Last Sunday brought back a large tradition in my house,
the gathering of my family to watch The
Walking Dead. It returned after its mid-season finale to a somewhat more
introspective look at two of our regular zombie slayers, Michonne and Carl.
Before I get into their personal struggles, I just have
to stop and say whoever created Hershel’s zombie head, I want one. That’s right we get to see bitey head of Hershel
still moving… Gross! Thankfully Michonne
finds it and put’s him to rest while taking the time to make herself two new
pack mules. Now back to our defining
characters of the episode…
I’m going to come out and say it, I’m not Carl’s biggest
fan but, I’m also not on the kill Carl bus either. This week, however had mixed reviews from our
home audience. Me personally, I think
that this episode solidified that Carl’s depiction of the innocence of child
hood on this show is officially shattered and he has become a sociopath born of
a hostile environment. My father insists
he’s just an unpredictable, whinny, dumbass.
I do think that Carl makes bad decisions, like this weeks over use of
bullets and trying to lure walkers away out in the open without a thought that
there may be more outside. However, let’s
take a moment to look at where he is coming from shall we?
Carl opened the show four seasons ago thinking his father
had died and began forming a bond with Shane when Rick comes rushing back into
his life. He has to watch as his mother
is conflicted between Rick and Shane, and then watch as the two men deal with
their own feelings for Lori. Just when
there seems to be some normality in a small camp they are attacked and end up
fleeing for the road where he sees the only other person his age, Carol’s
daughter, be attacked by zombies. After
the road the he is shot while hunting a deer in the woods with his father. At the farm he fails to kill a tied walker
that kills Dale, he sees his best friend has become a walker, half of the
people in his life are ripped apart and he watches his father kill Shane. At the prison he has to watch someone rip his
sister out of his mother and then is forced to shoot his mother in the
head. While Rick has his melt down Carl
is responsible for his baby sister and has everything around him seem to come
tumbling on his shoulders. Not to
mention killing his first human. Now
everyone he knows has basically died in front of him while trusting in his father,
his father is on deaths door and from what we can tell his sister has been
eaten. Yea, I’d say right about now he’s
earned the right to blow off a few of those teenaged hormones… You know if it
weren’t for the fact that he has to deal with the zombie appocolyps.
Carl also isn’t making things easier as he brings his
anger with Rick to a boil but, through that anger Rick realizes that things are
never going to go back to normal and despite what they come across, the life
any of them had known is just a long ago memory. At this point, Rick should have had a V8. Sorry but he has this realization every
season.
Rick slips into a coma this week leaving Carl to explore
the idea of being on his own. At first,
it doesn’t seem to bother him, he even has time to lure out a few walkers
before a third joins and then he realizes the true danger of being on his
own. You would think being on the bottom
of a dead walker dog pile would be enough for this kid… Of course not, he
decides to go tromping into a house making as much noise as possible. Why he decides to clear the house after
raiding it, I have no idea but what he finds is one angry fucker. In an intense battle where he finds out just
how useless a gun can really be, he loses his shoe but gets to keep his life
and the 112 oz of pudding. I would not
want to be his internal organs trying to process that.
It isn’t until he is back with Rick’s sleeping body that
his true feelings come out. Rick begins
to wake and, just like the rest of us after waking from a long sleep, he is
being very walker-esque. Here we have
Carl’s mini melt down as he tells him that he cannot kill him, that he is
scared to be alone. Lucky for Carl’s
crying ass, Rick is very much alive and doing much better.
Now I said this was also an episode for Michonne, and I
must say I’m glad that they did it this way.
This warrior needed some humanity.
Don’t misunderstand me she is definitely a draft pick for your survival
team but, it isn’t until now that we see her as she truly is, a woman, a lover,
and what she used to be, a mother. This
hit home. I couldn’t imagine being able
to breathe without my son anymore, and to have the grim fate they elude to in
her dream, I could not go on living.
Michonne’s past is pieced through for the audience in a
dream sequence that reads as a flash back that starts in a gentler time. Slowly the story unfolds to the identity of
her first to “pets” Mike and Terri, and that she had a toddler at one
point. In the dream the world around her
starts to crumble and she wakes in a car where she had been sleeping. Now being awake physically, I do not think
she had woken mentally or emotionally yet.
As she tracks what she believes to be Rick and Carl she seems to be
braking into a walker herself. It isn’t
until she sees a walker that looks frighteningly similar that she comes to the
idea that she is still here, no matter what has happened, she is still alive.
Her moment of weakness hits in the hollowed out shell of
a bar that Rick and Carl had cleared when she cries out to her dead lover Mike
and announces that she is still here and she is going to be here. After that it’s a walker blood bath as she single
handedly clears the town in slices of katana fueled furry!
The three finally find each other as Rick wraps up his
heart to heart with Carl, I think I’m going to start calling this trio the new apocalypse
family.
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