“They came together as an answer to defeat.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
The Walkers may be learning to talk, but it’ll be a while before they’re as talky as this episode was. Written by Vivian Tse and directed by former cast member Michael Cudlitz (Abraham), this was intended as a character piece; but with comparatively little plot advancement or Walker action, it seemed more like a post-apocalyptic soap opera than anything else.
Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 9, Episode 7 – Stradivarius”“We’re the same. All or nothing. You’re trapped, same as me, you’re connected to the dead, same as me. We are the same, and you can’t stand that we’re the same.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
This felt very much like a continuation of the previous episode – it probably didn’t help that I watched them back to back, but the tone and the content was so nearly identical I had to check to see if it was the same writer – no, this ep was down to Rosemary Rodriguez after Corey Reed’s stint last week. Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 9, Episode 4 – The Obliged”
“Have you ever had to kill people, because they’d already killed your friends and they were coming for you next? Have you ever done things that made you feel afraid of yourself afterward? Have you ever been covered in so much blood that you didn’t know if it was yours, a Walker’s, or your friend’s?”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Blimey. Even by Walking Dead standards, that was bleak. I mean, sure, there was plenty of action – and oodles of gore – but even this show rarely offers an episode so suffused with hopelessness. We knew the Wolves’ attack, and that blaring truck horn, had put a crimp in Rick’s Walker-herding plan, but I wasn’t prepared for quite how catastrophically wrong it all went as a result. Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 6, Episode 3 – Thank You”
“Just because we’re good people doesn’t mean we won’t kill you.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Watching the previous episode, I had cause to remark that, after all the shit our heroes have been through, it was about time they caught a break. In this week’s ep, it seemed that that break had turned up in spades. The only trouble was, with Rick and the gang so hardened from their experiences in the post-apocalypse wilderness, could they find it in themselves to trust their luck?
Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 11–The Distance”
“We gonna tell them? Everything that’s happened to us, everything we’ve done? We gonna tell them the truth?”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Well that went… about as well as expected. Let’s face it, if you’ve ever seen any post-apocalyptic drama on TV, you probably could have told Our Heroes that Terminus was not going to be the refuge they were hoping for. If nothing else, Woodbury last season was a pretty good indicator of that. And nothing good has ever come of anything called “Terminus”. But then, maybe these guys aren’t too genre savvy – perhaps they preferred reality shows.
Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 4, Episode 16 – A”
“You were wrong. I’m still here.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Hello again, faithful readers (all several of you)! As usual this time of year, my reviews have been delayed by a sojourn to sunny Los Angeles, and the Gallifrey One Doctor Who convention. Consequently, I’ve missed covering two eps of The Walking Dead since it returned from its mid-season break, so I figured I’d do them both in one bumper post – with this week’s to follow tomorrow – jetlag permitting!
Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 4, Episodes 9 & 10 – After / Inmates”
“How can you die from a cold – in a day?”
Well, that period of idyllic calm didn’t last long. Thank goodness. Despite last week’s Walker mall attack, I had visions of the new, agrarian community at the prison becoming like the one seen in series 2 of the original Survivors, where all the drama seemed to revolve around farming dilemmas. Not unlike, in fact, season 2 of The Walking Dead, for that matter.
Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 4, Episode 2–Infected”
“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.
“People with nothing to hide don’t usually feel the need to tell you that.”
After weeks of seemingly escalating action, it was a welcome change of pace in this week’s Walking Dead. Yes, the episode dealt with the aftermath of last week’s frenzied, traumatic developments; but this week the focus was more squarely on the seemingly idyllic community of Woodbury, as more of its Dark Secrets were revealed.
Andrea of Woodbury
As early as the pre-credit sequence, we saw who it was that the Governor had tipped his drink towards in his inner sanctum a couple of weeks ago – his beloved daughter. But she’s not the smiling, pretty little girl from the photo in his office any more – she’s a grey, rotting Walker, her hair coming out in clumps as her father tries to tenderly brush it.
As I’ve commented in various other reviews, you can’t go wrong with a creepy little girl in horror. From the ghostly twins in The Shining, through the wraithlike apparition in Ringu, they’re a staple, and a very spooky tradition. Penny, the Governor’s daughter, specifically recalls little Karen Cooper, the zombie girl from the original Night of the Living Dead who so brutally killed her mother with a trowel. But the Governor’s not quite so helpless as Mrs Cooper; he’s obviously been looking after what remains of his daughter for quite a while, and has a pillowcase handy to cover her head when she gets… bitey.
Michonne was not so subtly investigating the Too-Good-To-Be True community again this week, with a bullheaded approach that seemed less than sensible. She seemed to be sailing close to the wind last week with her barefaced challenge to the Governor over his account of what had happened to the too-trusting National Guardsmen; this week she was blatantly breaking into his house, reading his diary, and slaughtering his captive Walkers in a nice bit of gory katana-based action.
It’s been said by some that Michonne hasn’t exactly translated well from the more obviously fantastical comic series to a TV show that strains to be grounded in realistic characters. Certainly her surly terseness and superhero-like ability with a sword seem more suited to something like Smallville. And yet, I’m enjoying Danai Gurira’s portrayal, which hints at untold events that turned Michonne from a normal person to this brooding post-apocalypse warrior. There’s plenty to be revealed about her yet, I think.
Still, her bull-in-a-china-shop approach to investigating seems quite unwise, even given her confidence in her ability to handle herself. Woodbury is firmly under the Governor’s spell, and challenging him against that kind of devotion from that many people would surely merit a more cautious, secretive investigation. Michonne, instead, allows herself to be nearly caught in the Governor’s house, then actually caught having a slash-fest with a bunch of Walkers whose purpose she can’t have been aware of.
It’s a credit to the show’s more subtle version of the Governor that, on discovering all this, he didn’t go straight to the violent extremes of his comic counterpart. Instead, he tried a more subtle approach, cajoling Michonne and trying to recruit her to his cause, even going so far as to apparently ‘allow’ her and Andrea to leave the town. It’s another nuanced portrayal from the talented David Morrissey; we believe the Governor is a genuinely dangerous, scheming politician utterly without scruple, but seductive with it (despite, behind the scenes, plainly being an absolute loon).
Andrea’s certainly seduced, to the extent that she’s unwilling to even entertain Michonne’s (as it happens, accurate) suspicions. I must confess, since her self-obsessed death wish for much of season two, I’ve found Andrea a hard character to like, despite a perfectly good performance from Laurie Holden. Here, she compounded unlikeability with sheer stupidity in her unthinking trust not just of a gang of strangers, but a man she would have every reason to be suspicious of – the ever-charming Merle Dixon.
Still, at least Merle was consistent, with more memorable scenery-chewing from Michael Rooker this week. You genuinely didn’t know which way he’d jump when opening the gates for Michonne and Andrea to leave, but you were on safer ground when he started having fun with the undead. It came as no surprise that, when the show realised the comic’s concept of the Woodbury zombie-based gladiatorial streetfights, it was Merle who was straight into the ‘ring’ as reigning champion.
In the comic, it was the revelation of the ‘bread and circuses’ zombie fights which was the ultimate Secret of Woodbury; here, with that revealed in the fifth episode, I’m wondering if there’s more. Certainly Dr Milton’s mysterious ‘experiments’ have still to be explained, especially with a ‘research team’ that includes a man like Merle Dixon. Together with the conversation about Walkers ‘remembering’ their former identities a couple of weeks ago, I have a feeling this is going to play into quite what the Governor’s up to with his decomposing daughter…
Porridge
Back at the prison, it was all fallout from last week’s jawdropping events. With Woodbury having the lion’s share of the action this week, there was still plenty of drama with Rick and the gang, as they struggled to deal with their losses, together with the new addition of a baby girl who needed feeding.
Prisons not normally being replete with baby formula, Daryl took charge to dash out beyond the fence and find some, accompanied by the surprisingly resilient Maggie. Rick, meanwhile, went from last week’s crying wreck into a violent, self-destructive fugue of grief, heading unheeding of protest into the bowels of the prison, with an axe, to wreak revenge on the Walkers. Any Walkers.
Cue an orgy of head-splitting with some quite excellent gore effects, from which not even Glenn could dissuade his enraged leader. The whole sequence was obviously inspired by a similarly self-destructive orgy of Walker-killing from the original comic, in that case carried out by another grief-stricken character who didn’t make it into the TV adaptation. As was the cliffhanger, which saw the tearful Rick startled by a ringing from a dusty phone, and reaching out to answer it. In fact, given the show’s usual approach of deliberately subverting comic readers’ expectations, this week was surprisingly faithful in its straight(ish) adaptations of the original’s set pieces and concepts.
Even with comparably little airtime, the gang at the prison still found moments to (often affectingly) reflect on the trauma of recent events. Trying to choose a name for his new baby sister, Carl came up with a litany of all the names of the female characters who’ve died since the show began, ending (inevitably) with ‘Lori’. Glenn emotionally explained to Axel and Oscar that the group were more than just his friends; after everything they’d been through together, they were family. Suitably awed, the former convicts helped him to dig the necessary graves – looks like they’ve been accepted into the group now.
Still, Glenn might be being overly fatalistic with those graves, unless I’ve somehow missed something. Given Daryl’s melancholy emplacement of a Cherokee Rose on one of them, it’s presumably Carol’s; and yet, I don’t recall her fate being shown. Did the gang just put up a cross, with nothing to bury?
This was a more thoughtful Walking Dead than we’ve been used to of late, in keeping with the trauma of last week. There’s no way the show could keep up that level of adrenaline-pumping action for the whole of its sixteen episode run, and fun though it’s been, I wouldn’t want to see it exchange spectacle for drama. But even here, the showrunners appear mindful of last year’s criticisms, not stinting on zombie appearances. Even in the seemingly peaceful prison yard, there were corpses all over the floor and Walkers shambling around outside the fence. In contrast to last year’s largely zombie-free farm, this year we have a setting that demonstrates, however calm it may seem, that this is still very much a show about a zombie apocalypse.
“Looks like you’re sitting pretty at the end of the world.”
Welcome to Woodbury.
As I suspected after last week’s total absence of Andrea and Michonne, this week’s Walking Dead focused exclusively on what’s happening with them, with no sight of Rick and the rest of the gang at the prison. The splitting of the narrative into two threads (and two settings) that will inevitably converge at some point is yet another of the strengths of this season compared to the last. Last year’s constant setting of Hershel’s farm was at once claustrophobic and boring, with the hints of budget restrictions preventing us seeing anywhere else; the new setting of the idyllic town of Woodbury, contrasting with the grim bleakness of the prison, already gives a sense of a wider world in the story.
It’s a standard trope in post-apocalyptic fiction that, at some point, our plucky survivors will encounter an idyllic, picture postcard perfect community where everything Seems Too Good To Be True. Because of course it is – these places always have a Dark Secret underpinning their seemingly utopian nature. In this regard, Woodbury is nothing new, and to the show’s credit it trades on that trope by giving us a sense of unease throughout, and revealing some pretty nasty aspects of the place in its very first episode.
As in the comics, the introduction of this new story thread was foreshadowed by the crash of a helicopter, presumably the one we’ve been seeing on and off since about the third episode. It was revealed to be military, a National Guard Huey forced down by an engine malfunction, killing all but one of the crew. Andrea and Michonne were drawn to it, but when they got there another group turned up, professionally killing the walkers with a minimum of fuss under a businesslike, black-clad leader. Meet the Governor.
Yes, one of the comics’ best-remembered characters (along with Michonne) has finally shown up in the TV show. Played by Britain’s own David Morrissey (with a somewhat variable Georgia accent), his introduction is pretty faithful to that from the comics, but with the significant deviation that two of the heroes are ‘rescued’ by his party and taken back to the stronghold community of Woodbury, thus setting up a whole new narrative. In the comics, Rick and co stumbled over Woodbury and found out pretty quickly that it wasn’t as nice as it looked; here, it looks like Andrea and Michonne are going to settle in blithely (though Michonne at least is very distrustful already) before discovering the place’s Dark Secrets.
The show’s tendency to subvert expectations from the comics made me wonder if its version of the Governor might be less of a wrong ‘un than previously, but no, he’s established as a cast-iron baddie by the end of this episode. Again in keeping with the tropes of this genre, he’s a lying, manipulative politician, trading on the faith and wilful blindness of his community to carry out ruthless acts in its name. That hanging corpse outside Woodbury was just a hint; inside lies a secret lab run by a slightly unhinged scientist (notably like the one in Romero’s Day of the Dead), where unspeakable experiments are carried out on the walking dead.
And when the Governor found out from the injured pilot that a whole unit of National Guardsmen are just down the road, he gained their trust with a flag of truce before having them ambushed and massacred for their guns and equipment. He followed this up by telling the town of their “heroic sacrifice” before settling down with a drink in front of masses of fish tanks full of disembodied “living” zombie heads – including the (presumably murdered) helicopter pilot. That’s one of the creepiest images in the comics, and it was good to see it faithfully reproduced here, serving the same purpose – to show us that this guy is not right in the head.
Andrea, though, seems completely taken in, enough to end the episode seemingly flirting with him. Asking what his actual name was, she received the reply, “I’ll never tell” – an acknowledgement, presumably, of the confusion over his identity in the comics and the spin off novel also written by Robert Kirkman.
I’m not sure I buy Andrea’s instant trust quite so easily (although to be fair, she’s still pretty ill), given that she and Michonne were initially ‘captured’ by an old friend she would have every right to distrust. Yes, just as the show introduces a comics favourite in the form of the Governor, this week also saw the re-introduction of a favourite character created purely for the TV version. As was pretty obvious from the instantly recognisable offscreen voice, Merle Dixon is finally back – not as a teasing hallucination this time, but in the flesh, large as life and twice as ugly.
Michael Rooker, as before, chews up the screen as Merle – and he got a lot of screentime to do it this week. This is no bad thing, as we finally got to learn what happened to him since we last saw him cuffed to a roof in Atlanta and having sawn off his own hand to get free. He’s constructed a nifty stump attachment thingy which can have a bayonet attached to it, and become one of the mainstays of Woodbury, despite the Governor’s sniffy dismissal of him as a barely tamed animal.
So he and Andrea got to fill in each other’s backstories (helpful for us viewers). Andrea, of course, was unaware that you don’t have to be bitten by a walker to turn when you die, while Merle was unaware of how his little brother Daryl had stepped up to the plate in his absence. “He became a valued member of the group,” Andrea supplied rather tactlessly, implying that before then both Dixon brothers had been useless hangers-on.
Merle didn’t seem offended by that. He actually seems to have mellowed a bit; his previous unreconstructed Southern racism was nowhere in evidence, given that he was working with an African-American doctor, and had no special contempt for Michonne. Could he be being groomed for a slightly more heroic role? I rather hope not, he works best as a villain.
The tight-lipped Michonne (referred to by name onscreen for the first time) got to parcel out a little more of her backstory, courtesy of creepy scientist Milton and a nice civilised breakfast. The conversation turned to whether the walkers actually remembered anything of who they had been (“an echo, perhaps”), a possibility an uncomfortable Andrea dismissed, remembering the experience of having to put down her risen sister.
Michonne, though, seemed even more uncomfortable, especially when the question of her armless, jawless zombie ‘helpers’ came up. She’d put them down herself earlier in an unsuccessful attempt to stay hidden; asked who they had been, her hostile refusal to answer spoke volumes. As everyone present worked out, she had known them when they were alive – but only Andrea was foolish enough to press the point, receiving a contemptuous glare for her trouble. After only two episodes of screentime, I’m very much enjoying Danai Gurira in the part; she has the perfect blend of steeliness and inner vulnerability I expected from the comics.
It was a talkier episode than the first two breathlessly-paced, action-filled instalments, but no less compelling for that. We had a whole new scenario to introduce, as well as several very important characters, and even comic fans were probably kept guessing (as I was) by Evan Reilly’s script. Intrigue in place of action is better than the endless arguing that formed much of last season, and there were still plenty of zombies in evidence. It was excellent to see Michael Rooker back as Merle, and David Morrissey made an impressive debut as the Governor, who looks set to be just as memorable on TV as he was in the comics. Another very strong episode from a much-improved show.
Simon’s Incoherent Blog 