Month: November 2011

I’m writing this now despite a fairly hiccupy internet connection, one that might decide to swallow my post and disappear it into the ether.

Not that much happened here today, beyond some rain in the evening and a presentation about or textbook sales force earlier in the day. Heady stuff, I know. I feel like I have more to say about Sunday’s mid-season finale of The Walking Dead — which I watched last night right before bed — than about my own day at work. I don’t know if that’s sad or not, but I guess I should be grateful that my day was lighter on zombies than it was on sales data.

But as to The Walking Dead… Bear in mind, right now, that this is going to include some enormous spoilers for Sunday’s episode and the series overall. It will also touch upon the comics, which I actually quit reading after the first twelve (to my mind disappointing) issues, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though not extensively. I actually don’t have that much to say about the episode, but I want to get all my cards on the table and keep each of you thoroughly spoiler-free if that’s how you’d prefer to stay.

So the episode. And oh my god. It all comes down to that final, heart-rending scene, to which the episode (and, in retrospect, the season) had been building all along. I don’t know where the series goes from here, exactly; that final gut-punch of zombie-Sophia stumbling from the barn and being shot down leaves the characters in even bleaker straits than last year, but I’m not sure that it excuses all the show’s very real problems with character and pacing. Zach Handlen, who does a good job analyzing the episode and dissecting its faults, is optimistic and thinks that final twist is not just a (hugely effective) shock but a sign the writers actually know what they’re doing. One thing I do know, unequivocally, is this: even if the show can’t resolve the things I often find frustrating about it, even if it relies too often on the comics as source material even when it’s made character decisions that contradict them or go in another direction, even if the second half of this season is just incredibly awful — even then, those final minutes of Sunday’s episode were incredible.

It’s funny, because to a point, I knew it was coming. I knew a confrontation would happen, and that the barn filled with zombies would play a key role in how it unfolded. It was obvious, and not just because I’d read the comics, where the zombie killing on the farm plays out very differently but also along very similar lines. I’ve watched television, and I’ve watched this show, and I know the conventions that both rely on to tell stories. And I even knew, right up until the end, that it was a probably a child that was going to stumble from that barn. Hershel, who’d been keeping the “walkers” in there, had said that his stepson was among the infected.

But I didn’t know it would be Sophia. Even when I saw her feet, and the size of her, I kept thinking, well, it’s Hershel’s little boy. And that’s the terrible choice they’re going to have to make here. That’s what will happen: Shane will almost certainly kill him, and it will be horrible, but that’s where this is headed. Taking Shane further along that dark path and furthering the divide between him and Rick. Not a terrible way to end the episode and mid-season, but also pretty conventional.

But the show blind-sided me, and I think others, distracting us with the ongoing search for Sophia. As Handlen says, “narrative fiction teaches us the longer someone stays missing, the better the chance they’ll turn up alive; otherwise, where would the drama be?” We were distracted, like with any good illusionist or storyteller, so that the show could pull this huge and devastating reveal.

It’s a little like the season 2 finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember watching that episode and thinking, as Buffy fought to save the world from Angel, there are only two ways this can play out: she’ll save him, at the very last minute, and it will be wonderful; or she’ll kill him, and it will be tragic but necessary. And then the show proceeded to do both. At the very last minute, Angel was saved, his soul restored, but it was too late, and Buffy had to kill him anyway — but now not as an evil vampire, but as the man she loved. I remember thinking, then and later, well goddamn. Here’s a show that used my knowledge of television, of the conventions of storytelling and season finales and the show itself — used all of that against me. It made me think I was smart because I’d figured out the two sides of the coin, the two options available. And then it revealed that what it had tossed in the air wasn’t really a coin at all. That’s the moment when I went from being a casual watcher to a die-hard fan, when the show I’d missed for most of its first two seasons became the show I worked out a deal with a friend to have mailed to me during its last two. (This was pre-Web 2.0, and I didn’t have UPN.)

And that’s what The Walking Dead did to me last night. It let me think I’d figured something out, and then it pulled the rug out from under me. And I kind of like that kind of television.