely surprised that the scriptwriters had the balls for Rick to finally accept what had to be. As Shane reached for the gun, Rick, sobbing, stabbed him through the heart. It was a shocking moment, well-handled by both actors. The look of amazement on Shane’s face as Rick finally bought into his way of doing things was priceless. Mind you, I also wondered whether the whole thing had been engineered by Shane as an elaborate, unhinged way of committing suicide; the scene seemed laced with deliberate ambiguity on this.

Even than, the shocks weren’t over, nor the script’s clever mind games. Carl suddenly popped up, having seen everything (really, does nobody keep an eye on what he’s doing?). And it looked for a moment like he was going to shoot his father. Rick certainly thought so, an indication of how he’s not getting the changes in his son.

But no, as the gunshot rang out, it was the stumbling, now zombified Shane that Carl shot; possibly a clever nod to the comics, in which Carl shot the living Shane much, much earlier. It also served to establish (along with the discovery that the strangled Randall was now a zombie too) something we’d suspected for a few weeks now – you don’t have to be bitten to come back from the dead. This is a potentially interesting development; it means that, if this is caused by some kind of virus, everyone is a carrier, with death waiting to trigger it. I wonder if that’s what Dr Jenner whispered into Rick’s ear at the end of Season One? Still no resolution on that – yet.

As a prelude to the season finale, the episode ended with a swarm of walkers, drawn by all that gunfire, stumbling across the field towards Rick and Carl – and the farm. Clearly, in time-honoured zombie movie tradition, the climax to this season is going to see an invasion of the undead laying siege to our heroes’ refuge. Will they survive? Will they have to move on from the farm? (God, I hope so!) And more importantly, will they have the sense to get guns with silencers?

With the episodes of the last few weeks, The Walking Dead really seems to have got its mojo back after a distinctly patchy, often badly paced season. This was another strong story, and a great sendoff for Shane. Jon Bernthal has been excellent in the role, and will be missed. Zombie stories really need a human villain to work; the zombies are an all-pervading danger, but they’re essentially mindless. For genuine nastiness, you need the living, something George Romero’s movies always remind us of. I gather that another of the comic’s well-known baddies is due to put in an appearance soon to fill the void. First though, our heroes have got what looks like an all out zombie onslaught to contend with. If it can match the quality of the last few episodes, roll on next week…

The Walking Dead: Season 2, Episode 11

Judge, Jury, Executioner

After the last couple of zombie-heavy episodes, this week’s Walking Dead was back to the zombie-light character drama that has been, on occasion, so frustratingly slow-paced. But this was no letdown; rather, it was one of the most intensely dramatic episodes the show has done in ages. This time, you found yourself really caring about the characters and how they were adjusting to this cruel new world, in perhaps the cruellest episode yet.

As I predicted last week, there was more than an echo of classic BBC post-apocalyptic series Survivors, specifically a similarly talky but nailbiting episode called ‘Law and Order’. The story’s basic structure even resembled it, as it all built to a central ‘trial’ scene at which the group had to debate the morality of, and potential alternatives to, summarily executing their potentially dangerous prisoner.

As an examination of one of the central dilemmas faced by survivors of the collapse of civilisation, the episode pulled no punches. When those who survive have no authority structure left, they must necessarily take law and order – and its prosecution – into their own hands. This is a responsibility that most people simply don’t want, as we saw here – Hershel, Maggie and Carol were all more than willing to take no part in the debate and leave it to others. The trouble was, as Dale put it, that taking no part was tantamount to carrying out the ‘judicial murder’ themselves.

With Rick having thought long and hard, and having come up with no reasonable alternative to killing Randall, it was left to Dale to be the sole voice of what used to be called ‘civilisation’. The first half of the episode showed him roaming the farm and trying to change the minds of the gang one by one. As he said to Andrea, “the world we knew has gone, but keeping our humanity? That’s a choice.”

Andrea wasn’t initially convinced. When Dale reminded her that in the world before she’d been a civil rights lawyer, she simply replied, “who says we’re civilised any more?” But it was Daryl, still tormented, who had the most revealing assessment of the situation. Rebutting Dale’s assertion that the group respected him and his decision counted, he accurately summed up the state of affairs: “This group’s broken.”

It was later to become clear why the episode focused on Dale so heavily; but in the mean time, other characters were getting a little more screen time than usual, particularly Carl. Chandler Riggs has been putting in an amazingly confident and solemn performance for a twelve year old actor as Carl heads into dark territory this year; never more so than here, where for the first time the episode focused strongly on him. Even more so than in the comic, his pragmatic, child’s-eye view is a disturbing foretaste of the way humanity’s next generation could head, even while the aging Dale represents a world now long gone.

From Carl’s disturbing encounter with the desperate Randall in the barn, through his angry denial of Heaven to Carol and ultimately two hair-raising scenes of him taunting a stuck-in the-mud zombie, this was as much Riggs’ episode as it was Jeffrey DeMunn’s as Dale. With the very real moral dilemma taking centre stage, that zombie (gruesomely realised with some excellent makeup) was the only one in sight this week. But it was to take a vital role in the plot as basically a symbol of the very situation our survivors found themselves in.

First though, there had to be the showdown between old world morality and new world pragmatism, in that ‘trial’ that was so reminiscent of the one in Survivors. Dale passionately made the case for mercy, arguing that it was patently immoral to execute somebody for a crime he had yet to, and might never, commit. Shane’s pragmatic approach, with Rick’s agreement, was that the risk wasn’t worth taking.

The look on Jeffrey DeMunn’s face as Dale realised that he was alone in his views, that even his admirer Glenn wouldn’t back him up, was heartbreaking, tears shining in his eyes as he realised his world was probably gone forever. And then, surprisingly, it was Andrea he convinced. After she spoke up, a discussion was had as to the alternatives; keep Randall prisoner (a mouth to feed contributing nothing), dump him somewhere far away (considerable risk to whoever had to take him) or trust him to contribute by working with the group (either meaning someone would have to watch him or running the risk that he’d slip away and bring his thirty heavily-armed friends with him).

In the end, though, just as in Survivors, the pragmatic argument won out over the compassionate one, and Randall was dragged out to be shot. Rick having insisted that he had to shoulder the responsibility of carrying the act out himself gave Andrew Lincoln the chance to look unutterably tormented as he tremblingly held the gun on the weeping, terrified boy blindfolded before him.

And then a surprise, as Rick was confronted with the consequences. Carl turned up unexpectedly, urging his father to go through with it, perhaps with even a hint of bloodlust. And Rick, shamed by facing up to what his son was becoming – and what he might too – couldn’t pull the trigger.

It was a heart-stopping moment in an episode full of them. I was hugely impressed with director Greg Nicotero’s handling of his cast with Andrea Kang’s hard-hitting script; the more so because Nicotero is usually the king of zombies, having begun as a makeup man with Tom Savini on Romero’s Day of the Dead. You’d almost expect a Nicotero episode to be a gore-heavy one, but this was real drama, and sensitively handled.

And even after Randall’s last minute reprieve, the script had one last punch to deliver. Dale, wandering disillusioned out to the fields, was grabbed and disembowelled by a wandering zombie – the very same zombie that Carl had taunted and singularly failed to kill earlier, and may even have led to the farm. And finally, with Rick having been unable to shoot the untrustworthy prisoner, the episode concluded with Daryl having to shoot one of their best friends, just to save him from his death agonies.

It was a jaw dropping shock, and yet another clever example of wrong-footing those familiar with the comics. In the comics, Dale survives much, much longer than this, eventually striking up a romantic relationship with Andrea. Here, a character we thought was safe was ripped from the show brutally. The message was clear – forget what you think you know from the comics, all bets are off.

And it was also a final, nihilistic bit of symbolism in an episode that was full of them. Dale was the last representative of the old, good, compassionate world, and here he was, his guts ripped out by the world that was now, having to be put out of his misery.

This was an incredibly powerful episode for much the same reasons as the Survivors one, but given an extra level of tension by the fact that almost every US state still has the death penalty. In Britain, even in 1975, the debate was old news, but in the US it’s still very much current. What this episode does, as its very title indicates, is ask the viewer how you would feel about it, particularly if you were the one who had to not only make the decision but carry out the execution itself.

And finally, if you have any sympathy at all for the characters, it was an incredibly cruel episode. Rick is confronted with his son turning into a cold-hearted pragmatist like Shane; Carl is left with the knowledge that he may be indirectly responsible for Dale’s death; and Dale himself goes to his grave never actually having been told that his arguments for civilisation ultimately won the day. Good drama works by putting its characters through the wringer – this did that in spades. A superb episode even with only one zombie in it, impeccably written, directed and acted.