The dead are still walking. They’re probably not going to stop any time soon. The question is, where are they walking to? As I watched a herd of said dead beasties stagger slowly along a ruined highway a few nights ago, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly where they were heading off to, and after a while it dawned on me that I wasn’t just being facetious and that this was a metaphor for the series as a whole. The Walking Dead comic that inspires the series (and which I have read in its current entirety during the season break) delights in sending its characters through hell a few times and then finally killing them off, and there’s still no end in sight. Happy endings are rare, and the vicious delight of observation is in the journey – the lack of movement in the first season, which I otherwise enjoyed perhaps a bit too much (my overlong love letter to Robert Kirkman and Frank Darabont can still be found here), being my principal complaint. But where will it end?
For now, we’re back with Rick Grimes and co. as they attempt to find safe haven. Since at the end of the last season the CDC turned out to be the doomed recluse of a mad scientist, they’re back out in the world, and stuck in traffic. The highway they were taking to their next port in the storm is blocked by a huge traffic jam, the origins of which are never ascertained and which therefore exists purely to stop any progress from being made. Still, all of these cars are full of fuel and scavengable stuffs, so maybe this is a blessing in disguise, right? We have to make the best of the new terrible situation in which we find ourselves, and, well, these guys don’t need this stuff anymore, since they’re all dead. But not the walking dead, which is interesting.
In the comics, anyone who dies, be it by being eaten, shot or even of natural causes, comes back as a z-word (which I’m pretty sure they still didn’t say in this episode). The series, however, doesn’t seem to be going with this, as there were a lot of dead people who were just that, dead, in this traffic jam. I guess they must be following the more traditional ‘get bitten, get zombie’ path of five hundred thousand million zombie franchises of the past. This is kind of disappointing, since well, logically, being attacked by zombies is a pretty unrealistic (bear with me) way of becoming a zombie yourself, as you’re far more likely to simply get torn apart than lightly chewed. The ‘everyone is a zombie eventually’ aspect of the comics also had some interesting nihilistic implications, which I’m sorry to see go. I’ll be even more sorry right now, though, if all these dead guys are handwaved and they still go with this later on. I know that the series thus far hasn’t been gifted with sterling writing, what with the first season’s ‘let’s go get Dixon, actually fuck him let’s get out of here’ plot, and Lori.. bloody Lori.
The queen of illogical motivations and absurdities is back on full form in this episode, much to my completely unsurprised disappointment. Faced with the initial dilemma of whether it is right to steal from the dead guys in the cars, Lori is the only person to hesitate. When she voices her concerns, all of the other characters and 7.3 million viewers look at her with a completely baffled expression. Seriously, is she for real? Against all the odds, it gets worse later on. She snipes a little at Shane in a disproportionately dull response to his attempted rape episode last season, and then, after blowing off her son after he extracts a belt of useful weaponry from a dead guy, yells at Shane for blowing him off as well.
Lori; shut the fuck up and hide under the cars, because there’s a herd of zombies approaching. I loved this part, with everyone cowering in terror as the beasties shuffled by in a wonderfully tense moment that seemed to go on forever, and featured some beautifully grotesque eyeball piercing on Andrea’s behalf after she got cornered in the RV. Andrea had a lot of scenes with guns, and more precisely moaning pathetically about how she had her gun confiscated, this week, which foreshadows her comic-book-future as a badass sharpshooter, and also got to have a showdown with Dale about his dragging her back to the world of the living last season. In short, she is not happy about this, and later colludes with Shane, who is planning to ditch the group and get out of town before fate catches up with him and he ends up in a shallow grave. I don’t really think that either of them will leave, even though the ‘next time’ teaser trailer suggested that the group would be splitting up. I’m all for this, as the comics have never told any stories outside of the singular group of survivors, and a bit of additional perspective on the wider world of the zombie apocalypse would be nice. Last season’s CDC adventure highlighted some of the global implications of what’s gone down, but here the catastrophe once again feels remarkably cosy.
It even seems like we’re going to get out of this episode’s zombie drive-by with everyone intact, until one of the stragglers sends the little girl Sophia running and screaming into the forest. Rick goes into instant hero mode, chasing her and taking down her pursuers, but in that time Sophia herself vanishes, and then the rest of the episodes devolves into lots of hiking through the woods and characters sneering at each other, a rather disappointing turn of events after the sublime opening. There is a wonderfully grotesque scene that continues The Walking Dead’s ‘one freak-out moment per episode’ ratio, when Rick and Daryl (who continues to be awesome and demands a bigger role) disembowel a zombie to see if it has munched on our missing girl, and another tense little moment with a red herring tent, but for the most part, it feels a lot like stalling. The reveal that on Dale’s part, it really is stalling, since he fixed the errant RV ages ago, serves to endear his character as the emotional core of the group, lying to them so that they don’t think about moving on and leaving poor Sophia behind, but no-one else comes across as particularly sympathetic until near the end, when Lori, of all people, confronts the naysayers and yells them down in a speech that is possibly the first time ever that she has actively supported Rick, and also the first time ever that I have ever cared about her. Maybe her earlier idiocy was a ham-fisted attempt to degrade the viewer’s opinions so that this outburst can be more redemptive, but it was still not exactly elegant. Nonetheless, Lori rises in my opinion somewhat, if begrudgingly.
In the end, after a short interlude at a church that leads to a nice scene of Rick angrily pleading with God for a sign that he was doing the right thing, a scene that irresistibly reminded me of The West Wing’s second season finale (but not as good), his son Carl gets to have a cute, peaceful moment with a wild deer, and then get shot. Talk about mixed signals.
And that is that. The only other instance of note is the episode’s title. The first episode of the first season borrowed the title of the comic volume that it adapted – ‘Days Gone Bye’. This episode, however, inverted the title of its source material – ‘Miles Behind Us’ becomes ‘What Lies Ahead’, referring to what is still to come instead of what has already happened. It would be nice and neat if the last episode of this season bears the original title, but then that all depends on how this season’s journey plays out. For now, I remain cautiously optimistic, especially since it seems like next week we’ll be getting some new characters, and with a bit of luck, a new direction.
