AMC zombie series from Frank 'Majestic' Darabont - The Walking Dead

really enjoying this alexandria plotline. remains to be seen how they'll manufacture tension and danger - on past evidence, by characters behaving stupidly and implausibly out of character - but there are a lot of interesting tensions to explore beyond that. carol's little video scene >>>>>>>>

haha yeah that was incredibly hilarious

her "aw shucks!" looks when fumbling with the guns too

Definitely an intriguing decision to introduce a douchebag character who literally introduces himself as a douchebag.

that sort of self-awareness is pretty rare among douchebags.

i appreciated the theme of who they were pre-apocalypse; rick asserted it didn't matter but it coloured how all of them reacted to "civilisation". carol was lying but also not, she was just reaching back to who she actually was; everything said was true of who she used to be. michonne and daryl are the most badass badasses on the show but she used to be a lawyer and he was a redneck; of course she'd be substantially more enthusiastic, and he'd have been surly and suspicious in a place like that pre-apocalypse. and if rick finds adjusting to society difficult, naturally, of course he slips into the role of cop easily...

(the only characters whose previous occupations we don't know are sasha and rosita, right?)

Wow is this gated community arc laying it on thick. It got to the point where every time the politician gave one of those "I can read people" speeches or talked about "what this place will become," or someone talked about cookies or making prosciutto or knitting or trying to get NPR back up and running (OK i made those up) I wanted to barf. And then, adding insult to injury, they toss in killing an animal and threatening children, which is the laziest way to get a rise out of viewers.

Plus how literal minded to give Rick an actual scarlet letter A. This show, man ...

Carol threatening the kid was one of the show's best scenes ever! So hilarious. Her whole character during this arc is fabulous.

Main reason I like this arc so far is the way they're playing crazy Rick/Sasha/Carol/etc. being the real danger to this town rather than just doing Governor/Terminus/Part III

Rick going full-on Shane now, etc.

xxxp i think the A is something they might give to all new alexandria inhabitants? the novelty of the literal mark is questionable, but i don't think it means what _that_ scarlet letter meant? it's definitely supposed to be the opposite of W, presumably for "wolves," seen on one of the walkers outside the walls

That pile of walkers in the truck pile-up from a few episodes ago (with the torsos only, no arms or legs) also had the Ws carved into their foreheads

Not a coincidence that Rick, who has been making the moves on the married woman, gets the scarlet letter.

I don't mind this "arc," as such (considering nothing has happened yet). But I do find it already painfully repetitive, which is another frustration of the show: we know things will go bad, because they can never be good, so it actually gets a little tedious waiting to find out just how they will go bad.

There is no way they're making our heroes the villains, though, not after all the effort they've made to make their hosts seem so nice and clean cut, plus having introduced at least one psycho hothead, plus more than a few vaguely sinister people hanging in the shadows. I think it'd be hilarious though if an entire season was just a boring suburban drama with no zombies.

despite the heavy-handed horse symbolism and the cartoon middle-class liberals who inhabit alexandria, i'm enjoying this season because characters are talking to each other and, so far, not acting in wildly illogical or out-of-characters ways just for the sake of moving the plot along. hopefully whatever external threat's coming for them will arrive before the threatening love triangle has time to develop. carol again with the mvp scene! yay for psychologically terrorising small children.

i don't think sasha's crazy as in paranoid/cautious, she has extremely understandable trauma going on right now, and it's odd that deanna - so psychologically astute in how she's handled everyone else - isn't acknowledging this

for once i think the show is actually acknowledging grey areas - it's making our heroes unsympathetic but nowhere near outright cartoon villains.

How are they at all being unsympathetic? I think they are being totally reasonable. They've been wandering the wilderness for weeks, on edge and constantly at risk, and gated communities they've joined in the past haven't worked out so well. (The last one tried to eat them!) So yeah, don't know why Deanna is being so dense, or for that matter how this community has managed to stay intact/sane/Etsy, let alone so weirdly blase about everything. I mean, they've all seen and done their share of horrible stuff. It's a heck of a bounce back to baking cookies, especially when they still have people getting killed, or exiled or any of the other stuff our heroes apparently haven't asked about. I like that people are talking - which of course they do whenever the find some position of stability - but it's a bummer it's taking place in this surreal bastion of banality.

Another weird thing. "Oh, the last people here were cops." "Oh, the last people here had motorcycles." I kept expecting someone to find the house of a former samurai for Michonne.

Deanna seems pretty pissed off when Sasha challenges her on that - i think there are degrees in the community of how blind or aware they are to the structure of their fantasy. Deanna's heavily invested in maintaining that illusion (hopefully she doesn't end up as cartoonishly evil as the Termites/Tasha Yar). Obviously the Gay Recruiters know bad it is out there, but maybe Cookie Locker Lady isn't quite so keen as Mysterious Guns Guy Who's Probably Gonna Die By The End Of The Season (aka alt-Abraham).

Sasha's mental state is totally reasonable, but she's still acting out and irrationally, especially compared to before Bob and Tyreese died. Seemed to me in that intro she was deliberately making noise to draw more walkers to slaughter, not that different from Tyrese's suicidal pack dives.

i think carol being a spy and straight-up threatening to murder a child in his sleep - some things she's had SOME experience with! - while stealing the guns is definitely putting her on the dark side, no? i mean I love her more than ever but she's definitely toeing the morality line now

and like i said, Rick is straight up turning into Shane now - pretty blatantly going after another man's wife and even preparing to shoot him, confident he can take over the town from the sheeple by force when he feels like it and taking steps towards that plan as well. he's way over the line from being "careful". even Darryl by the end of this episode is questioning how far they need to go...

That piece of chocolate Carol snuck is just going to blow everything up

Yeah, she was like, fuck it, I'm taking the chocolate. Also, lol post apocalypse America, piles of guns everywhere but keep a close watch on the chocolate, man. I want to know who took the gun from the blender.

she's still acting out and irrationally, especially compared to before Bob and Tyreese died

Yeah, go figure, the deaths of her boyfriend and brother, one after the other, might do that.

Gay meet-n-greet guys seem the most reasonable, friendly but smart and wary. Everyone else has been drinking the Kool Aid, which makes me wonder where they've been hiding the Kool Aid. Would have been awesome had they served moonshine spiked Kool Aid in lieu of wine at the dinner party. Would have been funny if they used that to invoke another deus ex house. "Oh, this wine? One of the houses had an extensive wine cellar!" They should just keep doing that. "Oh, one of the houses used to have a guy who collected bandaids and bandages." "Funny, thing, the person who used to live here owned a loom and had a storeroom full of supplies!"

Still think bicycles would be in ample supply and good for riding around roads quietly and quickly, but hey, maybe they haven't found the house full of bicycles yet.

Thought: what if Carol gets busted for going all nightmare scenario on the kid, and the new community votes to expel her? That could tip things into chaos, without turning the new people into bad guys.

I kind of want to say fuck this stupid show and its stupid show shit. It's like they've stumbled across a gated community of functionally retarded people, men, women and children alike. They might as well call the show the Walking Fodder.

"Hey, this Adam Levine guy and his lacky are reckless psychos."

"That's true. But hey, let's go on another run with them!"

"OK, you've convinced me. Let's go! Whee!"

"Hey, I'm a panicky, babbling crazypriest. Did you know Satan walks among you?"

"Hmm, you make a good case, I'm convinced."

I will agree Gabriel is an incredibly annoying character. We don't know how Deanna is really going to react yet, but it doesn't look good considering her son's dead now

This new town is soft and dumb but I find it hilarious. I was happy when dumbass bro got killed!

That said you should probably stop hate-watching this show for your own mental health Josh, lol - i mean, is it really going to change, fundamentally?

Well, we're losing black cast members at a fast rate, that's for sure.

Maybe the spinoff will be set in, like, Maine and they won't even have to worry about appearances.

yeah, that's still annoying, but by the end of the season I have this feeling a lot more white people are gonna die, so it may slightly balance out. but still, poor Noah

xp the spinoff is in LA

i still think this is the show's best season thus far (which isn't necessarily saying much, given how bad 2 and most of 3 and even chunks of 4 have been). but most of its longstanding problems are at a minimum or not present imo.

looking for complete and flawless plausibility and character decision-making in what is clearly a mainstream work of genre fiction seems like a fool's errand. i m/l buy why everyone is behaving as they are in this season, it just happens to make some of the characters, major and minor alike, unpleasant or grating company - but then again, that's kinda what the show is

i guess we can be encouraged by how they've gone from complete tokenism (t-dog) to characters like tyreese, michonne, sasha & bob having significantly developed personas and either sticking around for longish arcs or still remaining, but then again you have two eps this season where an ep focused largely on a black character ended in his horrific death, which comes off as potentially racially sus & tone-deaf regardless of w/e the showrunners' intentions are

this season and last season have been pretty solid overall imo

yeah - compared to t-dog, suicidal CDC lady and prisoner #2 the show has gotten a lot better since then with the minority characters. the deaths are suspect - Noah's seems gratuitous given Beth AND Tyreese basically died for him this season! - but at least they got some actual development before biting it, which is about as much as you can ask for on this show where main cast members seemingly have to die at least by every half-season break

(by the time they hit the church it was obvious there were WAY too many people left in the show, and i expect we're gonna clear out a ton of named Alexandrians by the finale. sorry Tara, no romance for YOU)

I've been playing catch-up with this show for the last couple of months and I'm up to the point where Beth dies and I'm just not sure I can be arsed to go any further. I know everyone hates on S2 but really S4 and 5 have been so ponderous and boring for a show with zombies where a major character dies every other episode.

I was on board roughly up until the Governor died and it really seemed to shit the bed after that, just lose all impetus and direction and for that matter tension. I know the point is that there's no end in sight but it just goes round in circles, none of which would matter if the characters weren't so one-dimensional, you're just marking time until the next action scene.

It should be just 45mins of zombie attacks and them going to war with other arbitrary groups of people and literally nothing else.

Here's the thing. I like the genre. I like the scenario. That's why I've stuck around. But too much of this show is still driven by people behaving stupidly rather than making mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. But the stupidity has been such that it's totally ridiculous that the dumbass-prone would have made it this far. Pretty much everyone left should be comfortable with guns, good with aim, and not likely to do blatantly stupid shit, like trying to kneecap a zombie, or run off into a suspiciously quiet housing development in search of family, or wander into the bushes to take a dump. Which is especially aggravating, because the last couple of eps have knocked off the silent but deadly ninja zombie nonsense and had characters actually hear them moaning from a mile away, but not, I guess the zombies are just selectively quiet, per the dictate of each ad hoc plot turn.

There is so much potential that the show has not embraced, no doubt due to budgets, though I suppose lack of imagination. Like traveling to other places/regions. Like going on quests. Like more than stumbling peripatetically. It's not even clear what the characters want at this point, what they are looking for. Safety? Stability? Salvation? Who knows. Mostly they seem to be on the hunt for people stupider than they are.

AMC's notorious cheapness (which literally stem in huge part from matthew weiner's flagrant/well-documented monetary demands for himself & his show's budget) is def a factor, despite WD's insane ratings.

aside from scott m. gimple (the current showrunner) the show has never had a particularly adept creative mind in charge. darabont was fine but by all accounts had no clue how to portray this world/story within the constraints of well-constructed series TV. mazzara & kirkman (and by extension AMC) supposedly hated each others' guts and mazzara only seemed to know how to make the pure action scenes remotely interesting. the drama was terrible.

the fact that they moved around as much as they did in this season is mind-boggling by comparison to previous ones. the show's primary nihilistic message is a beaten dead horse at this point, but said deceased horse is being beaten in relatively entertaining fashion & is also genuinely affecting in certain moments, at long last. i'm hoping that the final two eps will be more interesting than a rote clash between the two sides, but i also won't be crushed if it is, long as it doesn't totally suck. this show isn't the americans, or even thrones - like my expectations are fairly low.

I didn't catch any "scenes from next week's episode," but my guess is that Deanna hearing that her son was killed (and her son's idiot cohort beaten up), right after Gabriel's message right after coming to her own conclusion that Rick's crew is taking over, right after (no doubt) discovering what Carol has been up to/beating up or killing the doctor, will lead to a brief yelly clash between the sides. But then both sides will have to unify in the face of a new front, either the source of those "W"s carved into the zombie heads, or perhaps something to do with Rick's old friend, who we saw make an appearance wandering around in the woods several eps back. Or maybe I am making that part up.

Or maybe they will build a radio and a raft out of coconuts and finally get off the island.

starting off this week's episode w/ nine inch nails was an amazing choice imo

would've been character-accurate to go to more generic dubstep
crazy rick is sooo entertaining. "KEEP WALKIN'"
did not expect Michonne to step in and deliver the final blow on behalf of the group though, good twist

yea sad crazy rick from the prison in season 3 was NAGL but this "demonic-version-of-walking-tall" rick was genuinely kinda frightening

Love me some NIN, but that intro was unintentionally hilarious. Though to be honest I expected the run mix to be, like, LMFAO or something, especially since his van mix was total boots-n-cats.

Great ending, though. While I find it absolutely implausible that it's only our people who have debilitating streaks of paranoid PTSD and not these gated community yuppies, or that the bad guys are also bad acting weasel types, or that ... well, a whole bunch of stuff, this inevitable conflict is playing out with a pretty compelling sense of drama. The downside, of course, is that, what, there is one episode left? With all sorts of big things set up or waiting to happen? That's one of this show's worst habits, building to a sensible season finale that spills into the next season. That's one reason the show can never find sure footing.

i'm guessing the finale's extended length (90 minutes) is an attempt to avoid that cliffhanger/transition finale potential pitfall, but who knows

i'm just hoping they don't slide the 'W' explanation into next season and we at least start on that already
also wtf happened to Lennie?

err, Morgan

hopefully he'll be back for the finale. his appearances have always been at logical beginning/ending points (premiere, midseason finale) so that would make sense. he's def one of the most intriguing characters they've developed even in his brief appearances - "clear" is my favorite episode of this series for a reason

I keep thinking the W is an upside down M and it's Morgan who's doing that.

that's what Yvette Nicole Brown said on Talking Dead, but it wouldn't make sense to me - they ran into the W zombies back when they hit Noah's hometown, and it's pretty unlikely that Morgan got there ahead of them (nevermind doing all this alone...)

it's tony wonder

Because we just saw Michonne kinda going mental, too, my guess is she knocked him out strategically. Because don't forget, there is also a mess of guns Carol hid somewhere. Methinks it will be a don't throw me in the briar patch situation, where Rick is kicked out and reconvenes with a few others, then doofus coward dude with his own buried gun (guess this is a thing?) does something stupid to spark it all off. The question is whether they stay put in this place, or the walls come down and the zombie swarm advances

Though my guess is still there's a fight of some sort, then some bigger, badder dude or group shows up, our heroes and the yuppies look at each other, then it goes black and we have to wait several months for another rocky start to a new season.

Kinda ridic that this show has once again totally failed to illustrate how many people life in this town. In only takes a couple of establishing shots. By the end of the hospital arc the shitty setup made it seem like there were like 10 people there, most of them cops. They're not doing much better with this town. At least the Governor's town seemed obviously populated, and sure, maybe there are only a handful of people in Alexandria (the better to conserve chocolate chips/alcohol, not to mention LOL power to operate the garage door - the notion that people would use electric garage doors in the zombie apocalypse is just ... ), but if they established that there are only a couple of dozen people there then it makes the appearance of civilization that much more delusional. But this show has even been bad showing us what most of our heroes are up to. Maggie, Abraham, Eugene, et al. Where's Gabriel after going full end of days with Deanna?

thought this week's was one of those rare walking dead episodes which i thoroughly enjoyed with almost no qualms and no annoyance. often i like the "moving the chess pieces into place for the finale" episodes better because they throw up so many questions and possibilities, while the actual grand finale is as likely to just be the writers clumsily knocking the chess pieces over.

i'd agree that there are plenty of conversations we haven't been thrown that you'd think might have been crucial but i don't think we need to be shown every character's waking move - that episode was pretty packed, happy to assume maggie, abraham et al are just getting on with quotidian stuff.

sasha's continued meltdown is really emotionally compelling imo - one of the few times in this series where it hasn't seemed jarring or OTT. maybe because she's only being reckless w/r/t herself, not putting others at risk. kudos to the actress too. very much enjoyed the ~sisterhood of michonne and rosita going after her. those three are good together! as are aaron and daryl! would watch spin-offs involving those groups.

less into the crazy rick soap opera at home - jessie is an extremely boring blonde white cipher atm, pete threatening her in front of rick is so not how abusers behave.

i assume whatever this creepy outside threat is will interrupt whatever the fallout is of crazy rick vs alexandria and they will ~unite

i think my biggest issue w/alexandria is that it is completely implausible for any community - especially one which has obviously been actively running reconnaissance missions and supply runs - to be as comedically incompetent and complacent as they're being depicted, no matter how lucky they are. and can they make their mind up as to whether deanna is the super-smart leader she was introduced as or a deluded naïf? i feel like the contrast between their relative softness and rick's group could have been more subtly drawn

I don't think Deanna is a naif at all. we've only got one moment where we get to see her not explicitly reacting/playing to another person, after Sasha expresses her anger at the naivete of the town, where Deanna actually seems to be truly angered. Everything she does, down to ignoring the "sorry" casserole, is politically calculated. She's been very deliberately managing the town's outlook to maintain this optimistic society. (Why the recruiters and that one girl are "outsiders" is that they really understand what the world is like outside the walls.) I get the impression that she's incredibly shrewd, far more so than her comic book counterpart.