Walking Dead: Isolation
Imagine being stuck in a prison with a bunch of sick people for an hour. That was how this week’s Walking Dead felt.
This plague/hemorrhagic fever going through the prison population is a terrible thing. Unfortunately it’s not a very exciting thing. For the most part this episode was a return to those flaccid days at the farm, when we’d get entire episodes of people standing around talking. There was a lot of talking this week. I’d love to go back and clock the screen time devoted to planning Daryl’s vet school mission compared to screen time spent on the actual mission. That was an exciting mission, which I’ll get to shortly, but bloody hell, they took their sweet time getting to it.
Things lead off with Tyrese mad about Karen and Dave being murdered. Understandable. He wants Sheriff Rick to find out who did it. Understandable. He wants it to happen NOW. He wants to fight and punch people because the investigation isn’t happening fast enough (a proven investigative technique). There’s a stupid and pointless fistfight. I suppose the point of it was that it was pointless. These people are stuck in close quarters with no real way to blow off steam.
A lot more people are sick now, so it’s time to quarantine the sick and sequester the young. Sasha (Ty’s sister) and Glen are among the ill. The dramatic stakes are raised! Hershel knows they need antibiotics, although if it really is ebola, they won’t help.
Still, it’s worth throwing the hail mary and sending Daryl off to a vet school in hopes that no one’s looted it for meds yet. Michonne is along, Ty eventually joins them, along with that doofy medic dude. They tear off in their dead buddy’s Charger, but not before changing the oil.
All the good, interesting stuff happens on this road trip. Daryl was going to pick a CD, and I was like, “Cool, I want to know what music Daryl is into.” Merle liked Motorhead, but Daryl likes to defy expectations. He’d still listen to something badass, but maybe some 80s straight-edge hardcore, or some NWA? This is interrupted, however, by a voice on the radio. I thought I picked out the words “survivors” and maybe “government.”
This is then interrupted by Daryl plowing into some walkers. He stops the car, causing me to yell, “Why would you stop the car?!” But a slow pan reveals the largest horde of walkers I think we’ve seen on the show thus far. Just a solid sea of zombies going back to the horizon. They close in behind the car, too, so slamming it into reverse only gets them high centered on a pile of corpses. So if you ever wondered what a V8 engine could do to a pile of corpses, now you know. Gore spray. They make a run for the woods, but Ty stays in the car, then hops out and goes down swinging a hammer, taking out walker after walker in a bloody last stand.
But no! He emerges from the trees plastered in zombie guts, barely able to lift his arms from the insane exertion. Epic.
Imagine, if you will, a Walking Dead in which the simpering people back at the prison all die of plague, every last one, leaving Daryl, Michonne and company the only survivors and main characters of the show. They’re on the road, starting from scratch with nothing but their wits and years of hard fought experience fighting walkers.
But no. Instead we get Carl lecturing Hershel, Hershel lecturing Rick, Beth lecturing Maggie and so on. The makeup effects on the mossy tree zombie were very, very cool. The bear trap zombie was a good touch too. Hershel goes into the sick ward to give everyone elderberry tea (go ahead, make your Holy Grail references). The other doctor guy coughs blood directly into Hersh’s face. “I fart in your general direction!”
The other storyline playing out is Rick investigating who killed Karen and Dave. I predicted last week that it was Carol, thank you very much. Right away I noticed how she was avoiding Tyrese. Rick: “We should pay our respects.” Carol: “Yeah, uh, I have to go somewhere and [mumble mumble].”
I know how I figured out that it was Carol, but I have no idea how Rick did. He went over to the murder scene and kicked some stones around, then saw a bloody handprint on the door frame and sort of vaguely measured it with his own hand. I guess during a commercial break he ran the DNA, checked the fingerprints against IAFIS, and traced the gasoline used to burn the bodies to a Sunoco in Harrisburg, PA, using Carol’s credit card records to tie her to the purchase. Or he just waved his hands and knew.
Of course we all knew before he did, since Ty asked Carol to watch over the sick people on account of how nice she is. She kind of freaked out and kicked the water bucket over and cried, which lead to a dumb solo mission to fix the water pump inlet. Later Rick asks her straight up if she was the killer. She just says, “Yes,” and walks away.
This sucks because if you’re going to start murdering people in the prison, why would you not start with Carl?
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Posted by Ed Grabianowski
on Sunday, October 27th, 2013. Filed under Dark TV, Headline.
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Tags: amc, isolation, walking dead
