the world's stopping but we keep going
Yes, I watched Season Three of the Walking Dead very quickly. Your point?
- "If you want to talk, go talk to Hershel! I'm doin' stuff, Lori!" Rick Grimes, you are an intolerable, whiny piece of shit.
- OH MY GOD I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THE CHAINSAW HAND I mean, hiya, Merle! I figured we'd see him again, but I didn't figure it'd be here. Okay, bayonet hand isn't quite a chainsaw, but it'll do.
Actually, I love the Brothers Redneck and how their love for one another makes them terrible for one another. They do pretty well apart, and that's probably the way they should stay, but dammit, they're one another's eternal weak spot. Daryl's having to end Merle was pretty emotional, but I think it'll be good for Daryl in the end. I am glad, though, that they walked back Merle from the racist stereotype edge and into humanity, and also without making him have some weepy saccharine change of heart where he realizes that them Negros is human too. He's just ... a complicated guy.
- Yes, I had been warned about this Governor, even if only in vague tweets of annoyance. Good grief, though, this guy is just ... comically sleazy. Like, moustache-stroking evil. The fact that part of the establishment of evil is seeing a woman naked and in his bed is just hilarious. And it only goes downhill from there, to say nothing of the eventual eyepatch.
I'm a little baffled by how much secrecy there is around things the folk in that town would obviously support. We catch Walkers so we can experiment on them and see what ticks! say the baddies who run the town, and everyone'd be like, okay, dudes, you do what you think is right! But no, even though these townspeople are the ones crying for bloodsports and enjoying freedom fun times, they can't be told anything about the dark exploitation that keeps the peace! The ... dark exploitation of ... corpses that you already obviously don't consider human? Yeah, they'd stand for that just fine.
All things considered, I think the Governor-as-rapist plotline and its fallout stand on their own, so ... I'm just going to put that down and walk away.
I think the reason the Governor is so much of a charicature is that I have no idea what the fuck he wants. He obviously doesn't just want a happysafefun town, because he's doing dark and nefarious dealings. I don't think he's actually into Andrea, but I can't tell why he's banging her otherwise, especially when he doesn't connect her strategically to the Rick Problem. There's obviously the thing with his little girl, but once that's over and she and all of the heads are gone, I'm not entirely sure what his focus is -- or what that had to do with anything else. He wants Michonne after she stabs him in the eye, but that's a very specific goal, one unrelated to the town. And I'd accuse him of being some petty dude who went sour when he got his fee-fees hurt, but he's out lying to and slaughtering the National Guard prior to that, so it beats the fuck out of me. He's got all this evil plotting set up to take down the party, and then he runs off and endangers himself just because he's pissy at Andrea and wants to menace her in a run-down building, only to then lock her in his special torture room that he seems to have constructed for absolutely no other reason than to torture her in particular. It's just like, if he can make the chaotic evil choice, he will. If he had the opportunity to tie a lady to some railroad tracks, you know he would.
It is possible that he's just garden-variety Hollywood batshit insane -- just a psychopath intent on making everyone feel they're warm and fuzzy right up until he can ruin their lives -- but good grief, is that ever boring. I think about Joss' line re: villains thinking they're the heroes, and how the most monstrous actions can be performed by people who are certain of their righteousness. I don't think the Governor thinks he's righteous. I don't think he thinks much of anything. I think he's too busy thinking about how he can callously evict some widows and orphans from their homes.
"We can't all live side by side." WHY NOT? Because you need that much elbow room when you twirl your moustache?
...And wait, I blinked, but did he get away? Did he get away to menace another day? Good grief, didn't we even get to off the ridiculous baddie? Are our intrepid heroes going to have to deal with His Pirate Honor again?
- I'm torn about the whole childbirth thing. On the one hand, yeah, legitimate medical cause for dramatic tension, no more or less legitimate than Hershel's amputation. Childbirth is a serious event for a body to undergo, and since they'd established before that her previous birth had been via c-section, it makes perfect sense that this would be rough too. And yeah, it has to be one of the ladies who bites it like that, because the ladies are the only ones around here with uterus powers. And, to top all that off, it makes 100% perfect sense that people are seriously, cripplingly upset.
On the other hand, wow, that's a lot of manpain. I'm not going to say she got fridged, since (as discussed in hand one) there are legitimate reasons for what happened to happen, but this was just this side of it. Rick then got to go on a manpain-fueled walker-smashing (and child-ignoring) spree to show his manliness. They even went out of their way to make sure that facilitated Carl's manpain, which makes me kind of grimly hopeless about his chances of not growing up to be a manpain-having pained man.
And yet, on that weird third severed hand I've got over here, the fact that it's all Lori's choice doesn't de-complicate anything at all. Her actor has said that Lori always saw her pregnancy as a death sentence -- I mean, fucking hell, that leads into a whole discussion about what, psychologically, must be going on to prioritize a theoretical infant over continued care for an already-living husband and child. I mean, if Lori's understanding is that this baby represents hope, and hope is more important than her life, that's not a choice I'd agree with, but it's a choice I can absolutely comprehend and sympathize with. However, without that associated discussion, her obvious resignation at the end looks just like Woman Accepts Her Genesis 3 Curse, Film at 11.
Of course, then she didn't get to die; she had to have one last ghost-voice hurrah to pull Rick out from his manpain by assuring him that she still loves him and he has good things to do, and then she gets to wear a pretty dress and appear in places, making him run around like it's that part of the end of FFX where you have to grab the fucking crystals before they disappear and/or you get shanked by a giant floor shiv.
- I want to love all over Michonne's what the fuck are these crazy white people doing now? face. In fact, I think that's just her resting face, which makes it even better. I really wish the writers would let her speak in concrete examples, though, especially when she's trying to get Andrea out of the Stepford Anti-Zombie Town. Vague as she is, she gets a little Log Lady. I get that she's supposed to be Mysterious and Dangerous, but you can be both those things while still communicating.
- Aww, T-Dog, man, I'm sorry Lori's death stole basically anyone's being sad about you. You deserved better, dude.
- I don't know if Milton the Geeky Scientist is supposed to be gay or just effete, but either way, he's coded faggy in a way that's a little insulting, at best. First homo we've met, and he's evil. Great. And more even than being evil, he's a sissy. When Rick and the Governor are being Real Men and chomping at the bit to fight, and all the guys waiting outside are posturing and dick-measuring, and here's Milton going, omg guysss, calm down! When he finally steps up, it's via sabotage, not manly manly punching action, which as we all know is the only correct way to solve things.
I'm not saying that he's necessarily meant to be gay. I'm saying he's coded gay, in that he embodies a whole list of negative stereotypes associated with the portrayal of gay men in media. The creators may have had nothing particular in mind about his sexual orientation, but it's telling that their image of a Girly-Man With Soft Hands Who Cannot Man Up For Real War! is all kinds of limp-wristed and soft-spoken.
- I'm assuming that Andrea has to use her vagina on the governor both because it's too much of a shame to let that vagina go un-man-used and as a way of de-gaying the months she and Michonne spent together.
Speaking of gay and Michonne, yes, please. However, between Michonne's mentioning her dead boyfriend, Carol's outright stating that she's not a lesbian, and Andrea's boning down with Snidely Whiplash over there, I think we've now gone out of our way to establish the concrete heterosexuality of all the ladies in our party. Good job, ladies. Good job being straight. (Yes, I have considered that this doesn't rule out bisexuality. No, I don't think that's what the show's implying.)
On a meta level, though, I'm glad that the show treats Laurie Holden like a babe everyone wants to get with, even though she's over forty. I mean, she is a babe everyone wants to get with! But I'm glad that the party's resident Sexy Lady is fortysomething instead of twentysomething; that's a little something different for a change.
Basically, you will not ever ever convince me that Andrea did not smooch Michonne good and proper before she pulled the trigger.
- And of course the first notable time when the Perfect Headshot Ability fails is when a girl is shooting. And not just any girl -- a girl who was possibly bound to be an Olympian? So of course she misses.
I'm not being much of a grouch about the Perfect Headshot Ability, though; I understand that this is a thing that is necessary so that every firefight isn't just ten minutes of wasted ARGH FUCK FUCK WHY AREN'T THEY GOING DOWN and scrambling around for more ammo. It's just that as long as it's in play, when it fails it's really obvious.
Tyreese fails at it, too, but he's shown up by his sister, not a romantic interest. Just pointing that out.
- I want so, so badly for some other group to treat the group like Rick's been treating everyone else they've come along. Best even if it's specifically because of Rick. Rick the Dick.
Rick's manpain has climbed the scale from Hearing Dead Wife to Seeing Dead Wife. And it'd be touching if, you know, I'd ever gotten the sense he liked her? I don't think he liked her. I think he liked what she represented, and I know that he liked that she belonged to him and symbolized his success as a Manly McMannerson. But I don't think he liked her. I mean, don't get me wrong -- there are things about Lori's character worth liking, I'm not saying otherwise -- but I was never given the sense of why (or even if) Rick liked any of them absent her status as My Wife and the mother of My Children. And now that he's seeing her as she's dead, well, once again it's not about her. Past the point of her death, Lori's entire function is to forward Rick's manpain.
I know that Rick's the Fearless Leader and all, but shitfire, when your Fearless Leader starts going nutballs and making decisions that run contrary to what everyone else is thinking (like, oh, kicking out the nice people or giving over Michonne), that is when you replace the heck out of him. Like I said on Twitter, I understand when video games make -- and keep -- an inexplicable person as the leader, because the human holding the controller needs a perspective character, no matter how arbitrary that character's leadership in terms of the plot. In a television show, there's no excuse for a bunch of characters to keep listening to a pale male for no other reason that I can determine other than that he's the same pale male they've been listening to all along. I really want Rick to bite it, if only because it might give the rest of the group a fighting chance.
Can we please have a different Fearless Leader next season? I vote Michonne. Michonne for Fearless Leader. Michonne for Governor. Michonne for President. Of the World.
Though I guess wandering around and being full of manpain is a good way to get rid of Rick the Dick for several episodes, so ... well done, that!
- Aw, hell, Glenn, what did I say about turning into Macho Man Randy Savage? To nuance: I don't think it's a necessarily bad thing now that Glenn's getting into the rough-and-tumble parts of survival, since the rest of the setup is pretty rough, and he's a part of it. What I mind is his getting tossed into the Man Punches Stuff, Becomes Man pipeline.
By the way, I think Maggie's reaction to Glenn's invasive DID THE BAD MAN TOUCH YOU? line of implied questioning was thoroughly justified. He's not approaching her like, oh, sweetie, I care about you and I love you, do you want to talk about it or should I just rub your feet? He's approaching her like, tell me what the bad man did to My Woman so I have extra reason to go beat up the bad man! I'm glad he realizes he was a dickweed later, though; that was good of him.
And far be it from me to judge how quickly people should or shouldn't be able to get over their sexual assault trauma and back to cheerfully boning in storage spaces, so I won't.
- Will someone please point out that this revenge shit is beyond petty? I mean, just say it? Acknowledge that this is what happens when you let manpain make decisions? Point out that the world is overrun with zombies and we are squabbling over two shitty hunks of land in Georgia?
I get that the prison is nice. There are, however, obviously other nice things out there, and staying to fight runs the risk of getting some or all of everyone killed. Packing up and moving on is not only a good option, it is probably the best option, and to consider it only in terms of Hershel's going 'Carol and I think we should hit the road, but whatever!' is a pretty clear indicator of how fucked by male posturing everything has gotten. Again, there are reasons to make the choice to stay and fight! But they are not obvious, nor are they even smart.
Again, it'd be great if the show realized that it's making a great point about human nature (or maybe just masculinity), that the entire world could go to shit and instead of banding together, people will find shit to squabble about. But that would involve its acknowledging that so much of what fuels its plot is petty penny-ante Hatfield-vs.-McCoy feudery.
- Ha ha, of course when they named the baby Judith, someone was bound to get Murder Ideas. ...I hope that was on purpose.
- To some degree, I don't mind the total inhumanty with which the party -- and by 'the party', of course, I mean fuckin' Rick "I'm Doin' Stuff, Lori!" Grimes -- has begun to treat all the other humans. I mean, this season involves a lot of kicking living people to the curb. What I mind is that there's no associated discussion of a) what totally fucking monstrous behavior it is, and b) how it's an attitude that would have gotten Rick straight-up left on the side of the street or in the tank in the first episode, or the rest of the party kicked out of the farmhouse before they even got there. Again, I will take it as a survival decision, but not an unquestioned one, especially when people behaving otherwise is part of what's gotten our party so far.
It gets questioned when Morgan shows up again (yay, Morgan!), but only in the acknowledgment that it's lucky Carl didn't kill him, because Morgan is A Guy We Like. Michonne's looking at Morgan's downed body and asking, re: his status of being alive, "Do we care?" is emblematic of the running attitude toward other humans. We care only when we care. And why do we care, when we care? Blood, boners, and dumb fucking luck.
It is also not addressed here that the Governor's attitude is actually a correct one: getting a bunch of useful people together is actually a fantastic solution to the whole end-of-the-world problem you've got going on. And yes, you're going to need a lot of barricades and firepower to protect yourself from marauding sumbitches, but the more people you've got around, the better your anti-marauding-sumbitch force gets. I mean, the critical second step is to not be comically sinister, but our party can do pull that one off.
I almost wish I didn't have the game to measure this against, but I do think of the video game at times like this. Okay, so you didn't have a lot of room for altering the course of gameplay, but if you make decisions that are shitty and cruel to others, you get those big brown eyes and a 'Clementine will remember that' for your troubles. And sure, sometimes there's no choice! Sometimes it's what you have to do to stay alive, and there's no other option! But your tiny moral center is standing right there, reminding you that the world has become monstrous, but there's a real human cost to becoming a monster with it.
Carl is the show's Clementine, but the show gives far less of a shit about whether or not Carl will remember that. In fact, Rick has spent the whole show all but wanting Carl to remember his morally dubious decisions.
And yes, I realize that this starts to get addressed at the end of the last episode. (Is it obvious I've been writing this up as I go along?) What I remain skeptical about is the degree to which this is going to usher in a new and fuzzy age of human behavior, and here's why: Andrea. Pretty much every awful decision Rick made worked out right (or at least didn't work out wrong) in the end for the party. Andrea, on the other hand, made all the merciful decisions, and that's why a whole bunch of people got killed, herself included. So the show is kind of talking out of both sides of its mouth here. It'll be interesting to see which side it keeps up going forward.
...Okay, I thought about it a little more about this, and here's my problem with being silent about it all season before going in for a sea-change at the end: Once again, everyone's divergent personalities get rolled up in Rick's development. Rick is the one who goes from Easy To Be Haaaaard~ (Hair joke) all season to The Governor, Only Nice at the very end, so fast you could get whiplash out of it, and fueled what seems entirely by realizing he's been a bad role model for his boy. That's great, but it's not the trajectory anybody else has taken. At the end, Carol's excited to have new people, but she would've been excited before. On the other hand, Michonne drove right by that hitchhiker and there's little to suggest she wouldn't do it again now. So we haven't learned a lesson. Rick has learned a lesson.
I don't know, I've still got to chew on why this didn't sit right with me. Maybe it was too subtle? See, the only real negative consequence that's come from Rick's hardassery has been that he's given Carl permission to be a hardass too. I've got to assume there's plenty of viewers out there who'd approve of Rick's survival decisions, and I can't imagine those folk think Carl's growing up like his daddy is anything but a good choice -- and if that's where you're coming from, the new open-arms policy at the end looks like stupidity, not an attempt to reclaim humanity.
And I just keep coming back to how damn near every time Rick was suspicious of someone, it was revealed that he had reason to be. He refuses to trust the prisoners, and we see one hold a gun on Rick and the other nearly take down the whole prison. He refuses to trust the mini-group, and we get a scene where two of them are talking about taking the first chance to plot their downfall. The show can't repeatedly demonstrate that shooting first and asking questions later is the correct choice, and then come back and say, no, it's the wrong choice.
- Should've let Andrea be in charge from the start, tell you what. When the show isn't making her do shit-for-brains things like hook up with bad-news dudes, she makes a great deal of sense.
So of course the testosterone-poisoned Rick-and-the-Governor showdown can only occur after she's been kicked out of the room, because she might suggest something other than a brutal shootout, and the show has already shown us that's the only way to solve problems. Neither Carol nor Andrea can stop Ed; Shane has to bash Ed's face in. Lori can't just tell Shane to fuck off; Rick has to kill Shane. None of the ladies can keep Merle from going after Daryl; Glenn has to tackle him. Women can jibber-jabber all they want, but it's man-fists that solve the world's big issues.
Good grief, even the Random Tiny Party men have to get their manpain on over that poor bitten lady. I realize coming back to life is a major problem in this series, but let's just let the dead women stay that way next time.
- The writers have obviously never met people of faith, because if these people were actually people of faith, they'd be praying more and quoting less. They'd also be wrestling a lot more with the relation of their faith to what's going on, either in terms of 'God loves me so He saved me!' or 'how could God let all those other folk die??' Crisis turns on the 'why me?' line of questioning; surviving a crisis that takes down everyone else around you goes up the 'why not me?' track. There's a great deal of theology to be had out of this kind of end-of-everything scenario, and you either go big with it or go home.
If you ever write something where you've got Bible-thumpers, having them quote the Bible is one thing; lots of folk can do that, and some at length. But people who are able to cite chapter and verse are much rarer. Like, I teach the stuff, and when it comes to stuff I can quote or even paraphrase, I can (generally) give you the book on everything, the chapter on some things, and the verse on next to nothing. If you just quote something at me, I can possibly get you the book it's from, but little else unless it's something real well-known. So if you're going to have a character better at that than I am, they'd better have a real serious Jesus reason for it.
- While I respect Michonne's status as a serious physical threat and a recent addition to the group, regardless of race or gender, I am super-duper uncomfortable by having her fate decided by all the white men in the party -- and nobody else. Can we all at least acknowledge that the reason Rick only asks Hershel, Daryl, and Merle is because he knows the others would say OH HELL NO to that plan, and he doesn't want the force of democracy to change his big strong manpain-fueled mind?
- Thoughts are also complicated on Glenn's asking Hershel's blessing to marry Maggie -- and on the female-as-property implications of the blessing-asking stage of things in general -- but I'm glad that it was a thing and it happened and now everyone has moved on to big important things like, uh, survival. I like them together; I don't like the implication that marriage is what validates their togetherness when nothing else will. If they have a big wedding next season I am rolling my eyes on down the hall and out the door.
Here's what I have NO complicated feelings about: the garbage idea that having a ring is such a necessity that it's enough to pull one off a dead woman and expect your intended to be thankful. (Bless Maggie, she's an odd enough one to get behind that.) See also: the garbage idea that having jewelry is so special and important that making your lady feel obligated to wear it it trumps its likely being a liability to her. Let us perhaps also say nothing of the idea that any modern diamond fancypants rings are made to survive heavy zombie-killing action.
- Rick, please stop giving your "greater good" speech. Or, you know, keep going on, but I have tuned you out, especially when you started talking about the beloved princples of democracy you have seen fit to straight-up ignore every moment prior to this one.
- Destroying the guardtowers in the raid on the prison is hilariously WOOO IT'S THE END OF THE SEASON DESTROY ALL THE SETS. ...And then they moved everyone into the prison, so I guess the set designers ran in going WAIT NO KEEP ALL THE SETS KEEP ALL THE SETS.
Okay, okay, so here's who's left standing:
Rick: A great big steaming bowl of why are we still listening to you? He's doin' stuff, Lori.
Carl: Oh no, here comes the manpain. It is boypain right now, but the manpain is coming. And his manpain will no doubt fuel Rick's further manpain.
Daryl: Why isn't Daryl the main character? I mean, I don't give a shit if he's the party leader, I just want him to be the main character.
Glenn and Maggie: I want to deal with them together because I like them when they're functioning as partners, because they make a great unit of equals. I am hoping like hell that their continued relationship does not imbalance that and send Maggie back into the proverbial kitchen.
Michonne: So much love. So much. I also love that she's a badass without being a showoff, and that she's fierce without being a stone. She kind of reminds me of Fran from FFXII. Oh, shit, now I ship that too.
Carol: When they were suddenly acting like she'd died halfway through, I was baffled; I thought I'd just looked away from the screen at the wrong moment. So I was happy when she came back, because she's great.
Beth: Well, she's got a pretty voice, and she uses it for Tom Waits, so the girl's all right by me.
Tyreese and Sasha: I like what a sensible fellow Tyreese is! And Sasha seems equally reasonable, though she doesn't get as much chance to speak up about it. I hope they get to do more things next season.
......And I guess that's everybody still left! Been a good season for killin' off party members, tell you what.
Number of time I used 'manpain' in this entry (including that one): 16.
- "If you want to talk, go talk to Hershel! I'm doin' stuff, Lori!" Rick Grimes, you are an intolerable, whiny piece of shit.
- OH MY GOD I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THE CHAINSAW HAND I mean, hiya, Merle! I figured we'd see him again, but I didn't figure it'd be here. Okay, bayonet hand isn't quite a chainsaw, but it'll do.
Actually, I love the Brothers Redneck and how their love for one another makes them terrible for one another. They do pretty well apart, and that's probably the way they should stay, but dammit, they're one another's eternal weak spot. Daryl's having to end Merle was pretty emotional, but I think it'll be good for Daryl in the end. I am glad, though, that they walked back Merle from the racist stereotype edge and into humanity, and also without making him have some weepy saccharine change of heart where he realizes that them Negros is human too. He's just ... a complicated guy.
- Yes, I had been warned about this Governor, even if only in vague tweets of annoyance. Good grief, though, this guy is just ... comically sleazy. Like, moustache-stroking evil. The fact that part of the establishment of evil is seeing a woman naked and in his bed is just hilarious. And it only goes downhill from there, to say nothing of the eventual eyepatch.
I'm a little baffled by how much secrecy there is around things the folk in that town would obviously support. We catch Walkers so we can experiment on them and see what ticks! say the baddies who run the town, and everyone'd be like, okay, dudes, you do what you think is right! But no, even though these townspeople are the ones crying for bloodsports and enjoying freedom fun times, they can't be told anything about the dark exploitation that keeps the peace! The ... dark exploitation of ... corpses that you already obviously don't consider human? Yeah, they'd stand for that just fine.
All things considered, I think the Governor-as-rapist plotline and its fallout stand on their own, so ... I'm just going to put that down and walk away.
I think the reason the Governor is so much of a charicature is that I have no idea what the fuck he wants. He obviously doesn't just want a happysafefun town, because he's doing dark and nefarious dealings. I don't think he's actually into Andrea, but I can't tell why he's banging her otherwise, especially when he doesn't connect her strategically to the Rick Problem. There's obviously the thing with his little girl, but once that's over and she and all of the heads are gone, I'm not entirely sure what his focus is -- or what that had to do with anything else. He wants Michonne after she stabs him in the eye, but that's a very specific goal, one unrelated to the town. And I'd accuse him of being some petty dude who went sour when he got his fee-fees hurt, but he's out lying to and slaughtering the National Guard prior to that, so it beats the fuck out of me. He's got all this evil plotting set up to take down the party, and then he runs off and endangers himself just because he's pissy at Andrea and wants to menace her in a run-down building, only to then lock her in his special torture room that he seems to have constructed for absolutely no other reason than to torture her in particular. It's just like, if he can make the chaotic evil choice, he will. If he had the opportunity to tie a lady to some railroad tracks, you know he would.
It is possible that he's just garden-variety Hollywood batshit insane -- just a psychopath intent on making everyone feel they're warm and fuzzy right up until he can ruin their lives -- but good grief, is that ever boring. I think about Joss' line re: villains thinking they're the heroes, and how the most monstrous actions can be performed by people who are certain of their righteousness. I don't think the Governor thinks he's righteous. I don't think he thinks much of anything. I think he's too busy thinking about how he can callously evict some widows and orphans from their homes.
"We can't all live side by side." WHY NOT? Because you need that much elbow room when you twirl your moustache?
...And wait, I blinked, but did he get away? Did he get away to menace another day? Good grief, didn't we even get to off the ridiculous baddie? Are our intrepid heroes going to have to deal with His Pirate Honor again?
- I'm torn about the whole childbirth thing. On the one hand, yeah, legitimate medical cause for dramatic tension, no more or less legitimate than Hershel's amputation. Childbirth is a serious event for a body to undergo, and since they'd established before that her previous birth had been via c-section, it makes perfect sense that this would be rough too. And yeah, it has to be one of the ladies who bites it like that, because the ladies are the only ones around here with uterus powers. And, to top all that off, it makes 100% perfect sense that people are seriously, cripplingly upset.
On the other hand, wow, that's a lot of manpain. I'm not going to say she got fridged, since (as discussed in hand one) there are legitimate reasons for what happened to happen, but this was just this side of it. Rick then got to go on a manpain-fueled walker-smashing (and child-ignoring) spree to show his manliness. They even went out of their way to make sure that facilitated Carl's manpain, which makes me kind of grimly hopeless about his chances of not growing up to be a manpain-having pained man.
And yet, on that weird third severed hand I've got over here, the fact that it's all Lori's choice doesn't de-complicate anything at all. Her actor has said that Lori always saw her pregnancy as a death sentence -- I mean, fucking hell, that leads into a whole discussion about what, psychologically, must be going on to prioritize a theoretical infant over continued care for an already-living husband and child. I mean, if Lori's understanding is that this baby represents hope, and hope is more important than her life, that's not a choice I'd agree with, but it's a choice I can absolutely comprehend and sympathize with. However, without that associated discussion, her obvious resignation at the end looks just like Woman Accepts Her Genesis 3 Curse, Film at 11.
Of course, then she didn't get to die; she had to have one last ghost-voice hurrah to pull Rick out from his manpain by assuring him that she still loves him and he has good things to do, and then she gets to wear a pretty dress and appear in places, making him run around like it's that part of the end of FFX where you have to grab the fucking crystals before they disappear and/or you get shanked by a giant floor shiv.
- I want to love all over Michonne's what the fuck are these crazy white people doing now? face. In fact, I think that's just her resting face, which makes it even better. I really wish the writers would let her speak in concrete examples, though, especially when she's trying to get Andrea out of the Stepford Anti-Zombie Town. Vague as she is, she gets a little Log Lady. I get that she's supposed to be Mysterious and Dangerous, but you can be both those things while still communicating.
- Aww, T-Dog, man, I'm sorry Lori's death stole basically anyone's being sad about you. You deserved better, dude.
- I don't know if Milton the Geeky Scientist is supposed to be gay or just effete, but either way, he's coded faggy in a way that's a little insulting, at best. First homo we've met, and he's evil. Great. And more even than being evil, he's a sissy. When Rick and the Governor are being Real Men and chomping at the bit to fight, and all the guys waiting outside are posturing and dick-measuring, and here's Milton going, omg guysss, calm down! When he finally steps up, it's via sabotage, not manly manly punching action, which as we all know is the only correct way to solve things.
I'm not saying that he's necessarily meant to be gay. I'm saying he's coded gay, in that he embodies a whole list of negative stereotypes associated with the portrayal of gay men in media. The creators may have had nothing particular in mind about his sexual orientation, but it's telling that their image of a Girly-Man With Soft Hands Who Cannot Man Up For Real War! is all kinds of limp-wristed and soft-spoken.
- I'm assuming that Andrea has to use her vagina on the governor both because it's too much of a shame to let that vagina go un-man-used and as a way of de-gaying the months she and Michonne spent together.
Speaking of gay and Michonne, yes, please. However, between Michonne's mentioning her dead boyfriend, Carol's outright stating that she's not a lesbian, and Andrea's boning down with Snidely Whiplash over there, I think we've now gone out of our way to establish the concrete heterosexuality of all the ladies in our party. Good job, ladies. Good job being straight. (Yes, I have considered that this doesn't rule out bisexuality. No, I don't think that's what the show's implying.)
On a meta level, though, I'm glad that the show treats Laurie Holden like a babe everyone wants to get with, even though she's over forty. I mean, she is a babe everyone wants to get with! But I'm glad that the party's resident Sexy Lady is fortysomething instead of twentysomething; that's a little something different for a change.
Basically, you will not ever ever convince me that Andrea did not smooch Michonne good and proper before she pulled the trigger.
- And of course the first notable time when the Perfect Headshot Ability fails is when a girl is shooting. And not just any girl -- a girl who was possibly bound to be an Olympian? So of course she misses.
I'm not being much of a grouch about the Perfect Headshot Ability, though; I understand that this is a thing that is necessary so that every firefight isn't just ten minutes of wasted ARGH FUCK FUCK WHY AREN'T THEY GOING DOWN and scrambling around for more ammo. It's just that as long as it's in play, when it fails it's really obvious.
Tyreese fails at it, too, but he's shown up by his sister, not a romantic interest. Just pointing that out.
- I want so, so badly for some other group to treat the group like Rick's been treating everyone else they've come along. Best even if it's specifically because of Rick. Rick the Dick.
Rick's manpain has climbed the scale from Hearing Dead Wife to Seeing Dead Wife. And it'd be touching if, you know, I'd ever gotten the sense he liked her? I don't think he liked her. I think he liked what she represented, and I know that he liked that she belonged to him and symbolized his success as a Manly McMannerson. But I don't think he liked her. I mean, don't get me wrong -- there are things about Lori's character worth liking, I'm not saying otherwise -- but I was never given the sense of why (or even if) Rick liked any of them absent her status as My Wife and the mother of My Children. And now that he's seeing her as she's dead, well, once again it's not about her. Past the point of her death, Lori's entire function is to forward Rick's manpain.
I know that Rick's the Fearless Leader and all, but shitfire, when your Fearless Leader starts going nutballs and making decisions that run contrary to what everyone else is thinking (like, oh, kicking out the nice people or giving over Michonne), that is when you replace the heck out of him. Like I said on Twitter, I understand when video games make -- and keep -- an inexplicable person as the leader, because the human holding the controller needs a perspective character, no matter how arbitrary that character's leadership in terms of the plot. In a television show, there's no excuse for a bunch of characters to keep listening to a pale male for no other reason that I can determine other than that he's the same pale male they've been listening to all along. I really want Rick to bite it, if only because it might give the rest of the group a fighting chance.
Can we please have a different Fearless Leader next season? I vote Michonne. Michonne for Fearless Leader. Michonne for Governor. Michonne for President. Of the World.
Though I guess wandering around and being full of manpain is a good way to get rid of Rick the Dick for several episodes, so ... well done, that!
- Aw, hell, Glenn, what did I say about turning into Macho Man Randy Savage? To nuance: I don't think it's a necessarily bad thing now that Glenn's getting into the rough-and-tumble parts of survival, since the rest of the setup is pretty rough, and he's a part of it. What I mind is his getting tossed into the Man Punches Stuff, Becomes Man pipeline.
By the way, I think Maggie's reaction to Glenn's invasive DID THE BAD MAN TOUCH YOU? line of implied questioning was thoroughly justified. He's not approaching her like, oh, sweetie, I care about you and I love you, do you want to talk about it or should I just rub your feet? He's approaching her like, tell me what the bad man did to My Woman so I have extra reason to go beat up the bad man! I'm glad he realizes he was a dickweed later, though; that was good of him.
And far be it from me to judge how quickly people should or shouldn't be able to get over their sexual assault trauma and back to cheerfully boning in storage spaces, so I won't.
- Will someone please point out that this revenge shit is beyond petty? I mean, just say it? Acknowledge that this is what happens when you let manpain make decisions? Point out that the world is overrun with zombies and we are squabbling over two shitty hunks of land in Georgia?
I get that the prison is nice. There are, however, obviously other nice things out there, and staying to fight runs the risk of getting some or all of everyone killed. Packing up and moving on is not only a good option, it is probably the best option, and to consider it only in terms of Hershel's going 'Carol and I think we should hit the road, but whatever!' is a pretty clear indicator of how fucked by male posturing everything has gotten. Again, there are reasons to make the choice to stay and fight! But they are not obvious, nor are they even smart.
Again, it'd be great if the show realized that it's making a great point about human nature (or maybe just masculinity), that the entire world could go to shit and instead of banding together, people will find shit to squabble about. But that would involve its acknowledging that so much of what fuels its plot is petty penny-ante Hatfield-vs.-McCoy feudery.
- Ha ha, of course when they named the baby Judith, someone was bound to get Murder Ideas. ...I hope that was on purpose.
- To some degree, I don't mind the total inhumanty with which the party -- and by 'the party', of course, I mean fuckin' Rick "I'm Doin' Stuff, Lori!" Grimes -- has begun to treat all the other humans. I mean, this season involves a lot of kicking living people to the curb. What I mind is that there's no associated discussion of a) what totally fucking monstrous behavior it is, and b) how it's an attitude that would have gotten Rick straight-up left on the side of the street or in the tank in the first episode, or the rest of the party kicked out of the farmhouse before they even got there. Again, I will take it as a survival decision, but not an unquestioned one, especially when people behaving otherwise is part of what's gotten our party so far.
It gets questioned when Morgan shows up again (yay, Morgan!), but only in the acknowledgment that it's lucky Carl didn't kill him, because Morgan is A Guy We Like. Michonne's looking at Morgan's downed body and asking, re: his status of being alive, "Do we care?" is emblematic of the running attitude toward other humans. We care only when we care. And why do we care, when we care? Blood, boners, and dumb fucking luck.
It is also not addressed here that the Governor's attitude is actually a correct one: getting a bunch of useful people together is actually a fantastic solution to the whole end-of-the-world problem you've got going on. And yes, you're going to need a lot of barricades and firepower to protect yourself from marauding sumbitches, but the more people you've got around, the better your anti-marauding-sumbitch force gets. I mean, the critical second step is to not be comically sinister, but our party can do pull that one off.
I almost wish I didn't have the game to measure this against, but I do think of the video game at times like this. Okay, so you didn't have a lot of room for altering the course of gameplay, but if you make decisions that are shitty and cruel to others, you get those big brown eyes and a 'Clementine will remember that' for your troubles. And sure, sometimes there's no choice! Sometimes it's what you have to do to stay alive, and there's no other option! But your tiny moral center is standing right there, reminding you that the world has become monstrous, but there's a real human cost to becoming a monster with it.
Carl is the show's Clementine, but the show gives far less of a shit about whether or not Carl will remember that. In fact, Rick has spent the whole show all but wanting Carl to remember his morally dubious decisions.
And yes, I realize that this starts to get addressed at the end of the last episode. (Is it obvious I've been writing this up as I go along?) What I remain skeptical about is the degree to which this is going to usher in a new and fuzzy age of human behavior, and here's why: Andrea. Pretty much every awful decision Rick made worked out right (or at least didn't work out wrong) in the end for the party. Andrea, on the other hand, made all the merciful decisions, and that's why a whole bunch of people got killed, herself included. So the show is kind of talking out of both sides of its mouth here. It'll be interesting to see which side it keeps up going forward.
...Okay, I thought about it a little more about this, and here's my problem with being silent about it all season before going in for a sea-change at the end: Once again, everyone's divergent personalities get rolled up in Rick's development. Rick is the one who goes from Easy To Be Haaaaard~ (Hair joke) all season to The Governor, Only Nice at the very end, so fast you could get whiplash out of it, and fueled what seems entirely by realizing he's been a bad role model for his boy. That's great, but it's not the trajectory anybody else has taken. At the end, Carol's excited to have new people, but she would've been excited before. On the other hand, Michonne drove right by that hitchhiker and there's little to suggest she wouldn't do it again now. So we haven't learned a lesson. Rick has learned a lesson.
I don't know, I've still got to chew on why this didn't sit right with me. Maybe it was too subtle? See, the only real negative consequence that's come from Rick's hardassery has been that he's given Carl permission to be a hardass too. I've got to assume there's plenty of viewers out there who'd approve of Rick's survival decisions, and I can't imagine those folk think Carl's growing up like his daddy is anything but a good choice -- and if that's where you're coming from, the new open-arms policy at the end looks like stupidity, not an attempt to reclaim humanity.
And I just keep coming back to how damn near every time Rick was suspicious of someone, it was revealed that he had reason to be. He refuses to trust the prisoners, and we see one hold a gun on Rick and the other nearly take down the whole prison. He refuses to trust the mini-group, and we get a scene where two of them are talking about taking the first chance to plot their downfall. The show can't repeatedly demonstrate that shooting first and asking questions later is the correct choice, and then come back and say, no, it's the wrong choice.
- Should've let Andrea be in charge from the start, tell you what. When the show isn't making her do shit-for-brains things like hook up with bad-news dudes, she makes a great deal of sense.
So of course the testosterone-poisoned Rick-and-the-Governor showdown can only occur after she's been kicked out of the room, because she might suggest something other than a brutal shootout, and the show has already shown us that's the only way to solve problems. Neither Carol nor Andrea can stop Ed; Shane has to bash Ed's face in. Lori can't just tell Shane to fuck off; Rick has to kill Shane. None of the ladies can keep Merle from going after Daryl; Glenn has to tackle him. Women can jibber-jabber all they want, but it's man-fists that solve the world's big issues.
Good grief, even the Random Tiny Party men have to get their manpain on over that poor bitten lady. I realize coming back to life is a major problem in this series, but let's just let the dead women stay that way next time.
- The writers have obviously never met people of faith, because if these people were actually people of faith, they'd be praying more and quoting less. They'd also be wrestling a lot more with the relation of their faith to what's going on, either in terms of 'God loves me so He saved me!' or 'how could God let all those other folk die??' Crisis turns on the 'why me?' line of questioning; surviving a crisis that takes down everyone else around you goes up the 'why not me?' track. There's a great deal of theology to be had out of this kind of end-of-everything scenario, and you either go big with it or go home.
If you ever write something where you've got Bible-thumpers, having them quote the Bible is one thing; lots of folk can do that, and some at length. But people who are able to cite chapter and verse are much rarer. Like, I teach the stuff, and when it comes to stuff I can quote or even paraphrase, I can (generally) give you the book on everything, the chapter on some things, and the verse on next to nothing. If you just quote something at me, I can possibly get you the book it's from, but little else unless it's something real well-known. So if you're going to have a character better at that than I am, they'd better have a real serious Jesus reason for it.
- While I respect Michonne's status as a serious physical threat and a recent addition to the group, regardless of race or gender, I am super-duper uncomfortable by having her fate decided by all the white men in the party -- and nobody else. Can we all at least acknowledge that the reason Rick only asks Hershel, Daryl, and Merle is because he knows the others would say OH HELL NO to that plan, and he doesn't want the force of democracy to change his big strong manpain-fueled mind?
- Thoughts are also complicated on Glenn's asking Hershel's blessing to marry Maggie -- and on the female-as-property implications of the blessing-asking stage of things in general -- but I'm glad that it was a thing and it happened and now everyone has moved on to big important things like, uh, survival. I like them together; I don't like the implication that marriage is what validates their togetherness when nothing else will. If they have a big wedding next season I am rolling my eyes on down the hall and out the door.
Here's what I have NO complicated feelings about: the garbage idea that having a ring is such a necessity that it's enough to pull one off a dead woman and expect your intended to be thankful. (Bless Maggie, she's an odd enough one to get behind that.) See also: the garbage idea that having jewelry is so special and important that making your lady feel obligated to wear it it trumps its likely being a liability to her. Let us perhaps also say nothing of the idea that any modern diamond fancypants rings are made to survive heavy zombie-killing action.
- Rick, please stop giving your "greater good" speech. Or, you know, keep going on, but I have tuned you out, especially when you started talking about the beloved princples of democracy you have seen fit to straight-up ignore every moment prior to this one.
- Destroying the guardtowers in the raid on the prison is hilariously WOOO IT'S THE END OF THE SEASON DESTROY ALL THE SETS. ...And then they moved everyone into the prison, so I guess the set designers ran in going WAIT NO KEEP ALL THE SETS KEEP ALL THE SETS.
Okay, okay, so here's who's left standing:
Rick: A great big steaming bowl of why are we still listening to you? He's doin' stuff, Lori.
Carl: Oh no, here comes the manpain. It is boypain right now, but the manpain is coming. And his manpain will no doubt fuel Rick's further manpain.
Daryl: Why isn't Daryl the main character? I mean, I don't give a shit if he's the party leader, I just want him to be the main character.
Glenn and Maggie: I want to deal with them together because I like them when they're functioning as partners, because they make a great unit of equals. I am hoping like hell that their continued relationship does not imbalance that and send Maggie back into the proverbial kitchen.
Michonne: So much love. So much. I also love that she's a badass without being a showoff, and that she's fierce without being a stone. She kind of reminds me of Fran from FFXII. Oh, shit, now I ship that too.
Carol: When they were suddenly acting like she'd died halfway through, I was baffled; I thought I'd just looked away from the screen at the wrong moment. So I was happy when she came back, because she's great.
Beth: Well, she's got a pretty voice, and she uses it for Tom Waits, so the girl's all right by me.
Tyreese and Sasha: I like what a sensible fellow Tyreese is! And Sasha seems equally reasonable, though she doesn't get as much chance to speak up about it. I hope they get to do more things next season.
......And I guess that's everybody still left! Been a good season for killin' off party members, tell you what.
Number of time I used 'manpain' in this entry (including that one): 16.