The Walking Dead Episode 4 Slabtown

Photo: Emily Kinney as Beth in "Slabtown."  From the episode's Wikipedia page.  (Does Kinney look 29 to you?  She is.)

I'm very late getting this entry in--like, almost a week, as the next episode airs in a few hours--so let's get right to it.  And sorry about the delay.

--The hospital is a Marxist Utopia (or, actually, dystopia): Your only worth is what you produce.  Production = worth.  Of course, the hospital is a bastardization of Marx's ideas.  He thought production could also be something abstract, like leadership, or good friendship.  But mostly he preferred physical production.  It's easier to quantify.

--Poll #1: Better leader: Dawn or Gareth?  We don't know enough yet about Dawn to say, but in terms of those they led, I have to say Gareth may have been better.  For everyone else alive, outside of those he led?  Maybe not.  Though they're both dangers to others outside their camp, Dawn at least helped you stay alive.  (These polls, by the way, come from the Talking Dead show afterwards.)

--Who was creepier, Dawn or Gorman?  I'll go with Gorman, though Dawn was more dangerous.  That's my own question, BTW.

--What's Ana Gastmeyer been doing these last many years?

--Poll #2: Yes, in a zombie apocalypse, doctors would be too important to kill.  Though, as we saw in this episode, doctors would be amongst the first to be killed by other doctors.

--Speaking of that, Beth better not tell anyone she has a little medical experience.  (Hershel was a vet, remember?)

--Anyone but me remember Emily Kinney from one episode of last year's The Following?  She was one of the silent followers and got shot dead real fast.

--I'm no prude, but wouldn't Darryl be a little too old for Beth?

--Speaking of Beth's age--which I think on the show is supposed to be early 20s?--the real age of Emily Kinney, who plays her, is 29.  Hard to believe, but true.  She's one of those women who will look 30 when she's 40, and so on.  I'll bet she got carded until she was in her mid-20s.  Maybe she still does, at 29.

--I haven't been carded in a few years now.  I did for a long, long time after I turned 21.  Especially if I was clean-shaven.  No, seriously.  I did.

--And--on the Talking Dead, at least--Kinney turns her head (and blonde ponytail) whiplash fast.  Reminded me of the little girl in the Verizon commercial and the little dog at the end of Coming to America.

--No, I'm not comparing the very pretty Emily Kinney to a little, furry, fluffy dog.  I'm just sayin'.

--Just researched it.  According to her Wikipedia page, Kinney was 25 when she first played 16-year old Beth Greene on this series.  It's possible in the life of the show that Beth is just barely in her early-20s, while Emily Kinney is just barely in her 20s at all.  Now that's messed up.

--I could also play a guy who's 9 years younger than I actually am.

--Or, not.

--Poll #3: Did Carol let herself be caught?  The option never occurred to me until it was offered up on the talkshow afterward, so I'm going to say No.  And I'm guessing she doesn't have any weapons.  I mean, wouldn't they search her, especially if they believe she's unconscious?

--I'm guessing Darryl, in last week's episode, was leading out Noah, who'll tell the Ricktatorship about Beth and the hospital.  And then they'll infiltrate the hospital to get Beth.  And find Carol?

--And all this after the next episode, which is about the D.C. group.

--Being a guest on the Talking Dead is not always the kiss of death--as Beth / Emily Kinney showed--but since two guys from the D.C. group are on the next episode, I'm guessing that at least one of them will get it.

--And I'm guessing it's the "genius," who I think will turn out not to be.

--Or, not. 

The Walking Dead--Too Far Gone--Episode Review

Well, it looks like I couldn't have been more wrong about The Governor being a series-long adversary, huh?  That, and more thoughts of the half-season's last episode:

--You had to know that Hershel wasn't long for that world after he said his now-famous (amongst fans, anyway) line (and sorry if I butcher it a little here): "You can't control how you die.  The only thing you can control is what you die for."  Having said that, you knew he was going to die for what he felt was a good cause.

--And his little smile at the end tells you that he did.  Or, at least, he thought so.

--I was more surprised that The Governor bought it there.  It is courageous of the writers to write two episodes that focused exclusively on him (to the chagrin of a great many fans) and then kill him off.

--That tells me that the writers care very much about character arc, and characterization in general.  It was important for them to show the viewers that The Governor was, indeed, "too far gone" to ever come back to decency.  See: Rick's speech at the end.

--It was impressive, in a character-development kind of way, to show how decent The Governor had been in his past, pre-Zombie Apocalypse, and then to show how he was never going to be able to go back to that, even when given the chance.  The last two episodes, especially the previous one when he killed Martinez and the others, could have both been called "Too Far Gone."

--With this kind of character development, and this kind of ratings and following, I would love to work on this show, if I was an actor.

--And if I wasn't.

--One of The Talking Dead's clips showed that David Morrissey, who played The Governor, always thought that Michonne was his real adversary.  Of course, he's right about that.

--The Governor was about to choke the life out of Farmer Rick.

--Where's Carol been the last few episodes?  I'm surprised she didn't turn up at the end of this one.

--Anyone know if the plot development of casting Carol off was always supposed to happen, or if the actress who played her had a movie role, or something personal, or something else that she had to tend to?

--Speaking of Carol, she apparently taught those kids to shoot really, really well.  Turns out, that may not have been a bad thing for her to teach them after all.

--Sorry to see Alisha go.  Why couldn't we keep her and lose the whiny, scaredy-cat one?

--But the guy in the tank always annoyed the hell out of me.  Good-bye.

--I think the baby's fine.  They wouldn't kill off a baby just a few months old, right?

--Not surprised to see the little girl go.  In writing parlance, that's book-ending.  The Governor couldn't save his real daughter, so why would he be able to save his adopted daughter?  Very thematic and character-building, but that's what the show has been doing for the past few episodes with The Governor.  So, yeah, I called that one.

--And I called Hershel, but The Governor, as I mentioned, was a surprise.  But it's good to know that I can still be surprised after watching three and a half years of the same show.

--Great shot with Rick and Carl with the prison in the background, and Rick saying not to look back, a la Lot and Lot's wife.  And the destruction of the prison does indeed seem like the act of angry gods.

--See you in February 2014.  If you can believe that.  2014?  Did I just say 2014?!?

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.

Walking Dead--Internment

Some quick thoughts about the episode:

--In an episode soon, Herschel won't have the time to wheel the dead out of view before he stabs them.

--How could Herschel possibly have gone this long without killing a single walker?

--What's up with Lizzie playing footsie in zombie blood?

--Carl's no longer whiny and annoying like he was last year.  Harsh, I know.

--You knew the fence would go soon.

--Hopefully Rick and Carl repaired the fence before they burned the bodies and picked peas.

--You knew the Governor would turn up soon, and that he'd been watching.

--I'll bet the Governor's talking to Carol when he says in next week's promo: "Don't you want to get back at him for what he did to you?"  Or something very close to that.

--Herschel has turned into one tough old dude.

--Quite the father/son and father/daughter bonding moments in this episode.  There's nothing that brings a family together more than annihilating large numbers of zombies together.

--Chris Hardwicke talked much faster than usual on the recent Talking Dead.  So fast that I couldn't tell what he was saying at times.  And that's me saying this.

--Josh, a guest on Talking Dead, asked an awesome question: Could Bob be a spy from the Governor?  I never would've thought of that.

--I've got to look up that Steinbeck quotation.

--I don't blame Rick for putting off talking to Darryl.

--I love the Tom Sawyer and Steinbeck allusions.

--"A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ."  I'm going to guess that was from East of Eden, or maybe Of Mice and Men.  But I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't, too, because I know those two pretty well, and I don't remember that quote in either one.

--Herschel has lately been the optimist that Rick used to be.

--Scott Wilson, who plays Herschel, said in an interview that ibuprofen got him through filming this episode.  Lately, ibuprofen's been swelling up my cheeks and sinuses to a painful extent.  It hurts now more than it helps.

--Okay.  According to Goodreads, the quote is actually:

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”

― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

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.