Tag: AMC

Shawn chimed in with his thoughts on this episode here.  You should really read it.

What I’m drinking: Sam Adams Harvest Pumpkin Ale.  Honestly, not as great as I hoped it would be.  Not nearly as pumpkiny as some others I’ve had.  But it’s still pretty good.

Six things that annoyed me:

1. With everyone on high alert for zombie noises, I find it hard to believe that anyone could not notice a zombie walking around in the prison, making all his little hard-to-ignore zombie noises.  “What’s that snarling and wet gnashing noise?”  “Just the wind, I suppose.  Lay your head back down, nameless person.  Life is perfect here in this dank prison, and things will never, ever change.” Then lots of biting and gurgling and me shaking my head.

2. Things I don’t care about: the deep-breathing techniques of children as they see their father get stabbed in the head.
That might sound heartless, but I’ll refer back to something I said last week: I don’t know these new characters.  I don’t really care about them at this point.  A fat bearded guy gets bit?  Oh well.  These things happen.  I didn’t know he had daughters, so I find it hard to suddenly generate any sadness that these girls have lost their father, when I didn’t even know they existed 20 minutes ago.
Killing non-characters is a lazy way to drive drama and try to evoke emotion.  And maybe it works on some people, but I really just don’t care.
This is pretty indicative of a problem I’ve had with these first two episodes.  There are a ton of new people that I feel like I should know, yet I have no idea who any of them are.  From the first episode, I know that D’Angelo Barksdale is a doctor.  And yet, when they needed someone to explain the fast-acting death-flu, they get another guy to explain it, while D’Angelo sits in the background looking concerned.  Is this new guy a doctor?  I guess he must be.  All I know is that the one guy I know for sure is a doctor is standing there with his mouth shut.  And that makes no sense to me.  They could kill 10 new people per episode for the rest of the season, and I could not find it in my heart to care about any of them.
Reading back over that, it does sound pretty heartless.  Oh well.  I guess I really am a monster, after all.  I am them.  They are me, and I am them.

3. Why did they stop tending to the fence?  I know, I know, they had sick people.  But making sure the fence didn’t cave in is a pretty big part of the safety of others, and yet they just kept letting the zombies pile up until they hit a critical mass.  That should not have happened.  I’ll tell you this right now: the council is doing a piss-poor job at keeping people safe.

4. I guess just anyone can burn two people in the middle of the day without anyone noticing.  (For the record, the smart money is on Carl.  You take away a budding sociopath’s gun, and he’ll find other ways to do terrible things.  Or maybe one of the new people has a history of arson.  It’s entirely possible.)

5. Really not subtle with the symbolism this year when it comes to Rick’s character.  The killing pigs scene this week was a bit too obvious of a way to show that he is back to being willing to kill again.  Farmer Rick is back to Killing Rick.  We get it.  Try making it a bit less obvious, please.  A lot of your viewers are pretty intelligent, and some of this feels a little insulting.  While he was burning his clothes, he may as well have screamed, “I have thrown these things behind me and am reverting back to my old ways!”

6.  I like to think that Tyreese (or anyone in this world) is more intelligent than to follow a trail of blood with no weapons drawn.  Those flowers won’t protect you, buddy.  I should know.  I’ve tried it in multiple times in Dead Rising.

Four things I liked:

1. It has only been two episodes, but I like that they’ve dialed up the action so far.  It’s almost as if the writers are sitting around saying, “Can we get at least two scenes an episode where zombies attack without much rhyme or reason?”  I am completely on board with this.  Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this zombie action dialed back in future episodes, but, for now, I’m a fan.

2. Hearing Beth sing a Tom Waits song.  That’s two for the series so far (“Hold On” showed up last season, and “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” this week).  Not sure who the Tom Waits fan is: a writer or the music supervisor or the actress who plays Beth (Emily Kinney), but I’m a big fan of it.  Hope to hear more in the future.  Maybe find a way for a zombie to recite “9^th and Hennepin”?  Just spitballing here.

3. Introducing a new, non-zombie threat to the survivors.  It’s an interesting little addition to the world.  It’s not just zombies you have to fear: it’s everything.  I’m not sure where they’re going with this flu scare (it may well be over now, and they’ll spend a bunch of time dealing with their little firestarter), but I like it while it’s here.

4. This is not so much something I liked, as much as it is something new we have learned about the zombies in this world.  We learned that the zombies will eat animals (pigs and rats, at the very least).  In the Romero world, we didn’t learn this until the underwhelming (to say the least) Survival of the Dead.

Final thoughts:

Some pretty big leaps in logic, and some terrible decision-making by a lot of characters.  Still, there was a decent amount of action here, and the plot seems to be moving forward.  It’s not like season 2, where we watched the characters sit around in a farmhouse all day.  Through two episodes, there have been constant threats.  Some of it may be illogical, but at least it’s interesting.

L.C. and I have decided to do a sort of dueling reviews thing for The Walking Dead this year.  You can read her review of this episode here.

What I’m drinking: Ginger ale, because I feel kind of terrible.

Six things that annoyed me:

1. The huge heaping of “Daryl love” at the beginning of the episode.  All of the new faces screaming our their undying affection like they were at a Beatles show.  (Or is that Justin Bieber show now?  Man…I’m old.)  It was like the writers were just winking at the audience.  “We know that you love him.  See how we’re acknowledging that love?”  It was like the episode of Lost where they buried Nikki and Paulo.  “We know how much you hate them.  We’ll bury them alive to let you know that we hear you.”  It’s all just a bit too obvious.

2. Maggie’s southern accent.  Has it always sounded like that?  She speaks with a southern accent like someone who has never actually heard a southern accent.  “Don’t worry guys.  I’ve read half of Gone With the Wind.  I got this.”

3. Rick’s line of “You will be the one who loses,” to his Irish femme fatale.  It sounded a bit too close to Heisenberg’s “I am the one who knocks,” but not nearly as awesome.  Even worse for Rick, that line wasn’t even one of Heisenberg’s most badass line (I’m partial to the simplicity of “Tread lightly” or “I won,” but I’m a simple man, with simple tastes).

4. D’Angelo Barksdale jumping off the wagon in favor of cheap CostCo wine.  C’mon man.  There were a dozen cases of Sweetwater behind you, none of which were sitting on shelves decayed by years of neglect and zombie blood.  Avon would be so disappointed in you.

5. The entire Rick storyline.  It was entirely too slow, and the outcome was obvious from a very early stage.  The message also seemed pretty obvious, but then they had to go ahead and shove that message right down our throats.  “That could’ve been me,” Rick said to Hershel.  We know.  We get it.  They could have had the storyline in there and not had that conversation, or ignored that storyline and just put in a 30 second conversation and the same message would have gotten across.
For as much as I love the remake of Night of the Living Dead, there’s a line at the end that has always bugged me.  Barbara has survived the night, and she is standing outside the house, watching her rescuers drunkenly fight zombies, torture them, and, in general, just act like monsters.  She is appalled.  She says, “They’re us.  We’re them and they’re us.”  But we already got it.  Watching those atrocities with her, we had already come to the conclusion that we were the monster every bit as much as they were.  I didn’t need it spelled out for me.  It took what could have been a subtle point and shoved it in our faces.  “See?!  Do you see what we’re trying to say here?!”
That’s exactly how Rick’s storyline felt to me.

6. The Paul Pfeiffer reveal at the end.  For starters, I didn’t even know that kid.  I know he’s immature and says things like “yack all over people,” but that’s it.  At least Zach was a little likable.  I was kind of sad to see him die.  But Paul?  I didn’t really care one way or another about him.
Of course, I suppose it’s setting up something for the rest of the season.  Perhaps the deer he was raving to Daryl about had been infected?  I’m interested to see how Paul was infected, and what that means for the rest of the survivors.  For now, this is an annoyance, but I reserve the right to change my mind based on where it takes the story.

Two things I liked:

1. Big fan of the zombie defense doors.  That was a cool little touch that they obviously spent some time thinking about.  They open out and impale the zombies on wooden spikes.  Much better than opening that chain-link fence every time.

2. The zombie-head-in-a-bag (or, as he was known to his bonnie lass, “Eddie”).  I know it was probably just a head in a bag, but part of me wants to believe she had buried the lower half of him in the ground and only left his head sticking up, like Cliff Clavin in Motel Hell.

Final thoughts:
Not a bad episode.  Some pretty good action in the middle.  Not much in the way of needless drama (this show loses me when the drama gets too big).  The Rick storyline could have been cut out, as well as the dozens of shots of random characters looking off into the distance, deep in thought.

Still, not a bad start to the season.  I’m glad it skipped ahead a bit in the timeline.  Had it picked up right where season 3 left off, we would’ve been in for some boring storylines.  But this shows a little bit of promise.  It raises some interesting questions for the future.  I am not dreading next week’s episode.  Progress!

My new friend (and possibly soon-to-be enemy, depending on how well this goes) L.C. Fremont and I have decided to have a little back-and-forth about each episode.  She loves the show.  I have numerous issues with it.  It should be a lot of fun, and there may be a little bloodshed.  You can read her first installment here.

Due to the nature of these posts, there will be spoilers for each episode, and this post will feature spoilers for the rest of the series.  So, if you don’t want spoilers, this probably isn’t the place for you.

Before the season starts, I thought I’d throw a few thoughts out there.

First of all, allow me to talk a bit about my feelings on this show.  I’m a big fan of the comics, I live in Kentucky (for those who don’t know, the creator – Robert Kirkman – is from Kentucky, and that is where Rick, Lori, Carl and Shane are supposed to be from), and I love zombies.  This show should be right up my alley.
And, for a while, it was.  I loved the first season.  The first episode in particular was tremendous.
It started losing steam pretty quickly in the second season.  Part of that was due to the shrinking budget (a hold-out by the cast of Mad Men had AMC shorter on cash than they thought they would be).  Our characters were stuck on Hershel’s farm for the bulk of the season.  There was a distinct lack of zombies and a massive increase in meetings and moral grandstanding (most of it due to the now-deceased Dale).  I found myself growing tired of the characters and bored with the lack of development of any sort of plot or action.  It redeemed itself a bit with a terrific end of the season, which carried over to a great first episode of the third season.

But I found myself growing bored and frustrated during the third season.  There were some great episodes, but they were usually mixed in with some terrible episodes.  I found out that I liked very few of the characters.  Even those I did like were ruined at times with lazy writing.  Characters changed from episode to episode, depending on what drama the show needed.  Secondary characters only started to be fleshed out in the minutes before their demise.  T-Bone stood up to Rick and died (we later found out that he drove a church bus and helped out in the community, which gave him more of a character than we had seen in the previous 2 seasons with him).  Axel started sharing a bit about his history and was promptly shot in the head.  It’s a lazy way to develop characters, and it’s something this show does a lot of.

And all of that without even mentioning the severe underutilization of Chad L. Coleman as Tyreese.  (Tyreese is one of my favorite characters from the comics, and Coleman has been terrific in The Wire and his random appearances in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.)

I’m curious to see where this next season goes.  At the end of season 3, The Governor had been exposed as a psychopath.  Of his previously large following, only 2 people are left, and they think he’s insane.  The rest were either gunned-down by him, or fled into the arms of the slightly-less-insane Rick Grimes (he hasn’t talked to his dead wife in a while, so I assume that qualifies him for the title of Not Quite As Crazy As A Murdering Psychopath).  So where do they go from here?  The Governor is still out there, but with an army of himself and two followers that don’t seem totally on board with his new direction (murdering women and children being the main sticking point.  Prudes).  Meanwhile, Rick and his band of misfits are currently living in the prison, having recently taken on a bunch of old people that have left The Governor’s camp.  So we have a psychopath with no army possibly trying to take on an old-folks-home masquerading as a prison.  Riveting stuff.

D’Angelo Barksdale is joining the cast, but, after seeing what they did with Cutty this past season, I’m not optimistic they’re going to do much with him.

I will watch this season, but I’m not optimistic.