The Walking Dead: Season One finale featured its fair share of explosions yet it certainly did not follow the usually season-ending model. There was no villain for the characters to come together to face and aside from its final few minutes, there was little sense of impending doom. Those hoping for a zombie-battling action spectacular will have been disappointed.
That being said, ‘TS-19’ was the perfect way to conclude what has been a superb first season. Like many of the episodes that have preceded it, the focus is not on the zombies themselves or the threat they represent, but how the disease outbreak has affected the world and the way characters see it.
For the last five episodes Rick has been able to cling to the hope that parts of civilization remain and that there will be some way to restore order. He had hoped to find scientists hard at work on a cure at the Center for Disease Control, yet instead he finds a lone scientist who has given up hope and who tells him that as far as he knows there is no government structure left anywhere. Dr. Jenner tells him that the human race is almost extinct.
Once again the biggest threat to Rick and the other survivors is not something physical but rather a psychological question. If they believe human society cannot be salvaged do they want to go on living and risk a painful death at the hand of the zombie hordes? Or would they rather die quickly in relative dignity? By the episode’s end each of the characters has to make the choice and a slightly depleted group will be left to face whatever comes next with little knowledge of where they are headed.
The psychological challenge is much greater for some characters than others. The characters I labeled as survivalists in my response to last week’s episode (Shane and Daryl) have already come to terms with the destruction of civilization and so Jenner’s revelation has little impact on them. Many of the others though had kept faith in the idea that there might be a way to have a fresh start. To them the knowledge that there is nothing left leaves them with no desire to go on.
Of the group, it is Rick who is most threatened by Jenner’s revelation, even though there is no moment in which he considers staying. Every action he has taken since the pilot has been led by the belief that he can salvage his old life; first that he can find his wife and son, then that he can find civilization. In the course of this episode he admits that he was faking his confidence, acknowledging that he had to appear strong for the sake of the group. By the end of the finale the group knows that he was never as confident as he claimed to be, potentially eroding their belief in him.
One thing Rick remains oblivious to is the tension between his wife Lori and his best friend Shane. While he is in the control room talking to Jenner, a drunken Shane attempts to talk to Lori about what happened between them before trying to force himself on her. Though she is able to escape him, clearly Shane remains highly unstable and Lori, by not telling Rick about what happened, is left exposed. Indeed, one of the most affecting moments of the episode comes after Shane’s attempt when Rick lies down next to a crying Lori in bed and, attempting to comfort her, tells her that she is safe at last. We know differently and we’ll have to wait for the second season to see whether Rick will come to recognize the threat Shane poses both to his marriage and to his wife’s safety.
One thing this episode did do was it gave us a clearer understanding of the circumstances leading up to Shane telling Lori that Rick was dead and how he came to survive the zombie infestation of the hospital unharmed. The sequence, which played at the start of the episode, not only did a good job of clarifying what exactly happened to Rick in the hospital but it was a dramatic opening to the episode as we saw an army unit sweep through the hospital, shooting anything that moved.
It is one of the frustrations of the series that in its brief run it has set up many interesting plot points, yet we will have to wait almost a year to see them progressed. While the love triangle is addressed in this episode, we have not heard more than a line or two in reference to Merle for the last few episodes while Morgan and his son remain at large, presumably about to make their way into Atlanta to find Rick.
Though the idea of waiting a year to find out what will happen next is frustrating, I think any of those story lines would have suffered from being addressed too quickly. Thankfully the next season will have double the episodes to play around with and I think Merle’s return, whenever it comes, will be all the stronger for the additional build-up and time that Darabont and company will be able to give it.
If this season had ended with a conclusion with Merle it would inevitably have felt rushed and come at the expense of the story threads that the last few episodes have worked hard to put into place. Instead I appreciated the choice to focus on the characters, further exploring the season’s key themes, providing some important answers, posing some new questions (most notably, what did Jenner whisper to Rick?) and forcing the characters to make a choice about their future.
As a finale for this first season of The Walking Dead, ‘TS-19’ did exactly what I had hoped for and left me hugely excited to see what the second season will bring us.
– Aidan Brack
Watch The Walking Dead: Season One on-demand right now at Amazon.com.
