Firing the entire writing staff seems to have been a good move for this show. The show is a lot better this season. Oh, sure, it isn’t cliché-free like Mad Men strives to be. This episode has both an incredibly predictable “Just in the nick of time” moment and a shirtless scene for the cast heartthrob, Jon Bernthal, but Shane doesn’t get shirtless for no reason. It is, in fact, a perfectly good thematically relevant and symbolic moment of having the hot guy in the cast be shirtless and flex his muscles for the camera.
Spoilers below the fold.
You know, maybe an alternate title for this episode would be “High School is Hell.” The story Rick tells about Shane when he was in high school narrated over Shane running through the halls of a different high school has some disturbing parallels. Besides the obvious sprinting like Hell and it being a high school Shane and Otis are running through, there’s the disturbing dual feeding frenzies. Shane tosses chicken feed to draw the chickens then high tails it out of there. Shane tosses zombie feed to draw the zombies then high tails it out of there. Not something you’d notice the first time watching it; how many TV shows have that level of added depth upon rewatching an episode?
And then there is, for me, the extra disturbing “fat kid gets it” element of the high school parallel. You have to figure that might not be the first time Otis got ganged up on violently because he was fat. And if it’s happened to him before, it happened in high school then too. It makes Shane’s actions more than evil. It makes them mean, the way a high school bully is mean. Although Shane in high school probably dealt with bullies the way he dealt with Ed last season.
When Shane shoots Otis in the leg (not the head, that would be too merciful) it isn’t what you’d call a character-defining moment. It’s more of a character-reminding moment. TVTropes refers to something called a Moral Event Horizon (don’t click that link if you don’t have time to kill); named after the equivalent part of a physical black hole, it’s the point of absolute no return when the character becomes permanently irredeemable in the eyes of the audience. For Shane, that moment was when he attempted to rape Lori. In other words, killing Otis was just reminding us that Shane is already irredeemable, in case we’d forgotten. See, you can justify it, maybe, the way Lori might be justifying it. “In a world this horrific, there are worse things than rape.” “Shane saved Carl’s life.”
That last one is true, but that’s not why Shane went out to get the medical supplies. Not directly. Shane wants to get back into Lori’s good graces. Desperately wants to. So when Shane finds an opportunity to do something heroic-like and earn some points with Lori, he takes it. Carl’s life is just a means to an end for Shane. Which was true before Shane was saving it by going to the high school. I have this idea about Shane. Working his way into Carl’s life back when he and Lori thought Rick was dead, I believe, was more of the same. Shane probably has an inferiority thing going on comparing himself to Rick. Because Shane will never be the moral hero Rick is, never the top dog Rick is, never the father and husband Rick is as long as Rick’s around. And fucking Lori while being a father figure to Carl the moment Rick appeared to be dead was just an effort to steal Rick’s holy throne.
You can make arguments for Shane’s actions in the high school. It was the heat of the moment. He was in pain and not thinking clearly. It was the only way the medical supplies were going to get there at all. That last one is a big one; I think it’s very possible that if one of them hadn’t saved the last bullet for the other guy, neither one of them would have gotten out of there alive. But none of this changes the simple fact that Shane killed another human being in one of the worst ways possible, to save his own ass. That’s what it’s about. Shane feels guilty about it, like he should, and shaves his hair off so he doesn’t have to answer questions or betray that he invented a bullshit story about Otis not being there. He looks at himself in the mirror, naked and his head shaved, and sees himself for what he really is. And so do we, the audience. Shane, for now, is the show’s main villain.
But then again, they reminded the audience of Merle’s existence this episode, didn’t they?
T-Dog getting his wound sewn up (Did they really have to remind us this too was just in the nick of time?) and mentioning Merle was all about reminding the audience who watched last season that they ain’t found the body yet. Merle is coming back as a villain, no doubt about it, and the mentions of him serve to keep us from going “Who?” too much when it happens. While I understand T-Dog’s point that he’d rather not even think about how he might owe Merle something, and remember he spent some time with Merle before Rick showed up, I don’t see that it has to be about owing him anything. With a vindictive enough attitude, all there is to feel is triumph and schadenfreude–”Bastard finally turned out to be good for something after all.” But T-Dog isn’t exactly the vindictive type, is he? He tried to free Merle after everything he’d done, and would have too if the key hadn’t so conveniently dropped in the hole.
Call it an act of God if you will; that’ll keep me from being reminded how much worse the writing was last season. Now that I mention it, God seems to be everywhere in the series this season, although mostly not in ways that would function as a writer’s excuse. We finally get to exactly what I suspected would happen. Yes, Virginia, Carl getting shot was the sign from God that Rick asked for. Because this is how gods—any gods—work. You’ll find it all over fiction, in all different religions. God will cover you in shit just so you’re forced to become clean in the end. God will fuck you up just so you’re stronger when you recover. God will shoot a child in the gut just so the people around him will regain their hope and faith and will to live. That, in essence, is what the religious mean by “God works in mysterious ways.” And yeah, that makes it hard to maintain faith sometimes, doesn’t it?
Which brings us to Glenn. You have to wonder what was up with the character stuff in this episode. The character development this episode—which was almost every moment that wasn’t the action adventure with Shane and Otis—seemed to be lacking a certain something. I couldn’t tell you what. I guess it just felt to me a little artificial. Glenn’s Learning A Lesson Now: You have to make it okay, no matter what happens. Let’s teach that lesson through an interrupted prayer! That’s not at all hamfisted. The scene between Daryl and Andrea where he’s further hammered into being likeable while conveniently telling a backstory that tells you a lot about who he is seemed fine while watching it, but in retrospect seems covered in writers’ fingerprints. All the character stuff felt that artificial when it wasn’t about Rick, Lori, or Shane. Except for Andrea’s answers to the questions posed by Daryl and Dale. Those were natural and well-delivered.
Maybe it’s just me. I certainly didn’t feel it was artificial on first watching, or even on second watching. And I certainly was impressed with the character stuff of the central cast. Rick being too weak to think straight, for one. Rick turning to Lori and telling her he needed her to make this choice for them was another powerful moment. All of the moments between Rick and Lori were that good, and Jon Bernthal’s acting was superb for all of the parts he was really acting. It takes a lot of presence to simply stand there with your eyes wide and communicate emotion and hints of what you’re thinking to the audience. Otis’s character stuff really seemed sincere too. But take a look at Dale’s story around the campfire from last season for an example of the kind of sincere character stuff I feel this episode missed. A lot of the character development scenes this episode feel, the more I think about them, as mostly awkward filler to serve the writing of the show. And the writing should be serving the characters.
The scene between Dale and Andrea was awkward for different reasons, though. Dale was trying to do right, I think, but maybe he was just trying to get forgiveness. I honestly couldn’t tell. Dale was in a position of having earned the distrust and dislike of someone through efforts to do right by them. Dale was definitely wrong to make Andrea’s choices for her like she was his teenage daughter, and definitely right to give her the gun back. Dale, like everyone else in this show, is just trying to do right the best he can. Some of the characters are better at it than others, though.
Random end thoughts: Daryl was right, that was a waste of an arrow. T-Dog talking about how the old rules don’t apply any more is a theme this show comes back to with some frequency. Isn’t there anybody else in the house with a blood type that can donate to A+? What’s up with Dale randomly taking a walk and why did we spend time on it? Shouldn’t Daryl have looted that campsite? And lastly: Looks like walkers do eat each other if they’re desperate.
Until next week.
Love your write-ups, Arthur. And I am enjoying the second season of TWD much more than the first.
Re: Shane’s head-shaving scene at the end (which, I agree, was as much about broadly indicating the direction of his character as a plot device to cover up his lie):
1) There’s a clear shot of a necklace with the charm “22.” Forgive my ignorance, but what does that mean? Is it his badge number or what appeared on the back of his high school jersey or something? I first thought of “Catch 22″ Shane’s conflicting nature. But that seems too easy.
2) Does the farmhouse have it’s power source to operate the water heater? Or are there gas lines still operating (I assume it’s a gas water heater). Like the orange juice last episode, this little detail bugged me. The bathroom seemed a bit too luxuriously steamy to me. FWIW, upon a 2nd and 3rd viewing, I have to concede that the OJ wasn’t all that pulpy and probably was Tang or Sunny D.
Finally, was I the only one who chuckled to himself when Otis started shooting the zombies to save Shane and thought about a bullet passing through a ghoul and actually hitting Shane (like Carl and the deer)?
Excellent, post! I agree that the overall writing in S2 is better than S1, but the trite, pseudo-spiritual scenes between Glenn and Maggie rang false to me. This is possibly because the writers were trying to make these scenes do several things at once: Develop character, explore the role of faith/spirituality in the WD world, establish a budding romance, etc.
Matt Maul, I would imagine the answer to your question #2 is that it’s a self-sustaining farm with a windmill, powerhouse in a nearby creek, or solar panels; as well as orchards and a vegetable garden. However, I agree that the farm’s self-sustainability was not made clear earlier in the show, and that’s annoying to me. Such a simple piece of dialogue: *hands Rick OJ* “Wow! This tastes like fresh-squeezed orange juice!” “That’s because it is. It’s one of the many perks of having fruit trees and a power-generating windmill out back. Wanna take a shower too?” Seems simple.
The only other nit-picky thing I thought of concerned Otis: Would there be overweight people post-zombie apocalypse? I only thought of this because Lori said something about Carl starving or being hungry all the time, so presumably there isn’t a great deal of food to go around. And even if the farm produces food, which I guessed at above, it would likely only be fruits and vegetables (I assume livestock would attract zombies. If the farm-dwellers are smart, then Maggie’s horse is the only animal they keep around, so they likely have very little meat aside from what they hunt). Would there be enough food in this situation to maintain Otis’s weight, or would he have realistically lost weight by this stage of the apocalypse? (One caveat: It looked like the sandwich Rick was eating was a cheese sandwich with Wonderbread. Assuming this wasn’t a mistake by the writers, then the farm dwellers are well-stocked with all kinds of food – fruit, vegetable and otherwise – and I’m just on crack with my wild postulations.)
Tasha, packaged, processed food is higher-calorie, lower-nutrition than fresh food. It’s one of the reasons that obesity is related to poverty: You can be overweight and malnourished, and that’s often the case. In addition, eating less often doesn’t cause heavy people to lose weight: Ask any lifelong dieter. Men, it’s true, take it off faster than women, but we don’t know where Otis started.
One thing I’ve been unable to figure out is how long this zombie apocalypse has been going on. 3 months? Six? You eat a low-cal diet for that length of time, you might lose 40 lbs. If Otis had 150 extra pounds on him, he’d still be heavy.
I too questioned the “meatiness” of some of the characters. A person doesn’t eat for two weeks. . . starts to look like my 85 lb. grandma.
Re: Otis’s weight. FWIW, the same criticisms (being too heavy given her destitute circumstances) were levied at Jane Darwell who played Ma Jode in “The Grapes of Wrath.” One explanation was the high starch diets the Depression era folks were forced to consume.
@Tasha: “It’s one of the many perks of having fruit trees and a power-generating windmill out back. Wanna take a shower too?” Seems simple.” HA!
The poverty-related obesity hypothesis is right on the money, I think. And it may be a sign that the show is only a few months into the zombie apocalypse, to follow Deborah’s comment. That is, in the first few months of the apocalypse, Americans’ diets would likely be similar to that of First World inhabitants living in poverty, with a high carb and fat content like the other commenters said. As the apocalypse continues, their diets would likely look more like those of Third World inhabitants living in poverty (e.g. fewer starches as they use up the Pop Tarts, and more nuts, berries and protein from hunting). So, they’d start losing weight and their bodies would look more like the people you see in Doctors Without Borders posters than the people you see at Wal-Mart. (I’m generalizing and stereotyping here, but y’all understand what I’m aiming at.)
I’m also wondering what winter will be like in this world. Will the zombies freeze solid when the temperature drops? If so, that means that winter is a zombie-free season, and our characters may head north eventually. If zombies are active in the winter, then being in a cold place just makes it harder to find food and keep warm, and our characters may stay in the South. (As I recall, I don’t believe the comics address seasonal changes in the zombies…)
I don’t think walkers eat each other. In reference to the suicide, that man was a man when he died. It was only after a walker (or two or three) started gnawing on the dangling legs, did the corpse become infected and reanimate as a zombie.
The actor who plays Carl reminds me of the young Henry Thomas from E.T. He’s simply wonderful – I was very moved when he regained consciousness and talked about his encounter with the deer.
The reminder that Shane is bad was necessary, but it was definitely more than that for me. It was great to see a moment of pure “I need to survive” from a character. I haven’t been sold on this season yet, though. It bothers me that there doesn’t seem to be a solid strong female role. I don’t think I have a very high tolerance for whining. The scene with Dale was definitely awkward. I can’t figure him out.