Walking Dead: Inmates
Walking Dead messes with nonlinear time and reveals snippets of what happened to the survivors of the prison battle. Sadly, most of these small stories are pretty dull.
We start with Beth and Daryl escaping the walker-infested prison as Beth from the past narrates. The narration is actually her writing in her diary after the group found the prison. Her words are full of hope for their future living in the safety of the prison, obviously juxtaposed against the complete disaster that turned out to be.
Hearing from past Beth while present Beth flees through the woods foreshadows a running theme this week. Each sub-group of survivors is shown separately, and the events they experience aren’t shown in chronological order. We jump back through time, then forward, then back even farther.
Team Beth and Daryl are tracking their friends in the woods, Daryl is making good Survival rolls (he’s obviously a level 12 Ranger, in D&D terms) to note how many walkers have been around and whether blood on a plant is human or walker. A zombie magically sneaks up on them for a b.s. action scene. They find a group of corpses being fed on near some train tracks. Beth cries.
Tyreese got stuck with the kids, Lizzie and some other girl, plus baby Judith. I guess Judith is alive. I literally had to mute my TV because they just had the sound of a baby crying for 10 minutes. Yes, that sucks when you’re trying to be quiet and avoid zombies. It brings to mind the famous thought experiment (is it morally acceptable to kill a crying baby if the noise will summon attackers who will kill the entire group?). But mostly it brings to mind how annoying crying babies are and how Tyreese really got the worst of this whole deal. Also Lizzie is creepy.
Tyreese finds a group of survivors being attacked by some train tracks, and we recognize one as the sneaky zombie that almost got Beth earlier, so we realize we’ve gone back in time and that this fight isn’t going to go all that well. Carol appears out of nowhere to save the girls, and to save Judith from being smothered by Lizzie. Remember that thought experiment? It tests moral ambiguity. Lizzie doesn’t have any of that.
There’s a sign directing everyone to a town or camp or something called Terminus (which isn’t ominous at all). It says everyone is welcome, come to Terminus and you’ll be safe. It’s so obviously a trap, right? I mean, I guess you go there anyway because what else have you got going on these days, other than long walks through the zombie-ridden woods?
Sasha is with a morose Maggie and Bob, who keeps grinning at…things. Maggie inexplicably looks really hot, and insists on searching for Glenn, thinking he’s still on the prison bus. They find the bus full of walkers, so they kill them one by one to see if any are Glenn-shaped. Then Maggie finds one more on the bus, and it has dark hair, but they never show us who it is.
Of course, Glenn wasn’t on the bus, he wakes up in the prison after the battle. He takes a nap (seriously) then gears up with his body armor. He finds Tara, who is conflicted for playing a part in the Governor’s massacre. They escape together, setting out to find Maggie. They’re attacked by walkers and Glenn randomly passes out. An army truck drives up and Sergeant Tough Guy arrives with a surly quip. Will the new characters be psychotic, like the Governor? Or psychotic, like Lizzie? Or psychotic, like Shane? Those are your only choices, because everyone eventually turns psychotic in zombie world.
By the way, Glenn’s battle armor is awesome, and I don’t understand why everyone isn’t wearing some. Beth and Daryl are going around in sleeveless shirts. This is dumb. I know there’s a tradeoff between mobility, effort, and heat, but I think you could make some effective armor out of something light (my wife suggested plastic soda bottles). Just enough to slow a zombie down, and make an unexpected bite turn from a sure fatality to a few spare seconds to react and escape.
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Posted by Ed Grabianowski
on Sunday, February 16th, 2014. Filed under Dark TV, Headline.
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Tags: syfy, walking dead
