The Walking Dead - "Secrets"/"Pretty Much Dead Already"

Season 2, Episode 6 & 7

“The world out there isn’t what you see on TV”

The “mid-season finale” is a recent construct, one that has popped up over the past five years or so as cable networks sought for a way to split up their 16-ish episode seasons instead of airing them all at once. (Okay, so this statement mostly applies to the USA network, but given how instrumental that it’s been in the rise of basic cable original programming, at this point it’s an idea that doesn’t feel exclusive to the network.) It’s something that exists more as an construct than an actual element of television, because even as there are plenty of show that make sure to include big developments in the episodes leading into the hiatus, to the point that even networks shows like The Vampire Diaries have adopted the model, there are still other shows, like say Leverage, that don’t. But the idea of this being so is still strong enough that I expected something big to come of tonight’s Walking Dead, and it's to that end that I would like to start this review with the following thought:

Even given the fact that “Pretty Much Dead Already” didn’t have any sort of big twist, and at times was underwhelming in much the same way as the season one finale was, and flies in the face of how we expect mid-season finales to work, it was still a pretty great episode, the kind that I have been hoping the show would eventually produce.

Now, I recognize that the ending scene to tonight’s episode, with Rick shooting Zombie Sophia is a significant event that probably holds great change for the show when it returns to complete the season early next year, and it certainly packed an emotional wallop that renewed my flagging interest in the show. But I’m hard pressed to call it a “twist” or a “cliffhanger”*, or in any way liken it to the developments that most mid-season finales tend to trade on, both because the group has still yet to leave the farm and (as the already-available previews for the next episode make clear) they’re not likely to do so in the near future, and because I doubt that when this episode got made the showrunner (whether at the time it was Frank Darabont or Glen Mazzara, I can’t be sure) probably wasn’t aware of the role that the episode would serve.

*(I get that Zombie Sophia was supposed to be shocking, and I didn't figure on her appearance until that long pause right before she exited the barn, but given how long that she's been missing, he fate wasn't totally surprising. That being said, it was quite moving, so kudos to the show for selling the moment correctly.)

But even if this wasn’t meant to be a finale of any sort, as the seventh episode of thirteen episode season, and thus the mid-point, such episodes are meant to be the benchmark by which a season should show its hand and tip the viewer as to more or less where the season is headed. (There are of course exceptions to this rule, and as creators get more and more creative control, these exceptions will only rise, but for most shows – and especially a show as purposely middling as TWD sometimes feels – this is still the rule of thumb to go by.) And in that respect, the show did a fantastic job, as everything leading up to that last scene seemed to reorient the show to a formula that works more often than not.

But first we need to back up and discuss last week’s far-less-interesting “Secrets”, which I meant to write about, but didn’t. In the review that I started but never finished (yes, that’s something that sometimes happens), my main complaint/hook was that keeping Rick and the gang on Herschel’s farm, which while admirable for keeping the characters to more believable small scale stories, was quickly growing thin as it felt like almost nothing was happening, and the few things that were happening were more or less repetitions of what we already knew, instead of progress/development of new stories for the characters.

But I had also planned on tempering said review by talking about three key scenes – the first where Andrea and Dale head out to the suburbs and end up shooting down a whole hoard of zombies, the second where Glen and Maggie face a zombie attack at the pharmacy, and the third which was Rick and Lori’s episode-closing conversation – as faint signs of life for the show. While the first two were mostly highlighted for the fact that they had zombies and were thus exciting (at times it feels like zombie attacks are the only thing the show is good at, and there are some obvious guesses as to why), the third scene felt like the first time that the show was really tackling the idea of the post apocalyptic-landscape changing people earnestly, as the extremely maternal Lori thinks about aborting her child and the territorial alpha dog that is Rick just lets the fact that she slept with Shane just slide.

(Everything else in that episode – especially Herschel’s reveal that he keeps zombies in the barn because he still believes that they are people with a disease that can be cured – was just incredibly boring and/or perfunctory way to go about continuing the narrative, and doesn't warrant much more of a mention than that. You can see why I wasn't able to generate enough personal interest to write a review.)

And I lay all that out because I believe that “Pretty Much Dead Already”, whether intentionally or not, goes about answering some of these criticisms through the use of just one story. As much as I’ve complained about the show inability to deliver pathos in light of its ability to do action sequences, I never thought about it as some sort of dialectic tug-of-war at the show’s center, mostly because I wanted to believe that the show could right itself to the point where it could in fact deliver on both elements equally. But when tonight’s episode placed Rick’s man of reflection against Shane’s man of action, I could sense an unintentional meta moment happening, as the show’s basic creative struggle was suddenly symbolized by the characters on screen.

But it also helped to give an even more concrete answer to the question that the show seems intent on raising, even when it actually doesn’t have an answer. For what feels like every episode this season (but probably wasn't), there has been a recurring element where two or more characters talk about how living in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland, without ever actually giving any proof that they’ve changed, mostly because we never knew what these characters were like before the world turned to shit. (I feel like I’ve written about this before, but again, the show has beaten us over the head with this idea so many times, I may just have had a narrative-induced concussion and imagined that I did so.)

That changed tonight as Shane, whose devolution into an uncontrolled, reactionary id finally gives us a character who's changed due to the extreme nature of his surroundings. Now, I’m not saying that the show has gone about this in the right way – Shane became a borderline cartoon in how aggressive he was tonight, and we had at least two conversations about whether or not somebody was “right for this world”, just to make sure we really got it – but it at least shows "growth" for the character. More importantly, given how Shane’s dumbass decision to open the barn doors eventually pulls everybody over to his side, as even Rick is forced to gun down a zombie in order to survive, he now represents not just an idea, but a dangerous yet alluring force, and one that can take down the rest of the group with him.

Beyond the A-story and the idea it espoused, however, the rest of the episode was still pretty week. The character development presented here didn’t really feel earned in either Shane not Andrea’s case, and even if it did feel earned for Daryl, the idea that part of his growth as a human being has to include a romance with Carol feels simultaneously weird and boring. I couldn’t care less about whether or not Glen and Maggie stay together as a couple, and hearing her bring up yet more forced moments of religion into the show was just painful It’s hard for me to hear. And Lori’s proclamations that the child she’s carrying has to be Rick’s are just so obtuse that I can’t help but think “oh great, that’s more melodramatic bullshit that we’ll have to deal with later.”

But even though all those things bugged me, I still came away feeling pretty good about this episode. We now have a through line not only for the season, but also for the show as whole, as the writers have finally found a way to properly execute the ideas that have just been essentially narrative hangers-on up until this point. And while there’s many ways that the show could screw this all up, it’s also given itself a safety net that’s much harder to miss, and that makes me feel hopeful about the future.

The Walking Dead will return in February.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

Part of the episodes description for tonight’s finale read: “everything is food for something”. Ummm, what does that have to do with anything in the actual episode?

So apparently Lori’s making sure that Carl continues to learn. I’m torn between admiration based on my love of learning and shaking my head at Lori for wasting Carl’s time on something so immediately pointless.

“It was like I was playing Portal…it’s a video game…” “Of course it’s a video game.”

I don’t care what the truth is, I choose to see that Dutch angle of Rick with his gun as an homage to Nathan Fillion’s Malcolm Reynolds Firefly, and nobody can convince my otherwise.