The Walking Dead Season 2, Episode 7: “Pretty Much Dead Already”
Previously: There are walkers in the barn. “They’re not people.” Carol appreciates Daryl. Shane sacrificed a man’s life. Dale suspects this. Lori is pregnant, and she also had an affair with Shane.
Note: my recap of this episode is not going to be as exhaustive as previous ones have been, because I just haven’t had the time this week. BUT! I did put some general review-type thoughts at the end.
Everyone is gloomily hanging out at the campsite, eating and sharpening knives and stuff. After exchanging a look with Dale, Glenn, with only, “So, guys” by way of preamble, announces that there are zombies in the barn.
Cut to the barn. Yes, there are zombies in there. The group discusses the situation. Shane wants to either kill all the barn zombies or leave the farm. Rick and the others do not want to leave because they have not yet found Sophia. They all spend the rest of the scene loudly fighting outside a rickety barn full of zombies, which doesn’t seem like the best idea.
Bear McCreary’s Strings of Doom and Destruction. Credits.
Shane considers the zombie barn and the strength of its locks. And the strength of the undead inside.
Glenn tries to get Maggie to talk to him; she smashes an egg on his head.
Lori is tutoring Carl with math books, who knows where she got them. Carl declares that he doesn’t want to leave the farm until they find Sophia, and not even after that.
Daryl is saddling up in the stable. Carol doesn’t want him to hurt himself further and indicates two things: she doesn’t believe her daughter is alive, and she doesn’t want to lose Daryl, too. Daryl reacts to this moment of intimacy by knocking over his saddle, hurting himself in the process, and calling her a bitch.
RV. Glenn is keeping watch atop it. Inside, Andrea is getting ready to take a watch down by the barn, and Dale warns her about Shane. ”Is that how you want to be, like him?” Dale asks her. “He’s not a victim,” Andrea replies. After she leaves, Glenn asks Dale to keep watch while he takes a water break; Dale examines the cache of weapons on the RV table.
Farmhouse. Hershel is eating lunch when Rick knocks on the door. Hershel seems to be reading the Bible. Rick tells Hershel they know about the barn. Hershel doesn’t want to talk about it. Rick wants to stay at the farm. Hershel doesn’t want to talk about that either.
Zombie barn. Shane keeps watch. Rick approaches. Shane wants to know how soon he can go to town on those zombies. Rick says they’re still “negotiating” and that the barn is secure. Shane is not buying it. More fighting.
Farmhouse kitchen. Hershel tries to explain himself to Maggie, who lays some pretty good Biblical knowledge on her own fundie dad, saying that Jesus commanded them to love others. Which, she reminds him, was what Hershel told 14-year-old Maggie when he remarried and brought new people into the house. The underlying question in this scene, like the RV scene with Dale and Andrea, is “Who are you going to be when the world falls apart?” Which is a good sign to me, because it indicates this show is developing some thematic awareness.
Hershel gets Rick to join him and Jimmy in a zombie-wrangling exercise. But before we get to that, we get a boring scene with Shane and Lori where Shane tries to convince Lori that her husband is crap leader. He also knows about the baby and thinks it’s his. Oh boy. This is going to help the situation.
On his way away from Lori, Shane has a tête-a-tête with a Sheriff’s-hat-wearing Carl, who tells Shane that he believes in the Search for Sophia, and he wants Shane to believe as well. Given that Shane wants the Alpha Male Leader Role which includes being the Designated Father Figure to Carl Role, Shane says he is on board with this. Shane goes tot he RV to get some guns and finds that they are gone! Shane knows his nemesis Dale took them.
Down by the river, Hershel is giving Rick a crash course in zombie-wrangling, using poles with loops on the end — I think they’re used for livestock. Or cleaning pools. Or for rescuing people from pools. IDK. Hershel’s zombified neighbours are stuck in the riverbed mud.
Down by another river, Daryl shows Carol another appearance of the Cherokee Rose. He also apologizes for earlier. Carol asks her why Daryl still wants to look for her missing daughter; Daryl says it’s because he thinks she’s out there, and besides, he doesn’t have much else to keep him busy. Carol lovingly strokes the bloom, and says, “We’ll find her. We will. I see it.” By the end of the episode, of course, we learn that entire statement is true. Horribly true.
Zombie-wrangling. It’s less fun than it sounds.
Glenn makes another go at getting Maggie to talk to him. She reiterates that she is not pleased that he told everyone about the barn zombies after she asked him for “one thing.” She’s mad about this because now her dad is going to kick them out. But Glenn takes a dudely stand and tells Maggie that he wanted to tell his group the truth in part because of the talking-to Maggie gave him last episode — he has been willing to be “walker-bait” because he forgets how dangerous the zombies are, “whether they’re sick people or dead people.” And he wasn’t going to tolerate having a couple dozen of them within a hundred yards of his friends’ encampment. He’d rather have Maggie alive and pissed then dead. Needless to say, Maggie responds very well to this display of assertiveness and the two of them get with the smooches.
Shane tracks down Dale, who is hiding the guns in the forest (I think to keep Shane from using the guns to kill all the barn zombies, therefore resulting in their eviction from Hershel Farms. Though I can’t really think what Dale is thinking just leaving all their guns in the woods). The interaction results in Dale threatening to shoot Shane, and Shane daring Dale to do it (which he doesn’t). Dale says it’s OK that he doesn’t have what it takes to make it very long, because “at least I can say when the world went to shit, I didn’t let it take me down with it.”
At the farmhouse, everyone’s wondering where Rick is. And there’s Shane, carrying the bag of guns, handing them out to everyone. He wants to go clean out the barn. No one wants him to, because they know doing so will result in their eviction. And just then, Hershel, Rick and Jimmy (it’s Jimmy, right? Or is it another random teenage boy?) return with their pet river zombies. Shane’s agitation level is rising. So is Hershel’s, as he immediately notices that everyone has guns. Shane is ranting and raving. To demonstrate to Hershel that zombies are, in fact, dead, he shoots the captive (lady) zombie half a dozen times in the chest (to no effect, of course) before finally destroying it with a shot to the head. Shane is full on lathered now. He starts hacking at the lock of the barn. Because Rick is still holding his pole-tethered zombie, and he can’t seem to get anyone to take the pole from him, Rick cannot physically go and stop Shane. And frankly, it seems like no one really wants to, because Shane is holding a mean-looking pickaxe and he is acting really, really out-of-control. So he succeeds in unlocking the door and out come the zombies. Since he’s given everyone guns, everyone shoots. Glenn asks Maggie for permission to shoot, too, and she tearfully gives it. Only then does Shane shoots Rick’s be-poled pet-river zombie.
When the shooting is over, at least 13 zombies lie (really) dead on the ground. Dale returns just in time to hear some more zombie growling coming from the barn. Two sneaker-shod feet emerge. It’s Sophia, undead. Carol sobs while Daryl holds her. Lori holds Carl and urges him not to watch. No one moves but Rick, who comes forward to put the little girl down with a single point-blank shot.
And there’s your mid-season finale.
A better episode than most of what we’ve had for the first seven episodes of the second season. For most of it, the show was trying to be the kind of thinky, talky philosophical post-apocalyptic tale, and it didn’t work. Throughout all these episodes, I’ve been resisting the urge to compare this show to another 2000s-era post-apocalyptic series — Battlestar Galactica. That show was a character not plot driven show (listen to the commentaries and hear showrunner Ron Moore point out the times he ditched plot in favour of character material), but it very rarely had the clunky, wheel-spinning feel that Walking Dead does more often than not. I want TWD to be a character-driven show, but I want it to be driven by the characters’ actions, not their words — especially not words delivered while whiling away days in an idyllic farm setting.
The Sophia story is very different from what happened in the comics, and it was a nice point of diversion, even if the execution (over the many episodes) was tedious. Once the zombies started pouring out of the barn, it was pretty clear to me that Sophia would bring up the rear (and I think one of the zombies we saw peering through the door near the start of the episode was Sophia, but she was unrecognizable at that time).
But Sophia’s appearance in the barn raises some questions. Apparently there was a preview for the next episode that indicated that no one in Clan Hershel knew about Sophia in the barn because it was Otis who put her there. The alternative is that Hershel did know Sophia was in there, but he was so invested in keeping his zombified friends and family “alive” that he did not want to risk Rick & Co. learning about the barn zombies. And he didn’t want to reveal zombie Sophia to Rick, because Rick would do what he did in this epsiode, end her unlife, going against Hershel’s right-to-unlife values. This discussion will just go in circles and we won’t know until the show returns in February, so it’s probably best not to think about it too much.
So let’s change the subject. This episode took time to put a question of ethics to Hershel — is it OK to turn away refugees just because they complicate your life? Same for Shane and Dale (do you shoot whomever you want in defense of the people closest to you?). When the world ends, what kind of person will you be? And will that person be able to survive? This is a central post-apocalyptic theme that the show has not touched on heavily before (or maybe just not that effectively, with the whole Lori pregnancy storyline and her questioning bringing a new person into a horrible world). It has, however, been a central theme of the comics, where Robert Kirkman has spent 90 issues asking the question, what do you have to become to survive? Should you become it? Are you still human if you do?
But to really delve into that theme, you have to put the characters in tougher situations. Most of this season has basically amounted to an unpleasant camping trip; speed up the timeline and put these characters in peril, and then we’ll see what this show can be.
