Is anyone else hungry for chocolate pudding?
Turns out there were TWO television programs featuring the antics of the shambling undead last night. One was The Walking Dead midseason premiere and the other was The Beatles 50th Anniversary Special. BA DA TISH CharacterGrades!™
So if you watched The Walking Dead, were you looking for another high octane, fence crushing, old man decapitating, baby killing thrill ride? Then I hope you kept last fall's midseason finale on your DVR, because AMC spent all their money makin' that tank blow up.
Instead, The Walking Dead is back to the quiet, morose groove it likes to settle into between the big loud tentpole season premieres and finales. But don't worry, this isn't Season 2 anymore. We don't have to watch Rick sip tall glasses of cool lemonade. It seems like The Walking Dead has finally learned how to be balance scares and introspective drama, even if they clearly do the scares better. Yay! After four years this TV show has learned what it means to be a TV show!
Rick
You can't blame the guy for pulling a Rick Van Winkle, with Carl acting like such a little shit. After useless yelling and throwing cereal around, Rick wakes up from his exhaustion induced temporary brain death and tells Carl what he needed to hear - that he's a man. It's a genuinely touching moment, because it must be hard for a dad to admit that his son is a man. Then Rick tells Carl about the birds and the bees, and when a boy zombie loves a girl zombie very much, he rips out her ovaries and eats them.
Carl
Warning, Walking Dead fans. For better or for worse this was THE CARL EPISODE. We all knew it had to come someday. For those of you who despise Carl's occasionally whiny bitch ass, maybe you should have watched ice dancing instead.
The closest thing Carl had to a home is destroyed. He's separated from all his friends. His baby sister has probably been eaten. And his dad is a washed up mess. And on top of everything, his hormones are finally kicking in! Whoa! Armpit hair!
So Carl is dealing with his problems by stomping around and cursing like a redneck Jonas Brother gone wrong. By the time Rick settles down for a long winter's nap, Carl is kind of a badass. He kills a few zombies, eats some pudding. Seriously. He eats a huge can of pudding on a roof, not giving a shit about the zombie locked up behind him. For one brief moment, he's king of the world. All you need in life is 132 ounces of pudding. It was maybe the best moment in Walking Dead history.
Less memorable was his incredibly awkward monologue to Coma Rick about how he doesn't need his dad anymore. This, along with Michonne's equally awkward prayer monologue to her dead boyfriend, were not acting travesties on an Andrea scale, but I couldn't help thinking it was like an audition monologue for acting students. Having a character alone in a room talking out loud just isn't that dramatically interesting.
By the time Carl has a gun pointed at his sleepy dad, The Walking Dead had captivated me. Carl's refusal to kill his own father, who he thought was a zombie, and his suicidal shrugging and giving up added a new dimension to Whiny Carl. The subsequent turnaround and big talk with his pops was just maybe the end of Whiny Carl.
Here's hoping Whiny Carl is dead and he's been replaced by Manly Carl. Manly Carl smokes cigs and drives drunk and makes Michonne do all the cooking, because that's what real men do!
Michonne
After finding footprints in the mud, Michonne decides to go in the opposite direction and ends up hanging out with a herd of zombies. She's got a new pair of pet zombies with her, and without teeth or claws zombies are surprisingly docile which makes sense if either a) you are drunk or b) you think about it for less than 12 seconds. QUICK THE 12 SECONDS ARE ALMOST UP, NEXT PARAGRAPH, NEXT PARAGRAPH!
Michonne has a dream of her past life, featuring cameos of her two old zombie pets (that she had to decapitate in Season 3) in their human form. This is, if I'm not mistaken, the first honest to god dream sequence The Walking Dead has ever tried for and I have to say I didn't mind it. I especially liked the absurd image of Michonne putting her ninja sword into the knife block like a normal ninja housewife. I was half expecting a backwards talking midget to start dancing but instead my heart got squeezed into a mushy blood puree when an adorable human child came running out and jumped into Michonne's arms.
Yep. Michonne used to be a mom, which makes everything about her just a little more heartbreaking. After the dream, she starts to see herself in a doppelganger zombie and eventually loses it. She slashes open her zombie self's face and the rest of the zombies surrounding her wise up to her humanity and she kills every single one of them. It's a really well done sequence that shows how taxing of a chore killing zombies really is and shows how easily Michonne can go on mass-murdering autopilot. Definitely my favorite scene of the night.
"After"
Extra Credit
- Nothing turns a boy into a man like 112 ounces of pudding.
- The opening shot of this episode is a nifty callback to the closing shot of the pilot. Zooming in a tank surrounded by zombies from high above. Finding Herschel's undead head was surprisingly sad. Was it chomping for flesh or trying to quote the Bible? We'll never know.
- This episode is probably the closest The Walking Dead has ever come to directly lifting a single issue of the comics and making it an episode. It's Issue 50 and almost everything Carl does, word for word, shot for shot comes directly from the comic. This season, material from the comic has proven to be much stronger than the material the TV writers made up on their own.
- Carl finds a note "Please do what we couldn't!" from a son about a father. THEMES?
Demerits
- Carl is not a great actor. Hey AMC, can we maybe put one less extra in zombie make up and spend that money on an acting coach?
- How many empty houses are we gonna watch people ransack on this show? And who's trimming the lawns?
- Although I do appreciate this episode's focus on just the three main characters, it would have been nice to check in on Carol, Tyreese, or Daryl. None of the other characters though.
Zombie Kill of the Week
AddThis: