Matthew Brunner
Margaret Aloi
DMJ432
03/12/14
After The Prison
(In the style of Eric Kane)
The second half of
The Walking Dead’s season 4 picks us up
exactly where the first half left us off. Plenty of fans are still mourning
over the loss of the prison from the end of the mid-season finale. I personally
am not sorry to see the prison go, way too much gray. Either way the Governor’s
somewhat more successful and yet still failed attempt to overtake the prison is
kaput.
Whoever has
survived is now faced with the choice between starting over and giving up. Some are alone, some are in groups but one
thing is for sure, they are all exposed. These new parameters demand a scaling down
of things in a way that makes sense given that many of the main characters will
now be embarking on completely separate and more personalized story lines.
Long-distance
communication is impossible and because the population has been decimated, the
likelihood that anyone will run into each other again is slim. Suddenly the small stories of small groups of
people begin to feel much bigger. Because of that, the writers know that for
the time being they are better off by telling smaller more intimate stories,
one or a few at a time. The Walking Dead’s Season 4 mid-season premier, Episode
9 entitled, After focuses on Rick,
Carl and Michonne’s stories.
So here we are at
the end of a two-month long wait, at the beginning of After we find Rick and Carl vulnerable and isolated. Rick has taken
a gunshot to the leg while Carl is ignoring Rick and acting like a teenager at
exactly the most inconvenient time. Michonne is alone but not quite as vulnerable.
She returns to the prison and just outside the gates comes across Herschel’s
reanimated head. With a heavy heart she puts him down with her katana; a little
extra salt in the wound for any die-hard Herschel fans. She proceeds to find
herself two new zombie pets by removing their arms and jaws and is on her way.
I’ve said it
before, that the way that characters act in The
Walking Dead is not always based in logic. Carl is mad at his dad and
understandably so, but has he also forgotten that Rick has just been shot and
is barely on his feet? Carl walks fifteen feet ahead of limping and bleeding
Rick who just barely manages to keep up.
We see a lot of
father son tension between Rick and Carl throughout After. We see Carl act like an angry teenager for the first time
and we witness Michonne’s existential crisis as she claws her way out of an
enveloping depression.
Rick and Carl discover an abandoned
neighborhood. At the first house Rick, the ever-vigilant father, tells Carl to
stay outside while he makes sure it’s safe. Carl retorts by telling Rick that
he should wait outside so that he doesn’t slow Carl down. It is clear that father and son are not seeing
eye to eye.
Meanwhile,
Michonne and her new pets have joined a heard of walkers. Michonne walks among
them and we see her in almost a functional catatonic state. She spots a walker
with weaves that looks like her. She sees herself in the walker and it snaps
her out of her daze, she proceeds to massacre the entire herd and is off to
track an unknown set of footprints, presumably someone from the prison.
Carl’s journey
here is somewhat of a age story, he rejects his father and struggles clumsily
to prove himself as a man. Once Rick passes out and Carl is on his own we see
him insert himself in situations that he is clearly not equip to handle on the
basis that he is now an adult. There is a moment when Carl walks into a room
and admires a room full of video games, posters, and books where he is reminded
of the life that he missed out on. He smiles and then sighs, and proceeds to salvage
the television’s power chord to secure the house’s front door.
The episode ends
on a surprisingly optimistic note as Rick wakes up from his long sleep and Carl
comes to terms with the fact that he’s still a child. They are sitting on the
floor having a father, son moment when they hear MIchonne knock on the front
door. Rick sees her through the peak hole, smiles, looks and Carl and says,
“It’s for you.”
Now that
characters are finding each other, lets hope that The Walking Dead can maintain
its momentum in episodes to come for the second half of Season. As we all know,
small victories and momentary bursts of hope are being constantly ripped away
from these unlucky people for the sake of our entertainment, after all we can’t have them
being happy for too long.
Two examples of Erik Kane’s previous reviews:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/02/24/the-walking-dead-season-4-episode-11-review-claimed/
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