First of all, can I say what a fine job Ernest Dickerson did on this episode? For the first time, I felt this show actually balanced it all in the ways I wanted. This is what I hoped the show would be.
- They couldn’t burn those bodies away from the camp? Pee yew.
- Andrea’s cold resolve was pretty chilling. That was some unwavering stillness there, which contrasts nicely with how she’s been portrayed in the series up until now.
- You know, this is the first time I’ve really felt how difficult the situation would be if someone were bit. Yes, we’ve seen it before but this evoked some serious thought from me. It was made all the more intense by how relatively healthy Jim looked. How would that not be stone-cold murder at that point?
- “We don’t kill the living.” Take out the ‘don’t’ and you got yourself a dandy Cannibal Corpse album title there.
- Boy, Laurie Holden (Andrea) and Jeffrey DeMunn (Dale) really sold a moment that could have dropped like a lead balloon. As evidenced by last week’s opener with Andrea and Amy, scenes of intended intimacy like that can go south fast if the writing, pacing, and/or delivery is off even a little bit. Everything here was rock solid, even the “today was her birthday” bit.
- On the other hand, how much stronger would it have been if Carol’s final good-bye to her husband weren’t telegraphed ahead of time? Think of how magnificently off that sequence would have been if we’d had only the slightest indication Ed was a bastard leading up until the moment Carol turns his face into meat pudding.
- I agree with everything Sean T Collins says here about Amy’s resurrection. It was eerie and moving at the same time – a rare thing to see someone even attempt, much less execute as well as they did here.
- That said, while Sean’s thoughts on the show’s reliance on zombie (and horror) film cliché ring pretty true to my ears rang true to me, I may be softening to this aspect of the series. There weren’t any moments in this episode’s plot that took me by surprise, but if I take execution into account? See Amy’s scene and the Dale/Andrea heart-to-heart above.
- The cinematography in this episode was just out of this world. From the waves of heat coming off the dry dirt road to the diffused light in the Winnebago in that first scene when Rick talks to Jim, it all added some wonderful texture and verisimilitude.
- Shane and Rick, Lori and Shane…that whole business was much more tense than it had any right to be given the cliché. I don’t credit much of the dialogue for this, but rather the performances and the way they’ve let the fatigue and desperation become a real physical truth in their faces and body language. It also helps that Dickerson lets each scene breathe just enough to let the tension build; no CSI cuts here.
- Oh, hey Hispanic guy has a family. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.
- There’s a lot to unpack here. Jim taking charge for his own fate, taking the decision out of Rick and Shane’s hands in the midst of their battle of wills. How we pay our respects and how we mourn the dead. What it means to be human versus being simply alive. I think for the first time we got to see how the physical presence of the dead and the inescapable reality of mortality bring out some interesting nuances of belief and character here. How each character deals with the very real presence of Death here made for some fine drama.
- Whoa…it’s…SCIENCE!!! Since I don’t get to see the coming week’s previews, this came completely out of left field. If Curt’s right and they’re going to explain away the zombie plague, this is a biiiig disappointment. There’s really no way to explain the zombie outbreak without undermining the story on some level and Kirkman knows that. It is far more evocative and frightening that this apocalypse has no definitive cause – the cruel mystery of the situation is part of the existential horror of the comic. After all, is there a monster more sympathetic to existential horror than the zombie? The tag line of Dawn of the Dead infamously read “When there is no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth,” but in tonight’s episode we are confronted with the Sartre’s even more famous No Exit line, “Hell is other people” as well – which circles fully back to the familiar zombie trope, “they’re us.” For following the zombie apocalypse, what horror could any hell possibly hold to compare with the mockery of life that the zombie represents here – an existence without those crucial things that define us beyond the debatable existence of the soul – our empathy, our fear, our very will to survive despite how pointless it all seems. Ironically, the only time an explanation for a zombie outbreak has ever delivered something that actually amped the horror of the situation for me was in the ending of [REC], and that was precisely because it pulled the rug out from the “zombie as virus” cliché and turned the entire film into a Prince of Darkness-style “Evil as Virus” thing. Is it too much to hope that the whole thing started after some archeologists uncovered a copy of the Necronomicon somewhere in the Middle East? Probably. Regardless, it does seem that they’ll be getting an origin story for the virus next week and that’s more than a little sad.
- I laughed at “I think tomorrow I’m gonna blow my brains out. I haven’t decided.”
- That walk up to the CDC was our first truly disturbing scene of epic horror since Episode 1, and it was great. Only a single zombie on display, and yet the sight of those bodies spotting the pavement like fly-covered dog droppings had more nightmare juice than the zombie attack closing last week’s show, in my opinion.
- Yes, the light coming from the open door was pure corn, but I thought Andrew Lincoln punched a hole through it with his fraught, almost pathetic plea for salvation leading up to it. How much of that was Rick’s fear for his family’s safety and how much of it was the awful knowledge that it might be his mistake that put them at risk?
Yup. This was my favorite episode of the series to date. If you had told me at the end of Episode Two we’d get something like this, I might have doubted you. That said, next week could return us to Dumbsville, so I’ll keep my expectations in check.
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