Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Walking Dead Season 2, Episode 12: Better Angels

The housecleaning continues on The Walking Dead! Housecleaning of the cast, that is. Only one more episode left in Season 2.

Once again, BIG HONKIN' SPOILERS BELOW!!!

• Loved the opening scene with the group takin' care of zombies intercut with Dale's funeral. Take that zombies! Bet you won't be killin' Dale again, will you?

• Hooray! T-Dog not only showed up for the second week in a row, but he actually had a couple of lines! Don't start celebrating just yet though, T-Dog fans. I have a nagging feeling this was just to remind us all that he exists so when he's killed off next week we won't all think, "Who the hell was that guy?"

• Carl wore his Science Dog t-shirt again, just like in the comic! A nice shout-out to Invincible, one of the other twenty or so monthly comics written by creator Robert Kirkman. I need to find me one of those shirts.

• Randall's description of his group only reinforces my belief that we're going to meet them next week. They've talked about this group way too much to just drop them sight unseen. It's foreshadowing, I tell you! And I still believe this group will be led by Merle Dixon. If not led by him, then he will at least be a member of it.

Of course I'm gonna look really stupid next week when none of this comes to pass and I'm wrong yet again.

•  It's a moot point now, but I still don't understand why Rick thinks that driving Randall an hour away and releasing him means they'd never see him again. Randall's from the area. Even if he was dropped off 100 miles away, all he'd have to do is look at the address on a letter in someone's mailbox to find out what town he was in, then find a road atlas and boom, he could find his way back to the farm.

• It's been a long time coming, but Shane finally went all Travis Bickell on us, didn't he? I can't say I was surprised by Shane's demise. He was killed very early on in the comic, in issue #6. He's been living on borrowed time on the series all season and I knew he'd eventually be killed off.

Then a few weeks ago the news hit the interwebs that John Bernthal, the actor who plays Shane, had signed up with another series. Most everyone logically interpreted that news as meaning that Shane would be leaving The Walking Dead. Robert Kirkman tried to do some damage control by saying that because of the way cable series are scheduled, it was entirely possible for an actor to be on two different series at once. I knew that was a load of banana oil though, and I was right.

I think it would have been better if they'd given us some space between Dale's and Shane's deaths. Dale's death last week was truly a shocker and in my opinion took the wind out of Shane's swan song.

The Rick vs. Shane scene followed the comic book version somewhat closely, with a few changes. In the comic Shane, driven mad by jealousy, lured Rick into the forest with the intent to kill him. Right as he was about to pull the trigger, he was shot through the neck by Carl.

So why the change? Why have TV Rick stab Shane and then have Carl shoot Zombie Shane? I suppose it was more dramatic for Rick to be forced to kill his best friend, and then we could have the "Rick Thinks Carl's Going To Shoot Him But He's Really Shooting At Zombie Shane" scene.

• OK, we now have proof positive that TV zombieism works the same as comic book zombieism. ANYONE who dies from ANY cause will turn into a zombie (or a walker, or a roamer or whatever the hell you want to call them). You don't have to be bitten by a zombie to turn, but of course it helps. This was a big revelation in the comic as the characters realized that no matter what they did, they were all destined to become the walking dead.

Is this the big secret that Dr. Jenner whispered into Rick's ear way back at the end of last season? It's kind of looking that way, but if so, why didn't Rick say anything about it to anyone? Maybe Dr. Jenner said something like, "We are all the walking dead" and Rick didn't understand what the heck he was talking about until now?

• Be sure to tune in for next week's season finale and watch Herschel's entire redshirt family (except for Maggie) get eaten. And probably Herschel as well. Then we can finally get off of the magic zombie proof farm.

• Looking forward to Season 3 (which probably won't start until sometime next year!) and the introduction of Michonne!

4 comments:

  1. Wrapped up beautifully, as always! I cannot believe next week is the season finale. I hope you are right about Merle, that would be interesting. Now who is Michonne..........

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  2. Spoileralert. I know for a fact that Michonne will appear in the finale. She saves Andrea who is running away from the Zombieinfested farm in the forrest surronded by walkers.
    The show ends with a fadeout pan with a prisonbuilding far away in the horizon.

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  3. Thanks, Dawn! WD is pretty much the only show I watch on TV, so I don't know what I'm gonna do after next week. I guess there's still Alcatraz, although it's getting a bit repetitious.

    Michonne is a character from the comic who everyone is hoping will turn up on the series. At the risk of getting too spoilery, after Team Rick leaves Herschel's farm, they encounter Michonne, an african-american woman who's on her own. She's famous for wielding a samurai sword to protect herself from zombies. Makes less noise than a gun (so it doesn't attract more zombies) and never runs out of ammo. When they first meet her she's walking along with her zombiefied boyfriend and his zombiefied buddy on leashes. She chopped off their arms and jawbones so they can't attack her. She found that having two zombies in tow causes most other zombies to ignore her. She ends up joining Rick and the other survivors and becomes an integral part of the team.

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  4. "Robert Kirkman tried to do some damage control by saying that because of the way cable series are scheduled, it was entirely possible for an actor to be on two different series at once. I knew that was a load of banana oil though, and I was right."

    Alison Brie is on Community AND Mad Men. So...not all bull hockey, just so you know.

    I would also suspect the reason that they thought taking that kid an hour away and dumping him that they wouldn't see him again bc it would be super difficult for an unarmed kid to make it back to civilization via the zombie hordes but at least gave him a fighting chance.

    I've been waiting for Michonne to show up and make this show not terrible for a long time.

    ReplyDelete

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