Road Kills

“Well, at least it was quick.”

Swiped from Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist's Facebook page.

On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s most famous book for whatever reason but I found The Dharma Bums more coherent and a better representation of what Kerouac was about. (As Truman Capote famously said of On the Road, which was written continuously on a long scroll of paper, “That’s not writing; that’s typing!”) 

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road works because the author’s odd, is-that-really-a-word? vocabulary enhances the Uncanny Valley unease of his post-apocalypse world. (Recall how this worked for the then-celebrated/now-forgotten 1980s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker.) The ending was aw-gedouttahere unbelievable but after so many pages of relentless misery, you’ll take it. 

Still, for all that goes down, The Road wasn’t nearly as brutal as McCarthy’s 1984 masterpiece Blood Meridian. Those who have read that one recognize it as the most horrific horror novel ever. That it isn’t in the Horror section of the book store makes sense when you read it. McCarthy’s monsters-in-human-form are far, far removed from the turbo-charged Halloween beasties of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, et al.

The Never-Ending Twilight of the Living Dead Simpsons

The many men, so beautiful! 
And they all dead did lie: 
And a thousand thousand slimy things 
Lived on; and so did I.

—S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part IV, Stanza 3

I knew I’d written about this ambulatory rotting corpse of a show sometime ago, so I looked it up and discovered I’d made a post in October 2013. Here we are again, already another half-decade later, with an meme more apt than ever:

Homer’s expression is so apropos. From the Unprofessional Madman Facebook page.

Thirty-one, 32 seasons. Thirty-one, 32 years. Three decades and change. 

Five U.S. presidential administrations, starting early in the term of recently deceased George H.W. Bush.

Baby Maggie would be in her early 30s now. Bart and Lisa would be securely middle-aged. Homer would be dead, either of occupational cancer or obesity-driven heart failure.

Why, oh why? How can this possibly go on? Like NBC’s The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, it’s as if someone forgot to pull the plug on these vegetables long after the EEG flatlined into brain death.

It gets worse. Consider that one generation ago (generations generally measured in 30 year increments), this show began as an act of brazen defiance and mockery of the phony Cosby Show pieties of the 1980s. One generation later, the character who ran the Quik-E Mart is being phased out in craven deference to the even phonier pieties of the current age — despite the fact that the character, funny accent aside, has always been a man of laudable integrity. With their knees bent and heads bowed to the screeching purple-haired Creeps of the New Church, soul and spine were exhausted from this show decades ago already. 

The irony is just a little too ironic here. 

Still The Simpsons persists, a shambling, living-dead parody of the living satiric glory it once was. In the end, all anyone will remember this once ground-breaking show for is as that sometimes-funny cartoon that went on forever and ever and no one knows why. 

Drive By Reviews: THE WITCH

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY/TL;DR: Apparently I alone among reviewers found Mark Korven’s soundtrack loud and annoying. Fortunately, a well-established sense of impending doom and fine acting by the cast salvage writer/director Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New England Folktale as a watchable film. If you enjoyed watching those three college students lose their minds over the course of The Blair Witch Project, you shouldn’t get too bored as the Thing in the Woods slowly exerts its cruelty on this exiled and isolated family in 1630 New England. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it was an extremely qualified enjoyment, hence the long review.

Robert Eggers’ The Witch reminded me a lot of The Blair Witch Project, which is an issue that should be dealt with immediately, as the latter film elicits strong feelings on either side. Although The Witch is a straightforward narrative showing the viewer many things the film’s characters do not see, as opposed to the found-footage pastiche of The Blair Witch Project, both films evoke a deliciously oppressive sense of isolation and dread. 

When the colonial New England family is banished from “the plantation” as it’s referred to at times throughout The Witch, we watch from the family’s point of view as they ride away. Settlers and even the Indians of the village regard them briefly and turn away to their business, and it’s right there that the viewer realizes the characters are riding away to a lonely execution. It’s the same feeling one has watching The Blair Witch Project’s trio of college students leave their car. You look at the car in that shot, and know that’s the last you, or the future human sacrifices entering the Dire Woods, are ever going to see of it. 

You can’t see the Evil for the trees. Good thing this will all be strip malls and fast food joints one day.

In both films there is an Unseen Evil in the Dire Woods that plays with its hapless victims before going in for the final kill. The difference between the films becomes more acute in the details, though. In The Blair Witch Project, you see and hear the reactions of the terrified students, but it’s difficult to make out the exact noises in the woods that are unnerving them. 

In The Witch, an infant disappears from a blanket in an instant in the course of a game of peek-a-boo with his angel-faced sister. It would be enough to drive anyone insane for the sheer unreality of it. Yet the frantic girl looks to the woods as if they indeed did make an infant vanish. A wolf ends up taking the blame, the 17th century New England equivalent of “a dingo ate the baby.” But the girl—and everyone else—comes to suspect dear Thomasin of something.

The director and cinematographer like this angel face so much it fills the screen in the film’s opening shot (this isn’t it), in case you don’t get later that she’s going to be a focal point.

The family set against one another is another dominating sub-trope of the fatal isolation of our victims that The Witch shares with The Blair Witch Project. In this movie, though, the director is not content to leave his audience wondering what is going on in those woods. 

Cue the loud and annoying “Are you scared yet?” music, and we’re seeing flashes of an infant wriggling naked by flickering firelight. The flat of a blade is pressed against his chest. We see the naked—sagging and unattractive, alas—buttocks of a woman thrusting suggestively in the dark, but given the blood that’s filling the container by her side, she’s into something as good as sex for her.

This scene bothered me, and for all the wrong reasons. Why did we need to see this? That the baby vanished within mere seconds in a game of peek-a-boo, far from the line of the woods or any animals, with no evidence of its abduction beyond the empty blanket, should have sufficed to inform the viewer that a supernatural agency is at work. As it is, we know the baby has met a sticky end, and this viewer, for one, was grateful the writer/director had enough restraint to spare us the poor child’s cry, let alone the sight of its dismemberment.

One would think they would blame Indians in the woods over a wolf for the abduction of the baby. However politically incorrect it is to ascribe any negative tendencies whatsoever to pet demographic groups, these things did happen—and if, indeed, as stated on a title card at the beginning of the film, that the very dialogue was taken from contemporary writings—writer/director Robert Eggers had to know this. 

As it happens, Indians do not exist to so much as hunt or travel through this blue-gray corner of New England in 1630. It might have added a more sinister note if someone had brought that up, e.g., “Is it not strange that even the savages avoid these accursed woods?” As the patriarch of a family exiled to the wilderness, I would be very interested in why this common 1600s problem isn’t a problem where I am. Is it the lack of game? So what is keeping the game out of these perfectly good woods?

Instead of asking existential questions about his infant brother’s chances of going to heaven since he died unbaptized, how about, “Father, of all the places we may have settled, why this patch of perpetual blue-gray gloom where nothing can possibly grow?”

This is a factor in the family’s rapidly deteriorating circumstances. A blight has taken their crop and they will not have food to last them the winter. A hunting trip turns up nothing but a revelation that the family patriarch has taken and sold one of his wife’s heirloom possessions for—I wasn’t quite sure. All we’re left with is that the father is morally compromised, and we’re under the impression this somehow has made him and his family vulnerable to some form of dark retribution.

For all that got so needlessly spelled out in the humping hag buttocks/knife on the baby scene, there’s much more that’s needlessly murky. The business with the silver cup the father sold is the one that’s most annoying, because the mother brings it up time and again, accusing her children of taking it. The father, to his credit, comes to their defense. (It’s a big plus in this film that the father is not an evil hardass as one might expect of religious family patriarchs.) There are other matters, however.

The murkiest for me was the time frame. How long was this family in this eternally blue-gray clearing outside of the woods before the evil in there decided to take an interest? We see the family tried and exiled at the beginning, then the next thing we see they not only have a house, but a barn, and corrals for livestock. How long did that all take to build? And where did they get livestock, when all they’d left with was the clothes on their backs? 

For that matter, what were they doing with an oversized billy goat named Black Phillip? I didn’t see any female goats he would be mated with. When did the goat start talking to the twins? There is a set of younger twins, a girl and a boy, who taunt Thomasin for being the witch who sacrificed their unbaptized brother. Black Phillip supposedly told them all about it. What on earth are they doing with this clearly Satanic creature?

The twins seem to know something is up, which alarms Thomasin, as she’s not sure. Meanwhile, the pubescent middle brother, Caleb, whom we’ve already caught making furtive glances at his angel-faced sister’s chest, is on some kind of quest to prove himself. Separated from Thomasin in the woods, he finds himself before a house where a seductive brunette comes out to meet him. You know once she starts kissing the innocent Caleb that an arm is going to come around, and it isn’t going to be an arm, but something more like a claw. (It is!)

Caleb returns home naked in the rain and...I don’t want to give away the whole movie. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed The Witch for precisely the same reason as The Blair Witch Project. It isn’t the supernatural element that provides the terror so much as isolation and the fragility of the human mind under stress. Some people find this process boring. For me, it’s the only thing that makes the movie watchable.

The CinemaSins YouTube channel covers everything that bothered me about the film, from the murky dialogue to the murky cinematography, to the fact that this family, for their own supernatural ability to get an entire compound erected in no time flat, haven’t gotten a handle on hunting and fishing. For those who have already seen The Witch, or those who don’t care about spoilers—I have the same issues with The Witch’s ending as the CinemaSins guy—this is a good, comprehensive watch.

“What happened in this barn? Why did the witch kill all the animals? How? What happened to the twins? How did I sleep through all of this? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS, and a sick feeling the writer doesn’t have a good answer for any of them. He’s just making it up as he goes along by this point.”

If you’re bored and like watching doomed people meet their ends, you’ll enjoy this. But this is one of those films that falls apart the more time you have to think about it. For all the rookie sloppiness of the story and its execution, The Witch is far from a classic. It is, however, a decent diversion.

Drive-By Review of Independence Day: Resurgence

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY/tl;dr: If you’re going into this movie stoked for a reprise of that exhilaration you felt the first time you watched the 1996 summer smash/cable TV staple, Independence Day, you’re in for a world of disappointment. Independence Day: Resurgence is entertaining enough as an alien invasion movie, but falls flat as a sequel due to sloppy storytelling that fails to remind us why we cared for the original characters, let alone the fate of all life on Earth during the current crisis.

It’s been so long since I’ve been in a theater to watch a movie I couldn’t tell you if it was the last Harry Potter movie, or the first Hunger Games. It’s been so long I’m past bragging about it like it means anything (insert usual sing-along complaint about rude theatergoers, etc.). Life has been so much less complicated since I abandoned caring about the movies, and modern pop culture as a whole, altogether. It’s pointless to complain about the endless remakes/regurgitations, and CGI superhero cartoons. It is what it is, and it won’t change until it does. I’m proud to say this is the first time in years I’ve bothered with the subject at all.

As it turns out, my wife and I are stuck in this hotel room until we can close on our house in Monte Vista. A small hotel room, with all four cats, and the litter box in the bathroom. Yesterday, she had to get out. We’ve had free tickets for Regal theaters that had been gathering dust in a desk cabinet since 2007. The time had come to put them to work.

At least agreeing on the film was easy enough. As the original Independence Day had been a favorite of our family since it first came out in 1996, we were curious about the sequel.

Yes, a family favorite. It’s one of those movies, when it comes on the TV, we end up watching it. Never mind that we have it on Blu-ray. Never mind that we’ve seen it countless times. Independence Day catches our attention, and keeps it. We laugh and cheer along when the good guys get one in, because the bad stuff has been making iconic disaster scenes one after another since the countdown Jeff Goldblum figured out hit T-minus zero. We’ve seen the White House go ka-blooie, we watched Air Force One race the deadly fireball, and we thrill to it just like we did the two dozen times before. 

Here’s the deal with good ol’ ID4, as the marketing boys branded the original Independence Day. A major lesson I took away from reading multi-genre masters of “pulp” literature like Robert E. Howard, Louis L’Amour, and Edgar Rice Burrroughs is that you can have the corniest setup, the most clichéd characters, the most obvious story direction—and you’ll keep reading, and love every cornball minute of it, so long as all the right narrative notes are hit, all the correct emotional triggers engaged. It’s not as easy as it seems, which is why we remember these pulp masters, and why people still read their decidedly non-literary work decades after their deaths. It requires OCD-level attention to detail among all the moving parts in the story, but it can be done.

This is exactly what happened with Roland Emmerich’s original Independence Day. We had different characters from different situations drawn into the crisis, and brought together for the final conflict. We had the U.S. Marine Corps pilot who wants to be an astronaut, but might not be selected because he’s in a relationship with a stripper. We care about the stripper because she’s a single mother and has aspirations to better herself (and proves herself heroic in the evacuation, rescuing even the First Lady of the United States from the wreckage of her helicopter). That’s a couple of examples. I could go on, but the point is, the sequel can’t even do these simple things, all of which can be set up with a few lines of dialogue.

I look at this photo from ID4, and realize I can’t
connect the little boy in the photo to the grown man
representing the same character in Resurgence.
Not even a little bit.

We can’t even decide on who the hotshot pilot who saves the world will be in Resurgence. Is it Will Smith’s grown stepson from the first movie? (Smith’s character is conveniently killed off in a non-alien-related plane crash before the story begins.) He’s haunted somewhat by the sight of his mother falling to her death as the aliens begin their next offensive. Somewhat. It really has nothing to do with anything, except for Vivica A. Fox reprising her role as stripper who miraculously becomes head something-or-other at a hospital, only to plunge to her death with a collapsing building shortly after loading a new mother and her baby into a helicopter. It’s mentioned a couple of times later how badly the guy feels about it. I felt nothing. I don’t even remember Will Smith’s character’s stepson’s name.

There’s another hotshot pilot played by Liam Hemsworth, and he’s got that Loveable Rogue thing going on. Are you our hero? He screwed up his career by nearly getting Will Smith’s character’s stepson killed in some flying maneuver gone wrong. Or something. It’s never quite clear. It just kinda happened, but Will Smith’s character’s stepson is still angry about it, and a Chinese general hates him for the same reason, because, well, you’re not a rogue if you don’t have haters. Or something. It’s something that apparently calls out for redemption, and there is, of sorts, but like everything else in this movie, there is no emotional traction whatsoever. You’re not rooting for anyone like we all were rooting for wisecracking, cigar-smoking Will Smith in 1996.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Will Smith’s character’s stepson supposedly leads an entire elite squad of the Bestest Fighter Pilots in the Solar System. I’d call them The Flying United Colors of Bennington but only people who remember the ads from the mid-1980s to 1990 will get the joke. So the joke fails, and our young, whey-faced pilots aren’t much good for anything, either.

“I’m aghast! All this potential greatness, wasted!”

Not even Jeff Goldblum saves this. He’s supposedly an expert on alien stuff who gets to do whatever he wants, having created the computer virus that saved the world in the first movie. He flits around a bit and flusters bureaucratic types who expect him to be somewhere else, doing something else, but for most of the movie he looks either aghast or baffled. He’s not very Jeff Goldblummy, really, which means Independence Day: Resurgence, is no Independence Day. Along with Will Smith, he was a large part of the heart of that first movie.

A great scene among the many great scenes in the original ID4. You’ll see nothing like this in Resurgence.

Judd Hirsch, who played Jeff Goldblum’s dad, is no more than buffoonish comic relief with a heart of gold in Resurgence. In the first movie, he was Jeff Goldblum’s conscience who inspired him to snap out of his middle-aged divorced guy funk to help save the world. He even led a religious service for those not actively engaged in battle, which was a nice touch in a film in which it seemed Earth might very well lose. Here, he's a hustler who wrote a book called something like How I Saved the Earth, capitalizing on his role in the first crisis, and not doing very well at it.

I could go all day with this, character by wasted character. Bill Pullman’s PTSD-wracked former President Whitmore is especially disappointing. Pullman’s character was hurt, but was by no means emotionally shattered in the first movie, despite losing his wife and most of the country he was president of in ID4. He has no reason to be broken in Resurgence, yet he’s a figure hovering helplessly, impotently between reverence and pity here. He even has a limp that requires the use of a cane. Why? Was there a rock in his boot while he flew the fighter jet in the first movie?

All of this brokenness requires redemption, naturally, which he sorta kinda gets. His Great Sacrifice™ should be more exciting than it is. It isn’t.

Brent Spiner’s character has no reason to be alive at all, given that the room he was in was shot full of holes by the president’s detail in the first movie. But he jumps up from bed looking no worse from wear after TWENTY YEARS IN A COMA once the aliens come back on the scene.

Spiner’s character probably has more to do than anyone when it comes to actually affecting the plot, which, curiously, says it all for this appallingly weak sequel. Even getting past his being alive and unusually spry and fit for someone who has been on their back wasting away for twenty years, Spiner’s Lead Science Guy at Area 51 was a somewhat annoying character out of touch with the horror wreaked around the world by the alien tech he was so enamored of. (Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore memorably checks him on this in the original ID4.) In Resurgence, he’s simply annoying.

It’s not Los Angeles. Also, the bad stuff is on account of what’s coming from the sky, not from unstable and collapsing earth. I had to remind myself of this. Loveable Rogue’s flight through the debris that should have knocked him out of the sky was too reminiscent of John Cusack in the small plane in Emmerich’s 2012.

Which is the best segue I’ve got to the horror that’s supposedly going on around the world now that the aliens are back. That is to say, there isn’t any. The writers and the director don’t bother to build any tension with the aliens return to Earth. The movie opens with what appears to be an alien tactical display, showing President Whitmore’s head shot on a convex display making his big speech before the final battle in the first movie. And it turns out Whitmore is awaking from a nightmare. That’s how we know the aliens are coming back.

This artless beginning starts us off baffled for whatever happened to President Whitmore. We get a few quick lines about how Earth’s nations united—a detail that is unfortunately, albeit amusingly timed, given the real-world UK’s vote to leave the European Union the same week Resurgence was released to theaters—and how Earth adapted the technology to defend against possible future attacks. Hooray for us.

So we’re ready. No conflicts here. Then the aliens come, and knock all our extraterrestrial defenses out, from Saturn to the moon. Just like that. No slow burn, no build, nothing. They show up, they blow stuff up, and whatcha gonna do?

A better narrative might have involved tension between war hawks who insist on vigilance against those who say, look, it’s been twenty years, can we please focus on other issues? This could have been done fairly with both sides (suffering survivors would certainly be an issue), but instead the Earth is overwhelmed, and it’s game on. Much has been made in some corners about how actress Sela Ward presented such a fine example of presidential decisiveness, when her decision stupidly takes out a friendly alien emissary who clearly isn’t one of the bad aliens.

Incidentally, when everything goes sideways and Earth’s heroes go to ground, the presidential party holes up in Cheyenne Mountain, right here in my adoptive home town of Colorado Springs. The aliens arrive, and presumably kill everyone there. I don’t get to see this. Neither do you. Sela Ward is standing there looking all presidential as the big doors open and aliens in mech suits fill the space. That’s it.

In ID4, you see the giant, miles-wide alien troop ships filling the skies over all the major cities. We see these cities destroyed, or at least their aftermath. In Resurgence, it’s one great big 3,000-mile wide mothership that covers the entire Atlantic Ocean. This strains credulity even for the most casual sci-fi action fan. The mass of such a thing would affect Earth’s orbit. Such a thing entering the atmosphere would burn off the atmosphere from friction alone. The blocking of sunlight across such a broad swathe of the planet would be another set of problems.

And if you can build a ship the size of a continent, why do you need anything, let alone Earth’s molten core? There are so many other molten-core planets across the galaxy. Why bother coming all the way to the inner solar system of this out-of-the-way star?

Put all that aside, save for the bit about the molten core, and we’ve still got issues. For one, we feel no suspense whatsoever regarding the aliens reaching the molten core. That’s the crux of everything, and there is no tension.

The alien queen comes out to play for the final conflict, and she’s just ridiculous. By herself, she doesn’t pose the threat of total annihilation that a simple ID4 mothership and its fighter ships did in the first movie. We have ONE schoolbus full of children threatened by this ridiculously huge Queen Monster That Wants to Kill Us All. But that just figures when we see all of one city, London, destroyed. Goldblum’s character makes what should be a funny remark about how the aliens always go for the landmarks, but, technically, those were all destroyed along with every other major city in the first movie.

For a sequel that should have been bigger and better and so obviously twenty years removed from poor, primitive 1996, it half-assed everything. There are no characters we care about. There is no sense of worldwide scope. There is no tension. We were watching this in 3D, and even that wasn’t so impressive.

Well, what did I expect? Resurgence wasn’t a sequel so much as another lame “re-imagining” of something that worked two decades ago. Cue that old sing-along complaint.

Except at least everyone in the theater was courteous. All ten or twelve of them. So that was something.

Thirsting and Trudging Towards the Next Narrative Arc: THE WALKING DEAD, Season 5, Episode 10, “Them”

Original airdate 15 February 2015.

Third of a series in which I review episodes of The Walking Dead in no particular order. WARNING: SPOILERS OUT THE YING-YANG, because, seriously, I’m among the last people in the solar system who has just started watching this. If you’re way-behind weird like me, give this post a pass.

Remember in my post about the previous episode how I thought we were going to get on with the next story arc? Thank God no one reads this blog, because this episode made a liar out of me.

“Mopin’, mopin’ mopin’/Like they gave up hopin’
Even Daryl’s mopin’/RAWHIIIIIDE!”

I’d thought the group had done enough “processing” of their grief over their bad decisions and the resultant fatalities. No, we have to dedicate an entire episode to Daryl moping over Beth, Sasha fuming over losing her brother Bob, Abraham sulking over dedicating the better part of his apocalypse to deception, etc. It wasn’t quite the festival of melodramatic soap opera bitchiness that caused me to change the channel in the middle of a second season episode at Herschel’s farm, but it came close. 

All this was done in the course of the group trudging slowly along down the same woodsy Georgia piedmont road we’ve seen for five seasons that we’re supposed to take for somewhere in northern Virginia now. We have a striking visual of dead frogs belly-up on a dry creekbed. We see Daryl digging in the dirt and pulling up a big ol’ earthworm and eating it. All this, and everyone is moping over their past decisions, whether they should have zagged when they zigged, and, God help us, “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

“I dunno, I could swear we’ve been on this road before.” To be fair, every planet in the Stargate universe—even in the Pegasus galaxy—looked like the hilly, misty woods of coastal British Columbia. Ten, 12 years of this, and no one ever said anything. I might as well shut up.

As they trudge, trudge, trudge along, the undead gather behind them. They attract more and more as they go. Rick and the crew realize they’re going to have to make a stand before the numbers become more than they can handle. Sasha goes off the plan and endangers everyone. They dispatch the mob, though, and resume trudging.

A pack of feral dogs attack. I find this interesting, as one does not see many dogs and cats in zombie apocalypses. (A friend of mine wrote the lone exception I know to this.) Admittedly, I have no idea how to address that in my own zombie books, but it stands to reason that feral dog attacks would be high on the list of things to defend against while out in the open. Here, it just serves to make sure everyone gets something to eat.

So what does infant Judith eat? Aside from practically glowing with serene cleanliness among the grime-streaked survivors, she doesn’t complain much for someone who isn’t ready for solid food, let alone starvation conditions.

I’ll be happy she doesn’t complain, however discordant her presence is in the series. (In the comics, she died from the same bullet that tore through her mother when the Governor made his final attack on the prison.) Never mind how they deal with the issue of diapers and wet-wipes. Is that what Abraham’s carrying in that bag? You need a big bag when you’re traveling with infants. Trudging right along....

Our intrepid heroes come upon a cache of water in plastic jugs in the middle of the road, with a note indicating that they were left there by a “friend.” Uh-oh. Despite their thirst, they resist the urge to drink it. Fortunately, a thunderstorm breaks. Everyone is happy for that free, untainted water from the sky. Then the thunderstorm starts getting severe. They take shelter in a barn Daryl was moping at a few scenes back. 

There’s more talky-talky as they settle in, and Rick makes his grand pronouncement, “WE are the Walking Dead!” It’s far less cheesy than it was in the full-page splash in the comics, but cheesy nonetheless. 

Then someone looks out and notices a bunch of zombies want into the barn out of the storm. After a splendid visual of electric blue undead revealed in a flash of lightning (what’s a whole parking lot full of dead people doing all the way out here the sticks?), we cut, and it’s morning. Apparently a handy little tornado blew through and skewered the dead on various tree limbs while leaving the flimsy barn standing. What the heck. Another great visual. 

Seriously, I can forgive a lot for a great visual. For all my complaining, if there is one thing about this show that’s done exceptionally well, it’s how they film this thing. The photographers, cinematographers, and sound people totally own it. Big-budget, high-end feature films wish they had crews like the one on The Walking Dead. 

A couple of the women from the group go out in the morning to enjoy this tableau and a finely photographed sunrise. I forget which two women, as it’s been weeks since I’ve watched this (I’ve been busy writing my own stuff), but the main thing is we finally meet our true catalyst for the next storyline, a supernaturally clean young man named Aaron.

At last, a development!

SEASON-WIDE SPOILERS: It’s my understanding that the crew goes to the community of Alexandria (not to be confused with the Washington, D.C. exurb, I trust) where Rick will get lethal over someone named Porchdick and make the original Alexandria residents question the wisdom of accommodating Rick’s crew in the first place. The narrative will touch on the old trope of how Prolonged Exposure to Crazy Makes You Crazy Too. In the season finale we’ll meet the Wolves, the nasties who attacked and destroyed Noah’s mystery subdivision neighborhood in the middle of the woods.

This will lead us to Negan; I’m guessing he’ll at least be hinted at in next season’s finale. The most interesting thing about Negan is that Robert Kirkman does a narrative leap after the resolution of that long-ass storyline, setting everything a year into the future. I’ve read those comics. I don’t see that working. Ideally, the TV series should end with the completion of the Negan storyline, which will put the series well past the 100-episode mark for syndication, and the show will go out on a high note.

We all know that’s not going to happen. For my sake, I hope they don’t take the rest of the zombie craze down with them when they burn it out. I have my own personal stake in this, after all. I should probably catch up on the rest of the season before the spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, begins on 16 August. We’ll see.

Thoughts I Should Probably Keep to Myself Regarding the Season 5 Mid-Season Premiere of THE WALKING DEAD

Season 5, Episode 9, “What Happened and What’s Going On.” Original airdate 8 February 2015.

Second of a series in which I review episodes of The Walking Dead in no particular order. WARNING: SPOILERS because, seriously, I’m among the last people in the solar system who has just started watching this latest season on a bootleg channel online. If you’re weird like me, give this post a pass.

First, before I tear this episode a new one—starting with its weak title, which vaguely betrays the shallow purpose of the episode—I want to make clear that I understand. I’m a Star Trek fan. I know full well what it’s like to love something so grossly flawed. I’m not judging you, the fan.

This show, on the other hand....

“What did I just watch?”

No kidding, I felt for you poor people, having endured a long trek across the TV desert of November into February, only to get this. With the predominant image of the November finale being Daryl carrying Beth’s lifeless body out of the hospital—leaving the Grady Memorial Slave Labor and Rape Camp to carry on (recall that Rick told Cannibal King Gareth he couldn’t let him go because he knew he’d victimize others)—we were set for a new storyline. What fresh hells await?

So, here we are at last. The February mid-season premiere. Our first image is of a shovel blade slowly chewing into the earth. Are we burying Beth?

We catch a view of Gabriel leading a prayer at a funeral service in a field off the road somewhere. The images take on a yellowy tone, and the screen flares yellow between images. Whoa, what’s happening? Are we tripping?

Random shots of stuff, thangs, flash before our eyes. A photograph of two boys sitting together. A framed picture of a house, with chocolate syrup—no, wait, that’s blood—eeek!—dripping and pooling on the glass. The camera not only lingers on this shot more than most, the director makes sure we see it several times throughout the piece, excuse me, episode. Drip, drip, dribble. Pool. Flash yellow, and repeat.

As teasers go I was relieved when the theme music started up. I’m not crazy about amateur art film episodes on anyone’s TV series. All the artsy-fartsiness did was cover for the fact that only two things happened in this episode: first, the whole gang packed up and made a 10 to 12-hour drive from north Georgia to northeast Virginia, because that’s what Beth would have done for Noah if she hadn’t gotten her brains blown out. Makes sense. Assuming we’re all shell-shocked and game for rash changes in venue.

How’s this for some clever mise en scene?

After the opening titles and rousing theme music, we finally get to some straightforward narrative. Gabriel’s church is compromised and there’s not much else to do, but Noah, the young man from the Grady Memorial Slave Labor and Rape Camp, has family in a community “outside of Richmond,” Virginia, and he’s pretty sure it would be as safe as anything in this zombie apocalypse. Dear departed Beth was going to help him get there, and the normally hard-headed and pragmatic Rick says, well, if that’s what Beth would have done, we’ll do it, by way of honoring her memory.

The second thing we’re doing in this episode is getting rid of the excess black guy by way of setting ourselves up for this half-season’s story arc. It’s been a running joke since the death of T-Dog that there can only be one black adult male at one time in our plucky group of survivors. You’d think the show’s writers might be a little more circumspect about this, but once Noah came on board with the group, Tyreese’s days were numbered. Indeed, he had only one episode left to live.

(For those about to chime in with “What about Father Gabriel?” I say, what about him? He’s not a man. He’s a coward and a weasel. He doesn’t count.)

As it happens, Tyreese had to be killed. He was that kind of annoying character good for awkward moments of “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” with characters who would clearly prefer to grieve in peace. As someone who has buried a few people in his life (live long enough, and it will happen), I can testify, these people are among the world’s worst.

Tyreese was already number one on my must-die list for his weak (but oh-so virtuous) capture-and-exchange plan that ended with the Queen Psychobitch of the Grady Memorial Slave Labor and Rape Camp changing the deal’s terms in the middle of the prisoner exchange and getting Beth killed. The scene at the hospital was an abomination, full stop. If Rick’s plan of slitting throats and absconding into the night with Beth was followed, Beth would be alive, and good riddance to the bad rubbish at Grady Memorial. 

But, no. Moving on....

Through the magic of television, our plucky heroes defy time and space by making a 10-12 hour drive in one 30-second montage of blurry state highway signs, and five more endless minutes of heart-to-heart, how-do-you-endure-all-this? between Tyreese and Noah. They come upon Noah’s community at what looks like early afternoon, among woods that look and sound still very much like north Georgia.

Was I the only person who noticed the absurdity of the community’s location, well away from any gas stations or 7-Elevens or supermarkets, or even other housing developments? If this was a compound belonging to a wealthy family, that would make sense, but these are low to mid-grade homes surrounded by a fence in the middle of the woods. 

Even so, it was compromised. No one shoots at Rick’s crew as they approach because there’s no one left. Some of the houses show signs of being torched. There was a struggle here. Fort Suburbia went down.

Noah has to run to see what’s left of his family, and Tyreese gives chase. At this point the student art film finds its title: Tyreese, You Dumbass.

For, naturally, we know that Noah’s family is dead. Mom’s rotting away on the floor. There’s a walker in one of the bedrooms, making the usual wheeze-snarl noises, presumably one of Noah’s siblings. We see the shadow of his feet beneath the door.

Tyreese, quite smartly, sweeps the house with his pistol while keeping Noah back. Okay, so everyone is dead or the next best thing. He sees the feet beneath the door. Hold that thought.

So what else is there to do now but do a little moaning over dead mama, while Tyreese looks wistfully at the photos of young boys sitting together in the back bedroom? While the thing behind the door somehow manages to slip quietly out of its prison, sneak up behind Tyreese, and bite a chunk out from his arm.

Oh, but we knew what was going down the second we saw those shadows beneath the door, didn’t we? We knew we wouldn’t hear the doorknob turn, the feet shuffling across the floor, or the usual wheeze-snarl characteristic of the reanimated dead in this series.

Noah comes in, and without so much as an, “Oh dear, my brother is a flesh-eating monster,” manages to put the creature who looks like his brother down with a plastic model jet plane through the eye. He then helps Tyreese settle against the wall before running out to fetch a more responsible adult.

It’s a wound on the arm, and certainly shouldn’t keep Tyreese off his feet, but we have an art movie to finish here. Enter tonight’s musical entertainment, Beth and the Hallucinations:

The ancient trope of Arguing With Hallucinated Dead People as I Lay Dying was nicely arranged, though. I enjoyed hearing Emily Kinney as Hallucinated Dead Beth singing, as the two dead girls smiled creepily into the camera. “It’s better this way,” says one of the girls. She means “dead.” Of course.

Hallucinated Dead Governor does some neener-neener on Tyreese about some stuff I didn’t follow, causing me to wonder what idiocies Tyreese let happen in the name of We’re Better Than These People, Let’s Do the Dumb Thing Instead during Season 3. I was more familiar with Hallucinated Dead Martin, and I had to agree, a world of misery could have been averted if Tyreese had snuffed his wannabe baby-killing ass when he had the chance. Oh, Tyreese. You dumbass. 

Because we’re really desperate to fill time in this episode, another deader wanders in undetected during the hallucination, causing Tyreese to break from his pity party long enough to use his already damaged arm as a distraction while he grabs something with his free hand to dispatch the ghoul. 

This was the most badass thing I’ve seen Tyreese do, so he gets points for that. 

Rick finally shows up, but it’s too late to amputate Tyreese’s arm. It’s just a matter of time waiting for him to die. Which he does. 

In a moment of crazy candor, Rick admits he knew there would be nothing up here. Why should there be? But they’re closer to Washington, DC, now, where they were heading anyway when people still believed Eugene’s line about a cure for the zombie sickness. Surely, among the millions of dead in that metropolitan area, there are people who know what’s what. 

So off we go to the next story arc, but not before we take out a few more walkers who have gathered at the front gate. They are dispatched with slow-motion, cinematic aplomb.

Which, I’ll note, is one of the strengths of The Walking Dead TV show. The cinematography and sound are high-end, feature-film grade. The writers may be pulling it out their asses, but these crews know their stuff.

Before I shut this big mess of tl;dr down, I have to note the most exasperating aspect of this episode for me, namely, what happened to Noah’s old neighborhood. Based on what I saw, it was quite clearly attacked by living people with live ordnance, who blew a large hole in the back fence and set random houses on fire as they went through looting the place. Yet no one addresses this; it’s as if everyone assumes the community was simply overrun by walkers. 

Was it hit by Negan and the Saviors? Most likely, it’ll be swept under the rug. We’ve got another story arc to get into. We’ll come to that merry band soon enough. Next season, anyway. We’ve got the rest of this half of Season 5 to get through first.