The Walking Dead took as much flak in its mid-season premiere as the entire first half of the season for not delivering enough zombie gore. With the second episode since the show’s return, ‘Triggerfinger,’ guns and gore are back in a big way.
Whether ‘Triggerfinger’ delivered enough violence to appease those seeking it is up for debate. Regardless, Greg Nicotero and his makeup effects crew put forth a memorable effort in numerous scenes. The best for me was the slight zombie cheek peel that happened as Lori was face-to-face with a zombie trying to squeeze through her windshield like a mouse in a tight hole.
That little bit of business to kick off ‘Triggerfinger’ completely exemplifies the type of zombies that the people in The Walking Dead are facing: relentless. There wasn’t an attempt, then complete berserker mode slamming into the windshield, then trying to find another entryway. It was just a consistent, persistent, and relentless press forward which is far scarier than the other method.
When faced with a dire situation like what Lori found herself in, a feeling of being cornered or trapped kicks in and there’s panic that can incapacitate most people. The fear doesn’t necessarily kick in the Fight or Flight thought process as opposed to the bash/smash/consume which lends more to tapping into someone’s adrenaline.
I was impressed with Lori in how she handled taking on two zombies on her own. In fact, this episode went a long way to redeeming her character in my eyes. Not that I’m not going to cheer when her inevitable end comes, but for now I’m happy to see that she made it out of that situation un-zombified. Shane probably went a long way to maintaining her status among the NOT undead by reeling her in with a fib about Rick’s safety.
Was Shane letting it out that Lori was pregnant in front of Carl an accident? No, I don’t think it was. While Shane is letting his passions and primal emotions dictate a lot of his actions in regards to survival and justice, he is still a very cold and calculating character so I don’t think it was a casual slip. Carl took the news fairly well, almost reveling in the possibility of being a big brother. I think his talk with Lori helped assuage Lori’s concerns that Carl was becoming too cold in their current world. Asking her to name the child Sophia if it were a girl warmed her heart a bit and made for a good Mother/Son moment that you don’t see a lot of on the show. There are a lot of moments between the two, but mostly it involves Carl being in a coma, or Lori trying to assure him that no one else they know is going to become Zombie grub.
Rick, Glenn and Hershel quickly find themselves holed up in the bar back in town shortly after Rick disposes of Tony and Dave. They are about to make their way to their car when they hear the rest of Dave and Tony’s crew looking for their friends. Silence is the first tactic, but when the crew double back and go to search the bar, Glenn dives in front of the door, shutting it on them.
At that point anyone would have figured out that there were people in the bar, but for some reason the writers had the group hem and haw over whether or not the door just shut or was shut by someone to keep them out. As they call out to whoever is inside, Andrew Lincoln does an excellent job portraying his struggle between what is morally right and what is the right choice for the situation.
If you’ve ever studied Game Theory (sometimes used in Economics, Mathematics, and Political Science as the empirical study of choices and predicting outcomes), you would have learned that sometimes the best course of action that maximizes your security level (aka minimizes damage/risk) isn’t always the morally correct choice. In this case, Rick could have kept his mouth shut until they moved on (which I would say is the correct choice for their situation seeing as they just shot their buddies dead) or he could have told them what happened and tried to reason with them (the morally correct choice).
The scene was dragged out perfectly as each time Rick’s head bobbed or his lips pursed as if he were going to speak, I wanted to scream “SHUT UP, MORON!” at the TV. Of course, Rick being Rick, he doesn’t and it completely backfires on him. Not only do they start firing on them, but once Walkers (or Roamers as the new group called them) start to descend on the town, the group bolts leaving one of their own with his leg impaled on a fence as a result of a failed parkour landing attempt.
With Walkers closing in fast and Hershel’s idea to amputate the leg in a nearby shed evaporating by the second, Rick violently separates leg and fence and they end up bringing the kid, Randall, to the farm for treatment. This sparks quite a little debate amongst Shane, Rick, and Herschel to which Herschel man’s up and tells Shane very matter of factly to shut the hell up.
There have been two camps forming within our Survivor Group; Team Rick and Team Shane (please excuse the overdone use of Team ###, but it does fit here), with some like Andrea siding on the action/reaction versus reason/logic approach to their situation which would be Team Shane. Darryl, while he hasn’t said flat out, I don’t think, that he prefers Shane over Rick, does seem to share the same methodology lately especially with the resolution of the Sophia storyline.
I think Carol and Dale should open up a therapy business where they just stand there and let people scream and vent their internal dialogue until they feel better about themselves. I will say that Darryl was definitely much crueler to Carol than Shane was to Dale, but it was pretty much the same thing.
The episode ends with Lori, in hushed tones, telling Rick that Shane has lost it and sees her, Carl, and her baby as his, and that Rick needs to protect them at any cost. Maybe she’s honestly fearing for her life, but the whole thing seemed to be more her getting in Rick’s head and using him to handle Shane. Perhaps the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but the whole thing seemed really devious to me.
The preview for next week’s episode does show Rick throw a punch at Shane, but Shane handling him fairly easily (I’m not going to comment on the clip that played during the HORRENDOUS Comic Book Men because I really don’t want to direct anyone to that show if I can help it). Here’s why Rick, though, is far scarier to me than Shane: Doctor Who and Jedis.
In ‘A Good Man Goes To War’, The Doctor tells Madame Kovarian that a Good Man doesn’t need rules, but that she shouldn’t push him because she’ll find out why he has so many. The argument can be made that we are all primal and vicious creatures at our core, but what separates us from the animal is our ability to suppress those urges and use reason rather than violence to solve our differences. Those “rules” we put in place are also what usually separate Good vs. Evil in the traditional tale of the Hero’s Journey.
This is also where the Jedi portion comes in. Vader was the most powerful Jedi/Sith around, even more powerful than Darth Sidious, so how did he get punked by Luke in Return of the Jedi? Was it because he didn’t want to kill his only son? Maybe, but at that point he was still firmly under Sidious’ control.
A more viable solution can be found also in Master Windu’s preferred fighting style which has a Jedi, in a controlled way, lose themselves to their emotions and almost tap into that Dark Side energy to obliterate their opponent, which is pretty much what Luke does. He loses his mind once Vader threatens his sister and takes him out.
Rick has a lot of rules put in place to keep him from losing control, but at the same time he wants to. It bubbles up to the surface, but he suppresses it. What is going to happen when all of that becomes too much and Shane really does threaten the one thing that means more to him than anything in his world: his family? It isn’t going to spell a happy ending for Shane, in fact I would go so far as to say that we may see him go the way of Otis fairly soon.
– James Zappie
