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The Walking Dead: Season 2, Episode 6

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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!

Secrets

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It’s a very straightforward, to the point episode title for The Walking Dead this week – Secrets. Our heroes may not be moving, but the character development – or soap opera, if you’re being more critical – aspect of the plot was very much to the fore, and the festering secrets held by so many of the characters started to come out, one by one. And some of these have been long overdue for an airing; this show has often been one of those cases where the drama is driven by secrets, to the extent that if the characters would only tell each other what they all knew, their lives would become infinitely simpler.

To start with, I was a little surprised when the episode opened at plainly the day after Glenn’s discovery of Hershel’s barn full of zombies. You’d have thought Glenn might rush to tell the others what he’d found that night, so immediately I started to wonder whether he’d been tied up somewhere. But no, he’d apparently been convinced by Maggie not to tell anything to the others. I have to say, I wasn’t totally convinced by this turn of events; budding romance or not, you’d think most people in Glenn’s shoes would think a secret barn full of zombies was something that shouldn’t be hushed up.

And of course it wasn’t, not for long. In an episode filled with people’s secrets, poor old guileless Glenn was stuck with not just that one, but the one about Lori’s pregnancy too. And you could tell he wasn’t very good at keeping secrets: “I can’t even play poker. It’s too much like lying.” So, inevitably, when Dale caught him out in a lie about helping to “clean spark plugs”, he just blurted it straight out: “Hershel’s got a barn full of zombies and Lori’s pregnant.”

Dale looked somewhat taken aback at this. It was a nice scene, very well played by Steven Yeun and Jeffrey DeMunn, both of whom got some meaty material this week. Glenn’s been very much to the fore the last few weeks, which I’ve enjoyed; this week, he was given cause to question his place in the group, much like Daryl last week. Having acted as Lori’s confidante, then placed both his and Maggie’s lives at risk to get Lori some morning after contraceptives, he heard some unpalatable opinions from Maggie. She sees him as taken for granted by the group as an errand boy; basically, as she put it, “walker bait”. Again like Daryl, he got some immediate reassurance, this time from Lori, who considers him a supportive friend. But in both cases, Daryl and Glenn, I can see the seeds of self-doubt will likely lead to plotlines to come.

Glenn may have had a lot of the limelight this season, but Dale’s hardly had much to do apart from uttering the occasional wise and gnomic remark. This week changed all that, and we saw how wily he really is – and occasionally, perhaps, a little foolish. Armed with the information about the barn, he quietly confronted Hershel about it, in a well-played scene which revealed Hershel’s motives in keeping the zombies captive. They’re his friends and family, and as far as he’s concerned they’re sick people. And you don’t kill someone when they’re sick, you wait for a cure. Meanwhile, he’s been feeding them live chickens to keep them docile, and we got to see an all too realistic depiction of the chickens having their legs broken so they couldn’t run away. For a vet, Hershel has interesting priorities about avoiding suffering; but then again, he’s also a farmer. And I’m sure the American Humane Association made sure the chickens weren’t really tortured like that!

Dale couldn’t convince him that what was in the barn was actually walking corpses, and there’s no coming back from that. So, rather than jeopardise their already shaky toehold on Hershel’s farm, he agreed to keep the zombies a secret himself – one more secret stored up. But he’s obviously better at keeping secrets than Glenn, and this episode revealed just how much he had known and kept secret for the good of the group. His chat to Lori not only revealed that he knew about her pregnancy, but also that he thought the baby might be Shane’s – so he’s known about Lori and Shane all this time.

Not only that, but he also remembers how, back in season one, he came across Shane sighting his rifle at Rick in the woods. This came up in an electric scene in which Dale confronted Shane with advice that now might be a good time for him to move on. This exchange positively crackled with tension, as Dale told Shane, “I know what kind of man you are.” And it turns out Dale even has his doubts about Shane’s story of how Otis died – something else that may well come out in the near future.

For his part, Shane was coldly furious and not a little scary. Yes, he’d done what he did to Otis to ensure Carl would be ok; but as he put it, if Dale was right about what kind of man he was, threatening to reveal that information might not be the smartest idea. Jeffrey DeMunn and Jon Bernthal were excellent in this scene; Dale full of anger and contempt, and Shane plainly heading deeper into darkness with his cold, quiet threats.

Elsewhere, Shane was coaching the gang in how to shoot, and just like in the comics, Andrea turned out to have a surprising aptitude for it. But Shane went too far in trying to motivate her to hit a moving target when he shouted that she should imagine it was the walker who killed her sister. This led to a mini-subplot about Andrea’s shooting ability, which was resolved when she accompanied Shane to a nearby housing development in the latest development of the seemingly interminable background plot of the search for Sophia.

It really is beginning to stretch the bounds of credibility that our heroes still hope to find Sophia alive, and as a plot, I’m very much hoping they drop it soon; either by finding her, alive or dead, or accepting that they won’t and giving up. Nonetheless, this week’s instalment of the search was a nice set piece that gave us some more good zombie action, together with a chilling depiction of the aftermath of the apocalypse. Shane and Andrea’s search took them through a suburban street where the houses were filled with corpses, including a quite gruesome pile of charred bodies in a burnt out garage. And then quite a horde of zombies turned up, allowing Andrea to perfect her shooting skills. It gets easier after the first one, apparently.

And obviously zombie killing is a pretty aphrodisiac pursuit, as in the car on the way back to the farm, Andrea couldn’t wait to grab Shane’s crotch, to which he responded by dragging her over to the driver’s seat and getting it on then and there. Cut to a long shot of the car with a (presumably unintentionally) hilarious sound effect of the horn going off as Andrea bounced off it (the car’s horn, not Shane’s. Well, both, presumably).

So that’s one more secret to be kept. But the really big one was about to come out – finally. After having changed her mind about the morning after pills, it was time for Lori to talk to Rick about the baby. Actually, it turned out Rick had already figured it out when he found the empty pill packets, and he was less than happy about it.

This was another cracking two-handed scene in an episode full of them. As a character, I’ve never found Lori all that interesting; it’s no reflection on actress Sarah Wayne Callies, it’s just that she’s not written particularly deeply either here or in the comics. But this scene allowed her to reveal some more depth, and reflect yet again on the fairness or otherwise of bringing a child into such a world. Kudos to Callies, and also to Andrew Lincoln as Rick, but the writing was the star here; Lori’s conceit of surviving via good memories of the world that’s gone was an incisive one. As she said, Carl has little enough of that to remember, and any new child wouldn’t remember it at all; he/she would only know the hell of the world they were born into.

Rick was understandably angry at having been kept in the dark, both about the pregnancy and Lori’s dilemma about ending it. If nothing else, that rules out the pregnancy as being the subject of what Dr Jenner whispered into Rick’s ear at the end of season one, leaving me with no clue about that now. But the pregnancy wasn’t all that came out. Rick had also figured out that Lori and Shane had slept together while they thought he was dead, a fact that she now guiltily confirmed. Rick seemed understanding, given the circumstances; but I can’t help thinking that this is far from forgotten.

So, an explosive episode for the characters, even if little else happened in the way of driving the overall plot forward. Some great performances on the parts of all the regular cast, though it must be said that most of the inhabitants of Hershel’s farm remain sketchy and ill-defined – for example, who’s the teenage boy that occasionally pops up? I don’t think we’ve even been told his name, or if we have, it was a fleeting reference and hasn’t been mentioned again.

And there was, thankfully, rather more zombie action than usual amongst all the character drama. Besides the shambling inhabitants of Hershel’s barn, we got not only the horde of walkers encountered by Shane and Andrea, but also a nicely gruesome bit of business with Glenn’s rather sloppy killing of a zombie in the town pharmacy. With recent zombie appearances seeming rather tokenistic, it was good to have more than two around this week.

With next week’s episode being the last before the mid-season break till February, it looks like the events of recent weeks will probably blow up in everyone’s faces, and this week has been as much about moving pieces into the right places as anything else. It’s well done, and seemed less like filler than some weeks. But I’m hoping we can get a bit more momentum back for the second half of the season; resolve the interminable search for Sophia, move the gang on from the rather static setting of Hershel’s farm, and get back to some epic zombie action. It might make the characters’ lives hellish, but it makes the viewers far more entertained.

The Walking Dead: Season 2, Episode 4

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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!

Cherokee Rose

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After last week’s intense, character driven episode of The Walking Dead, comes… another one. And that’s not a bad thing, as last week got me really interested in the characters again, to the extent that I wouldn’t have minded a comparative lack of zombie action. As it happened, last week didn’t stint on the zombies, but this week did, and I found myself not missing them… too much.

After the extreme darkness the characters were exhibiting last week, with their constant talk of death and ending it all, this week saw them lightening up somewhat. Which was not only a relief but quite plausible; if they’d remained in that kind of mood on an ongoing basis, I’m pretty sure that there would have been a few suicides.

Not that it didn’t start a bit dark, though. The pre-credits sequence showed us Otis’ funeral, a sad cairn in lieu of a body, and focussed very much on Shane’s obvious (to the viewer) guilt. As Hershel eulogised Otis and his wife cried, the camera kept lingering on Shane’s face, and credit to Jon Bernthal for an expression that screamed guilt to the viewer while giving nothing away to the characters onscreen. As if to make things worse, Shane was then called upon to recount Otis’ last ‘heroic’ moments as a memorial, and I found myself grimacing as he told a patently false tale of self-sacrifice cleverly intercut with flashbacks of what actually happened.

As I said last week, keeping Shane as a main character longer than the comics did is one of the best decisions in the TV show. Part of the appeal is that even though he’s a baddie, he’s clearly ended up there with the best of intentions. He really loved Lori, and started an affair with her when he believed her husband was dead; now that he’s back, Shane’s finding it hard to shut off those feelings, and that’s leading him down a very dark path. And I got the impression that he also genuinely loves little Carl, and that his cold-blooded use of Otis as zombie bait was purely to ensure that he managed to get back with the medical supplies needed to save the boy’s life. Not that that makes it any better, of course – you know what they say about the road to hell and its construction methods.

The gang also got back together again at Hershel’s farm this week, which was something of a relief; dramatically, it was all beginning to feel a bit scattershot with various parties heading off in various different directions. Now that they’re back together again, there’s time for some good old fashioned woolgathering as they contemplate the situation they find themselves in. Carl’s out of the woods, but there’s still no sign of little Sophia; and Daryl’s lonely search for her was a key to making his character even more sympathetic.

It would have been easy to portray Daryl, as Merle’s brother, as just another thoughtless, bigoted redneck. What the writers have done with him is far more interesting; he’s a man from a very poor background who may well be somewhat uncivilised, but comes across as genuinely decent. We saw that last week as he bolstered the depressed Andrea’s spirits, and saw it again this week when he comforted Carol as she busied herself tidying up the RV in the hope of her daughter’s return. Norman Reedus made Daryl’s tale of the Cherokee Rose (from which the episode drew its title) genuinely affecting, and you could see how touched Carol was not just by the flower he brought, but also by the hope. In a genre which so easily turns to survivalist wank fiction, it’s nice to see that the backwoodsman who’s so good with the crossbow is also a decent, caring human being.

Also building on the depth he was given last week was Steven Yeun as Glenn. He’s been perfect in the role, and the costume has made him look exactly how you imagined the comic character to be. But up till now,he’s been relatively little used. That’s changed these last couple of weeks as the show gets closer to his pairing up with Hershel’s daughter Maggie. The scene between them in the abandoned pharmacy was both touching and hilarious, as his attempts to disguise what he was really taking by picking up a pack of condoms led to them inevitably having sex. It was sweet, and in keeping with the Glenn the comic fans know, that even confronted with an outright verbal offer to have sex, he still couldn’t keep his foot out of his mouth: “I’d never have sex with you… I mean, of course I would… but…” Later, Maggie tells him it’s a one time thing, but I think the showrunner would be wise to retain their rather charming relationship from the comics.

It wasn’t just free love that Glenn was getting up to this week, though; he was instrumental in dealing with the lone zombie the gang did encounter, a rotted, corpulent thing who’d stumbled down one of Hershel’s wells. Reasoning that shooting it in the head would contaminate the water, an ill-thought-out plan was created to extricate it with a rope by dangling Glenn down as bait. Of course, this all went pear-shaped as the rusty pump they were using as a pulley gave way, leading to a real heart in mouth sequence as Glenn dangled screaming just above the ravenous corpse and the others struggled to drag him out before it bit him.

Thankfully he was fine – I’d hate to lose Glenn, one of the comic’s mainstays, so early in the story, but I didn’t rule it out – and not only that, he had managed to snag the zombie in the rope. It was a big fat one, and quite rotten; you didn’t have to be a genius to predict the result of trying to drag a severely decomposed corpse out of a well with a rope tied tightly round its shoulders. With gruesome inevitability, it happened; the corpse split in half, the lower half tumbling back down the well trailing guts and all manner of organs with it. So much for not contaminating the water – it’s lucky Hershel’s got other wells.

The only zombie sequence in this week’s episode, this was well-directed, going from direct tension to gruesome gore pleasingly for zombie fanboys like me. It also felt a little like an unnecessary subplot tacked on solely to provide a bit of zombie action in an episode light on it. But I’ve got a feeling some of the stuff we saw here is going to pay off later on. Most noticeable was Maggie’s sickened face as T-Dog smashed the zombie’s head in; later, Glenn suggested that this must be the first time she’s seen one of them killed. But last week, she alluded to having lost several relatives to the plague, so there’s something not right there.

I don’t want to go into too much detail for those who haven’t read the comics, but if they’re doing what I think they’re doing, further hints were given by the revealing conversation between Rick and Hershel as they gazed out over the beautiful view from the farm and discussed God. It’s plain that Hershel’s a God-fearing man, but he’s also a vet and committed to relieving suffering. He’s no mad fundamentalist, but his quiet certainty about his faith in the face of recent events seems a little foolhardy. Playing Hershel, Scott Wilson has endowed the character with the same old-fashioned morals (not necessarily a bad thing) as the comic character. But his insistence that Rick and co surrender all their arms seemed odd when they could be surrounded by zombies at any minute, as Shane pointed out. And while he’s obviously considering letting the group stay on at his farm, he wouldn’t hear of them having to sleep in his barn. Good old hospitality? Perhaps…

Andrew Lincoln continued his convincing Georgia accent as Rick got some more bonding done with his family too. After confessing to Hershel that he didn’t have much truck with God any more (interesting to know that he presumably used to), he had to confess to his son that he’d lied earlier about little Sophia being OK. It was a sweet scene, and I’m impressed with young Chandler Riggs as Carl; he perhaps seems a little too sweet for a boy in this situation, but the loving relationship with his father is crucial to the narrative, and this scene really brought that home. Plus, he finally got to inherit Rick’s sheriff’s hat, his trademark in the comics (he’s rarely seen without it). And this version had the added verisimilitude that Rick was going to have to pad the hat out so it would fit!

Rick also symbolically discarded the rest of his police uniform this week, packing it away in a drawer at Hershel’s, presumably not to be seen again. As a piece of symbolism, it was a little heavy handed; the uniform obviously the last representative of a once-secure world now vanished forever. But the look on Rick’s face, and the way Lori sadly embraced him as he closed the drawer, gave it a real dramatic heft.

Lori too was troubled, after sending Glenn with a secret requirement from the pharmacy and insisting on his absolute discretion about it. So much discretion in fact that even he didn’t know what he was looking for; presumably Lori just used a brand name. But she told him to look in the feminine hygiene section, and even if you haven’t read the comics it was fairly obvious what she was after. Of course it was a pregnancy test, and of course it was positive. Even Glenn, who now knows what she wanted, doesn’t yet know that she really is pregnant; but Rick might. I’m still betting that’s what Dr Jenner whispered in his ear just before he left the CDC, based on the blood tests they all had.

Of course, if Lori is pregnant, the question is, who’s the father? She slept with Rick as soon as he found her near Atlanta, but she’d been sleeping with Shane up till then. And Rick may be wondering too. Why else, if Jenner has already told him, hasn’t he mentioned it to Lori himself? It’s another interesting dynamic to add to the tensions in the group, and I’m sure it won’t be the last one.

As I said, after finding its feet with the characters again, the show does this kind of drama well, leaving you wanting eagerly to know what happens next. It’s a mark of the drama’s priorities that this week’s cliffhanger was nothing to do with menacing zombies; rather, it ended with a shaken Lori squatting in the dark holding her positive pregnancy test. Tonally, the show is beginning more and more to remind me of BBC 70s post-apocalypse drama Survivors, with its focus on real, sympathetic characters dealing with the practicalities of life after the end of civilisation. The mainly rural setting is another similarity; it’s lucky for the budget that in a post-apocalypse scenario, cities would be best stayed away from. I’m not sure how many episodes could have been set in the deserted Atlanta without breaking the bank!

A similarity to Survivors is no bad thing (to my mind, it’s the most comprehensive exploration of a post-apocalypse scenario ever shown on TV). But the show’s still not forgetting it’s also a zombie horror, and even the brief encounter with the undead this week was satisfyingly gruesome. Although the ‘looking for Sophia’ plot is beginning to drag somewhat, these last couple of weeks feel like a show finding its feet again after an uncertain start to the season.

The Walking Dead: Season 2, Episode 3

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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!

Save the Last One

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It was (almost) straight back into the thick of the zombie action in this week’s Walking Dead, but for the first time this season, it felt like the characters had more dramatic heft than the events surrounding them. For the first time this season, this episode felt like a drama punctuated by zombie action, rather than zombie action interrupted by lulls in which characters stated the obvious.

It was dark territory indeed this week, no mean feat for a show that’s set in a post-apocalyptic hell roamed by flesh eating corpses. But it wasn’t the scenario in which our characters found themselves that made it so dark; rather, it was a series of cleverly intertwined musings on the desire for survival versus the choice to opt out and die.

That this seemed more interesting than the zombie shenanigans faced by Shane and Otis at the infested school medical centre was perhaps the first time this season that the characters have felt fully rounded enough to actually care about. The depth of the characters in the first season was one of the reasons the show was part of that group – including Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones – that propelled genre television into the ‘serious drama’ realm. I must confess that, until this week, I hadn’t really felt that season 2 had managed to recapture that; this episode, by show newcomer Scott Gimple, amply made up for it.

The theme of whether it was worth living in a world like this, or better just to give up, was what drove the episode, and was first brought up in a truly intense scene between Rick and Lori. With their son Carl still in critical condition, and Shane’s return with the necessary medical equipment very much in doubt, Lori had started to wonder whether it would be better if Carl didn’t make it after all. Why, she argued, would a child want to live in a world like this, eventually to become nothing more than a hunted animal himself?

This is a theme touched upon in the original comics on several occasions, but the performances of Andrew Lincoln and Sarah Wayne Callies gave it a lot more oomph than just reading it on the page. And as in the comics, you found yourself wondering whether giving up might be the more sensible thing to do. As Lori pointed out, their friend Jackie (who chose to die in the explosion of the CDC) hadn’t had to see any of the terrible things that had happened since. Rick, of course, was more optimistic – he’s the hero, he has to be. But even then, when it looked like Hershel was going to have to take the risk and operate on Carl without equipment, it was Lori he asked to make the choice.

In an episode where death seemed more significant than it has recently, Andrea and Daryl found themselves having a similar heart to heart as they went on a (somewhat inadvisable) trip to the woods by night to continue their search for little Sophia. Darabont regular Laurie Holden (best known to me as Marita Covarrubias in The X Files) has been varying anger and despair in her portrayal of Andrea since Dale persuaded her not to remain in the CDC as well, and this is obviously going to be a running character thread.

As I mentioned last week, of all the characters, Daryl seems best equipped psychologically to deal with the situation, and he countered Andrea’s hopelessness with similar optimism to Rick. He’d been lost in the woods as a child too, and after all, he’d made it ok. But he gave Andrea’s death wish short shrift as they encountered an all too gruesome reminder of the consequences; a man who’d hanged himself from a tree but neglected to shoot himself in the head, leaving his reanimated corpse dangling helpfully while others munched on the flesh from his legs.

This was a nicely gory way of ramming home the point of their argument, as Andrea confessed she wasn’t sure if she still had a death wish. But later, as Dale apologised for taking away her decision and gave her back her gun, you had to wonder. You also had to wonder whether Dale had a death wish of his own as he went on a ramble through the darkened traffic jam in search of cigarettes. I’m a hopelessly addicted smoker myself, but even I would probably rather endure nicotine withdrawal than wander around a dark area that might be full of zombies. Still, nice to see that Dale smokes Morleys; this fictional ‘almost-Marlboro’ brand may be most associated with The X Files, but it’s been a staple of TV shows since at least the early 60s.

In contrast to last week, pretty much all of the characters got a moment in the spotlight here, with none given a raw deal. We got to know Hershel’s daughter Maggie better this week, and I particularly enjoyed the growing intimacy between her and Glenn. Glenn as a character has sometimes got short shrift in the comic, but has sometimes seemed even more perfunctory in the TV version; it was nice to see Steven Yeun given some decent material at last, as he caught the character’s blend of smartassery and adolescent awkwardness. Lauren Cohan as Maggie seemed a lot more ballsy than she does in the comics, which is no bad thing, and it looks like she and Glenn might grow close…

Leaving earlier than he did in the comics, though, was Pruitt Taylor Vince as Otis. Otis in the comics always seemed a bit of a spare part, as though Robert Kirkman introduced him then had no idea what to do with him. Vince’s characterisation actually gave him more depth, but he certainly didn’t outstay his welcome. I may have been concentrating on the character drama this week, but the intervening zombie action was still pretty thrilling as Otis and Shane struggled to get away from the infested school.

There were some well-directed shock moments like when Shane was about to jump from a window and a zombie suddenly reared out and grabbed him; or when a horde of them, previously unseen, lurched into the chain link fence Shane and Otis were resting against. But nothing like the shock moment that was revealed in flashback after Shane returned, alone, to Hershel’s farm. For it transpired that, despite Shane’s tale of heroic sacrifice, Otis had actually been shot by Shane himself to decoy the zombies while he got away.

The moment this happened was a genuine shock, despite previous heavy signs that Shane was a wrong ‘un. Remember last season, when he sighted Rick with his hunting rifle before Dale turned up? Or when he practically tried to rape Lori in the CDC? Shane’s badness came to light fairly early on in the comics and he was duly despatched (though Rick had to dig him up again later to shoot him in the head properly). It’s one of the best decisions of the TV version to change this, as Jon Bernthal’s charismatic performance makes him believable and likeable even though you know what he’s capable of – in this case, not even leaving poor Otis the last bullet to shoot himself before the zombies tore him apart.

As Shane took the opportunity to shave his head back at the farm (to hide the marks Otis had made struggling with him), he looked like the very devil himself in the steamy bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, in one of the few missteps this week, we’d seen this in the pre-credit sequence. It works well as a device causing the viewer to wonder why this was significant, which was revealed at the very end of the episode. But while I can see the intention, I thought it also drastically undercut the tension of Shane and Otis’ deadly mission; after all, we always knew Shane would make it back, because he hadn’t shaved his head yet.

That criticism notwithstanding, this was far and away the best episode since the show’s return. The drama was compelling, the zombie action thrilling, and the dramatic balance between the two far better struck than in previous weeks. The characters too seem finally to be shining the way they did last year. Despite the fact that the overall plot has, technically, barely moved, I was gripped throughout, and hope we can have more episodes of this kind of quality.