The Walking Dead - "Save The Last One"

Season 2, Episode 3

How a television show about zombies can turn boring real quick

The Walking Dead has made the fairly bold move this season of turning into a slow-burn, character driven story that just happens to included zombies, and not being an action-driven zombie show. I’ve largely defended this move, especially how the show has broken down these small stories into sizeable chunks, so that at the end of each hour it feels like something’s been accomplished, but it seems as if the show has quickly written itself into a corner, as tonight’s really boring episode will attest.

It times like these that I have to wonder how much the show had planned out/how much of that planning got disrupted by all the behind the scenes drama, but it feels like it’s just stuck spinning its wheels at the current moment. While the episode did end with Carl recovering, it spent the interim time just whiling away the minutes, with Rick and Lori essentially repeating the conversations that they had last episode, with this new thread about how Lori thought Carl should die so he wouldn’t have to live in the zombie apocalypse, which essentially came to nothing anyway. (Meanwhile, T-Dog got stitched up and Glen hits Maggie as they have some stilted and trite conversations about God. Yay.)

Over at the traffic jam, the other half of the group is still busy searching for Sophia, and of course they still don’t find her. This leads to some nice moments between Daryl and Andrea as they go out looking for her late at night (so they can escape the incessantly crying Carol), and a darkly funny scene with a zombie who’s caught in his own noose. But despite that fun little foray, once they get back to the trailer, it’s more depressing talk about how Andrea may or may not still want to kill herself, and for some reason ends with Dale apologizing to her for saving her life. Right….

Even the stuff that should have been interesting – that is, Shane escaping from the school - never quite reached the level of intrigue that it seemed to be going for. Now, this storyline had zombies, so that automatically made it the most interesting thing in the episode, and the show continues to deliver good zombie-oriented set pieces. It fails, however, on the emotional side of things. Since the cold open where Shane shaves his head gives the story a foreboding push, that helps to excite things a bit more, but it fails a little bit when we see Shane return to the Greene family farm without Otis. Right away it’s obvious that Shane gave up Otis to the zombies in order to save its own skin, and while it’s an interesting idea to see Shane lose his morality in the face of imminent death, the fact that it was so telegraphed takes away any sort of punch.

Of course the main problem is the characters. The show is still in that phase, thanks to the shortened first season, and has yet to be able to develop these characters beyond their basic stock traits. (I least I hope that’s why; it quite possible the show knows that people only tune in for the zombies, so they don’t give a shit about developing anything else.) So while this could have been a nice character study of an episode, the characters that we were studying didn’t have enough layers to them to make anything here all that interesting.