The Walking Dead--Live Bait

Just a few things to say about the first non-Rick episode of the year, if not of the entire series:

--So the Governor is Brian Heriot?  Or did he just make that up?

--And he just strolls into the house of these two women?  And the kid, and the guy on oxygen?

--The Governor sorta looks like Kurt Russell in his 80s action movies, like Escape from New York.

--In the beginning of the series, most of the characters would kill almost all of the walkers that came at them, often out of sympathy.  (Or at least it seemed that way to me.)  Now, there's no pity.  The Governor, for example, just closed a door on one, and left one strapped into a wheelchair, theoretically forever.

--The guy got "killed" with the oxygen tank that the Governor got to save him.  If I remember right, that's called irony.

--This is the family guy before the zombie apocalypse transformed him to the dark side and he became the Governor.

--The creators of the show are giving the Governor a lot of his own time in order to set him up as Rick's foil character--that is, the one character who he is most similar to, but who also has a couple of glaring differences in order to set up the traits of both.

--The pit kills, especially the last one with the bone and the face-stretching, are the kills of the week.

--I don't mind the total focus on the Governor here, and it seems like next week will be more of the same, but I'm hearing that many viewers are less than thrilled.  A few are threatening to stop watching.

--The show's creators are taking a heckuva chance here, and if the ratings plummet over these two episodes, there'll be a lot of finger-pointing.

30 Days Without An Accident

Photo: To make it bigger, click on this great shot of Daryl and Michone, from http://entertainment.time.com/2013/10/13/the-walking-dead-watch-30-days-without-an-accident/

Loved the episode almost as much as I love the show (Andrea's exit notwithstanding.  It's the show's biggest strikeout, allowing her to have a casual conversation for so long with a guy who will obviously be a zombie soon.  Still not over that.)  But the title of this episode sounds like something you keep track of after a long and nasty stomach flu.  Maybe a really old person who's been wearing Depends for twenty years, trying to show some optimism.  Or me just being a bit immature.

Well, welcome to my blog about The Walking Dead.  I hope to cover a bit about each episode, so keep coming back if you like the show.  I'll probably include spoilers, so reader beware.

In this first episode of Season Four, we find the prison in a lax state.  They've got a garden, and the old man has a new leg.  Daryl has sort of taken over.  There's a lot of new people, and a lot of kids.  And we even have a library, which you know I like, if you've been reading my main blog at all.

And we've got some new romances.  If you're a diehard romantic like I am, you'll think right away: One of them's gonna get it.  Soon.  And then the nerdy kid shows up, and you know he's quick to go as well.  Sure enough, before you can say So young, yet so cynical, one of the young boys in love gets his neck and face chewed off--after saving someone else, no less--and the nerdy kid gets something nasty in the water (like the pig, probably), and turns while in the shower.  Sleeping cellblock beware, including the blonde girl who's been on the show awhile now, who shrugged her shoulders when told her boyfriend bought the farm.  (I swear that I predicted her reaction to someone as well.  She'd been rather la-de-da towards the kid before he'd left.)

I was about to be disappointed with the episode, with the predictability of it (you even knew the Copter Walkers would crash through the rotted roof soon), when the storyline with the weirdly pretty woods woman took over.  I was wondering if Rick was going to wonder why she was so green (literally; she was quite moldy) and you knew right away it was a mistake for him to give her the knife.  Luckily, she wasn't quite a killer, just a lovestruck and lost (and insanely depressed and starving) woman who just didn't want to go on anymore.  She wanted to serve her husband, you might say, and when she was unable to do that (her effort was rather lackluster), offered up herself instead.  She'll find, as she said, that you can't go back, and I doubt she'll find romance with her husband now that they're both walkers as well.  Look for them soon at the prison fence.

So where's the next episode to go?  You can expect a call for a cleanup in cellblock twelve, once Patrick is through with them.  Rick will regret telling the woods woman that having more people in the jail is a good thing, that there's safety in numbers.  There will be a lot of shambling walkers in the jail, many of whom had been just recently thirsty or sleeping.  Rick may also regret not killing the woods woman a second time before she could turn, and with her husband she will be amongst those who crash the fence.  And the fence will surely come down.  You know this not just because of the constant foreshadowing in the beginning, when all the characters were marveling at how the walkers knew to push at one part of the fence, and not be so spread out like they used to be.  Nope--you know this also because every before- (or was it after-) commercial promo has Rick standing in a section of ruined chain-link jail fence.  And you constantly hear the old man saying that everything they had tried to keep out has now made its way in.  Makes you regret The Governor hadn't won the jail war.

See you next week.