Episodes
Monday Feb 10, 2014
The Walking Dead: Straight out of the comic.
Monday Feb 10, 2014
Monday Feb 10, 2014
When I came into work today, our office manager kicked things off by asking, “Jason! Did you watch ‘The Walking Dead’ last night?” She’s a big fan and talking about the show is one of a few things we’ve bonded over. That said, she wasn’t all that impressed with last night’s midseason premiere -- more explosions and action were expected. After she said her piece, I let her know that we would have to agree to disagree on this. You can’t keep the tension from a big game-changing moment like the battle at the prison going all the time. There needs to be time to decompress, dial back, and have the characters take stock of their current situation. I’m pretty sure I still have my job after conveying all this to her, so this will continue to be conversation fodder at the office. That being said, it was also nice to see how much of the episode was taken straight from the comic.
It shouldn’t surprise fans of the comic that we got a lot of recognizable scenes as the episode was written by series creator Robert Kirkman. The show is also at an interesting juncture right now. After ending the third season in a way that diverged wildly from the comic, we eventually saw that the show was taking the long way around to get to pretty much the same point. Now, the cast is scattered to the four winds and the presumably-eight-episodes-long journey for everyone to find each other begins with Rick and Carl on the road.
There were some things that were immediately recognizable: Carl’s angry declaration to his unconscious dad about how he didn’t need him anymore, and Rick’s zombification fake-out. Going back to re-read the issues in question, I was also surprised to see that Michonne’s mercy-head-killing, Carl taking out the zombie that Rick couldn’t kill, and Carl’s experience in leading the zombies away from their house were also appropriated for television. Clearly Kirkman was trying to get as much in as he could and this was the right time to try something like that too.
So how did it all hold up? Pretty well as the biggest change from the comic in these scenes was how Carl acted during them. In the comic, he’s still very much a kid who is dependent on and looks up to his dad. With the TV show, Carl’s now a teenager who clearly has some issues to work out with how things have gone for him and his dad recently. Though Carl’s sullenness and Rick’s overbearing protection could’ve come off as manufactured, Chandler Riggs and Andrew Lincoln did a good job of selling what they were given. It’s also nice to see the TV incarnation of Carl mature from someone who liked to sneak out and mess around with zombies stuck in the lakebed to a young man who can take them out on his own terms. His aim needs a lot of work, though. The character has been deeply annoying at points, but what I saw last night is encouraging for future episodes that put him in the spotlight.
Last night wasn’t all about things taken from the comic. Michonne also got several key scenes as she prepared to resume her solo wanderer ways and prepped two zombies for the journey. Excepting the opening, her scenes appeared to have no basis in the comic. Or at least, no comics that I’ve read yet. Yet the most striking one in the episode was her “flashback” to the time before the zombie apocalypse due to its casual surrealism. It was easy to accept it as a flashback to begin with, then it occurred to me, “Wait, has she been cutting meat with her sword all this time?” My disbelief still wasn’t broken when I saw her sheathe it, but as things slowly kept getting darker in the room it was clear that this was something else entirely. The whole sequence was very well-structured and unnerving while also giving us more insight into Michonne’s character. If you were wondering why she started breaking down after holding Judith earlier in the season, this scene contained a pretty good answer for that.
We also saw the character put a rather violent end to her wandering ways before going back to track down Rick and Carl. The buildup to that moment was nice in its wordlessness and how it played with surrealism a bit. It was easy to see the dreadlocked African-American zombie at first as a metaphor for the character as she tried to blend in with the pack of walkers. Yet it disappeared for a bit after we first saw it, making you wonder if Michonne’s mind was playing tricks on her. That the majority of her scenes last night were mostly wordless was also quite refreshing as it let you draw your own conclusions as to why she did what she did and didn’t hammer home the predictability of her character’s journey.
Even though we got several key scenes from the comic in last night’s episode, it might be a while before we get more. Not only are there characters alive who didn’t survive the prison massacre in the comic, but those who did -- Glen and Maggie specifically -- are split up. Much as I knew what to expect from the midseason premiere, the way forward isn’t clear at all. Even though Abraham will be showing up in the course of these next several episodes, the waters have been muddied to the point where it’s going to be hard to predict when he’s going to show up unless I see Michael Cudlitz’s name in the credits beforehand.
So it would seem that “The Walking Dead” is enjoying the best of both worlds at the moment. It’s still drawing on the comic for key scenes, overall direction, and characters, yet taking them down new routes while still remaining true to the source material. This was a very quiet episode by the show’s standards, but one that had some strong character development and set the stage for things to get more intense as the rest of the season goes on.
I’m just hoping that intensity involves cannibals and “TAINTED MEAT!” That’s what I really want to see now.
Jason Glick
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