If you were a fan of the comic book Bone, odds are it was at least in part because of "Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures". These monsters, having at least some capacity for intellect (and, in theory, quiche), were still entirely capable of doing the dumbest things from time to time.
But in Bone, they at least did it in pursuit of a specific goal. Their fault was that they did dumb things as a result of being overly focused --- like, for example, leaping onto the very thin branch of a very tall tree in an attempt to eat the comic's main protagonist. All three fall out of the tree, with the protag yelling the "stupid, stupid" line, their idiocy being likely to have killed them all.
The Walking Dead, right up to the end of Season Two, is loaded with such moments.
Which is a damn shame. Everything else about the show is excellent. I love the characters, I love the dialogue, I love the tension of conflicted relationships, and of course I love the friggin' plague-motivated zombies. There's such attention to detail, here, that it's easy to get caught up in the show from moment to moment.
The problem is that the show's writing ALSO seems to get caught up and lost in it.
It's like the writers are so fascinated with the amazing navels they've produced for themselves, that they can't stand up and look around until someone says "oh, by the way, the season's coming to a close... do something extra-dramatic". The result: characters often do whatever would be most dramatic, as opposed to what would make some kind of sense. Sometimes, these two things happen to dovetail, but almost by serendipity rather than intent.
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Let's examine a few problems with Season Two in this regard, SO SPOILERS AHOY:
1) SHANE HAS TO DIE
One of the key dramatic elements of the show to this point was that police officer Rick (the nominal leader of our ragtag band of survivors) had been in a coma when the zombie plague broke out. Shane, his partner, comforted his wife during the collapse of society, to the point that the two got it on. There's a lot of Guilt and Secrecy and Knowing Looks, all against the backdrop of a do-or-die survival story, creating mondo tension.
And it was good.
But, apparently, that cow finally ran dry. During Season Two, Rick's wife determines she's pregnant. More secrecy, and lies, and carrying on, inevitably ensue.
Shane, throughout Season One and into Season Two, has been losing faith in Rick as a leader because Rick keeps making decisions that get members of the group killed. Worse, it's not just that he makes bad calls --- but that he does so "from the heart", at times dumping all sense of logic and even his own experience as a police officer out the window.
In short, he waffles on long-range planning while excelling at tactical snap-decisions during an immediate crisis. He can get people out of trouble, but he's not very good at avoiding or planning for it in the first place. In the end, he relies so heavily on luck that it almost requires deus ex machina to ensure there even IS a Season Two for this show.
Worse, when Shane brings his concerns to his best friend and long-time partner, he gets nothing but a load of platitudes in response. Rick's concern is that his leadership is being questioned; with rare exception, he essentially pats Shane on the head and shushes him. So Shane is already worried for everyone in the group, not the least of which being Rick's wife --- whom he still loves and wishes he could have to himself --- and now this concern is exacerbated by Rick's poor record of decision-making.
This tasty little stew is brought to a boil in Season Two, when Shane discovers that Rick's wife is pregnant. It could, in fact, be his. And because Rick keeps blowing him off, including after yet another bad call which gets people killed (see Point #2 below), he is driven to drastic steps to protect himself, his unborn child, and the woman he still loves.
I had a lot of sympathy for Shane's viewpoint. I imagine a lot of viewers did.
So, in order to nip that in the bud, the writers made Shane into a murderer several episodes before the pregnancy issue was even introduced. His character is made darker, grimmer, less likable or supportable, because we're going to kill him off by the end of the season, see?
I really hate deus ex machina writing. Even when it's wrapped around an otherwise excellent story. And this story arc is loaded with it.
"BAMBI MOMENTS" AND YOU
All of this is set up with a goddamned "Bambi Moment".
A Bambi Moment is when someone is in the wild, sees wildlife, and approaches it with the same attitude as though they had just left a screening of Bambi. Wildlife is innocent, playful, a victim of humanity's essential evil, and if we could just reach out and touch it we would regain some of our lost innocence blah blah blah yakkity-schmakkity.
In real life, about half-a-dozen people are gored to death every year by deer who respond to someone invading their personal space in the same way deer do with everything else: with a good solid poke from their ANTLERS. That's what the damn things are for, you idiots.
So Rick, Shane, and Rick's kid Carl come upon a deer in the woods. When it doesn't run away, Carl approaches it while his dad and his dad's best friend stand there going "d'awwwww".
Frankly, I was expecting the deer to gore the kid. Instead, a hunter somewhere past the deer puts a round clean through it --- and right into Carl. The hunter, Otis, leads Rick to the farmhouse which Season Two revolves around, where a country veterinarian removes the bullet fragments and sews the kid up. But they still need advanced medical gear to save him. Otis, a former paramedic, knows where to get the stuff and how to identify it.
How convenient. We're given a reason to go to the farmhouse, we're given a new character who just happens to have the crucial information to save a child's life, and oh by the way he's a fat guy. This is important later.
DEATH BY BAD WRITING
Shane and Otis go to get the medical stuff, but the school and clinic where it is has been overrun by zombies. Initially able to distract them with flares, they grab the gear, but then get cut off and split up trying to get back out. There's a long sequence of hiding and evasion, culminating in the two linking back up outside and making for their truck.
Here's where things go not just stupid, but "Stupid, Stupid": the zombie horde is huge, so Shane and Otis have no real chance of killing enough of them before running out of ammo. But they STILL slow down and turn around, sometimes stopping entirely, to shoot the closest ones. All this did was let the remainder of the horde close the gap, unimpeded.
If they'd just kept moving forward, they'd have been in no danger, despite Shane's limp. I guarantee that limping forward is faster than limping backward. It also attracted more zombies with the noise of gunfire... so, yeah, Stupid Stupid Rat Creatures.
So why did they do it? Because they needed a reason for the horde to get close enough, so Shane would be "forced" to kill Otis as a distraction. After all, Otis is fat and having trouble breathing and slowing Shane down...
...well, he would be, if it weren't for that limp making Shane just as slow, so I guess Otis being fat really wasn't an important point after all. For a limp-less Shane, it could have been the reason for the killing, but in the end? Not really.
Oh, but Shane doesn't JUST kill Otis. No, he does it in such a way as to be completely nonsensical: he shoots Otis in the leg, presumably to slow him down further. Then grabs his gun, struggles with him, and fires off the last shot. THEN wrestles Otis' bag of medical gear away. Spending all that time, when he could have just shot him in the head; it's not like the zombies really care much if their distraction-meal is moving or not.
So Shane turns to leave him to his grisly fate... and the truck is right f***ing THERE.
In the time it took to shoot Otis, grapple with him, and get the bag, they could just as easily have gotten away in the truck together. If this'd been a Left4Dead match and I was the equivalent of Otis, I'd be raging at the teamkilling douchebag. There was no point to the killing at all.
Weeeeell... except we needed that reason to dislike Shane. A reason that he couldn't really be forgiven, a crime worthy of capital punishment. Which brings us to:
THE ASS-PULL
It's a Trope, look it up.
See, Shane and Otis went off by themselves. No witnesses to the betrayal. Shane comes up with a reasonable enough cover story. That should be the end of it, save for any guilt issues.
Except that the old guy of the group, Dale, just plain decides out of nowhere that Shane killed Otis. No reasoning. Just "something doesn't sit right" in Shane's story, and suddenly he knows that Shane killed off Otis to distract the zombie horde. He's even able to shop that story around to other members of the group, successfully undermining Shane's reputation in their eyes.
In defense of the story at this point, Shane's taken a dark turn himself over the killing and become more ruthless --- but not stupidly so, not yet. He's just a lot less willing to put up with Rick's continual waffling. It makes Dale's story more believable for the other members of the group, watching Shane's downhill trend --- but how the hell did he come up with the idea in the first place? And it's still a load of assumptions, even if they just so happen to be absolutely correct.
All of which finally brings us to Point #2.
2) The Search for Sophia
A little girl, daughter of one of our group's members, gets separated in the zombie-infested woods from the rest of the group. It would be heartless to move on and not at least try looking for her...
...so, Rick stops the entire group, dead in its tracks, until they do.
Okay, you know, a few days' searching is fine. But it's not just a few days. It's at least a week, where they are stopped on the highway, having already been hit by a migrating herd of undead in the same spot. Hell, they're still there even after Sophia's mother has begun to resign herself to the idea that her daughter is dead.
In clinical terms, this is called "asking for it".
It's because Rick won't give up the search, badgering everyone else into staying and looking, that they're still in the area when Carl has his Bambi Moment and gets shot. Leading to the farmhouse, Otis' murder, et cetera. Most of Season Two revolves around life at the farm, which has managed so far to escape a zombie incursion by sheer cussed luck... well, sort of.
Rick insists on staying at the farm, using it as a base to maintain the search for Sophia, after which point some evidence is discovered to suggest she may still be alive. Thus, they're given a stronger reason to stay, despite the desire of the locals that they leave.
And why, besides the obvious, is their departure desired?
Because the veterinarian who saves Carl's life also believes that the whole zombie thing is just an illness. He's been rounding up the few that wander near his farm and sticking them in an old barn, going so far as to feed them with live chickens until "the sickness runs its course". Some of these zombies are his family, too. So he doesn't want them discovered and killed by the group.
Whoops! That didn't last terribly long, did it? The zombies are discovered, there's a huge to-do about it, and while the group is still trying to figure out what to do about it, Rick goes off to help grab more zombies for barn storage, out of sheer courtesy to the locals. Even he has kind of a "what am I doing?" look on his face when he and the others emerge from the woods with a restraining loop around a zombie's neck.
Shane responds by forcing the issue, setting up a firing line and breaking the barn open. The zombies are shot down, with Shane himself pumping rounds into one in order to demonstrate how this is not "just a sickness" to the old veterinarian.
Well, you know, that's just darn-well over the line, isn't it?
Zombie apocalypse? Can't be doing the smart thing, now. We have to be considerate about the delusions of others, because we're guests on their farm and all.
So Rick gets up in Shane's grill about it, with more platitudes and head-patting.
Shane's response to that is to decide that Rick is going to get them all killed by being butt-stupid. I can't say I disagree with that rationale.
3) HOW NOT TO DEAL WITH RAIDERS
Season Two's climax is set up when a roving band of survivors shows up in town, and everyone involved in the key events decides that it's cool to be dumb.
THE SHOOTOUT
The veterinarian, Herschel, has finally come to terms with his own stupidity about the plague. So of course he goes into town, the one overrun with zombies, to get stinking drunk by himself in a bar. Rick and the group's scavenger-extraordinaire, Glenn, go after him.
While the three are finishing up a good old heart-to-heart, two guys from Jersey walk in. There's a little tension, then everyone relaxes, and one of the Jersey guys starts asking about Rick's group. Rick clams up, the Jersey guy presses, makes some educated guesses, starts talking in more desperate terms. Rick stays mum.
Then for no reason at all, the Jersey guys go for their guns. Why not just walk out? What would shooting anyone gain, except the attention of the nearest zombie horde? Well, for whatever reason, Rick guns them down, being a much faster draw.
But before they can leave, the badguys' buddies show up looking for them, try to walk in the door, and Glenn leaps across to barricade it. Although it shouldn't work, it does; the newcomers argue amongst themselves, shouting through the door and at each other until they actually talk themselves into leaving.
Can't have that! Having said nothing to this point, Rick then shouts, "they drew on us!".
Yes. Because one, they will certainly believe that, and two, you needed to say it at all because what --- you felt guilty or something? All Rick needed to do was keep his damn mouth shut, but no, NOW there's a bunch of guys out there with a reason to stick around and avenge their fallen. Only the show's writers know why Rick thought he'd just be taken at his word through a closed door, without even showing them the bodies or his face.
So we segue into a pointless siege, which ends only because the zombie horde has been attracted and the Jersey guys' friends are running for it. One of them falls off a roof and impales his leg on a wrought-iron fence with a big-ass barb at the top.
THAT POOR DAMN KID
So what's Rick do? Why, insist on saving the kid who was shooting at them, of course! How noble!
Um, but he's hung up on that fence. Let's amputate! Sure! That'll only take a load of time we don't have, because the zombies are coming in force... how about you put a mercy bullet in the kid's skull? No! We have to save him somehow, for no reason that anyone can think of!
So Rick just yanks his leg off the fence. They take him back to the farm and patch him up.
Oh, but now we're not sure about him. After all, he was shooting at Rick and Glenn and Herschel! He's a threat! Let's not discuss WHY he was shooting at the people who killed his friends, no, in fact let's take him into a shed and manacle him to a wall and torture him with techniques that even Gitmo guards would frown upon, until he tells us that he's with a group about twice our size.
THEN let's take him out about twenty miles away to cut him loose. Whereupon he voluntarily says he knew one of the farmhouse folk from school. Now they're shocked; he might know where the farm is! We can't let him go now, he might tell that group where the farm is...except the entire point is, he knew that already.
The only new information he has is that people he grew up with are still alive. And that there's an armed group protecting them. This is the point where the two groups could parley, meeting up at some distant spot to negotiate for -
- oh, sod that, right? That would be sensible, not dramatic.
Instead, they continue to treat the kid like crap, continue to squabble, and finally have a nice little murder-by-committee meeting where it boils down to killing the kid because they can't trust him. Gee, I can't think why trust could possibly have been an issue after all the blood-knuckled beatings...
SETUP TO A FALL
Enter Shane's plot to kill Rick. As mentioned before, Shane really just wants to protect the people he loves, and he's come to the anguished conclusion that Rick is going to get everyone killed with his lousy leadership. To save everyone else, he figures, Rick has to die.
He sets the brutalized kid loose with the story of wanting to join his group, follows him out a ways, then murders him. He bloodies himself on a tree to provide a cover story, goes back to the farm, and gets everyone up in arms over the kid's "escape". Shane manages to get Rick to go with him, planning to kill him when they're alone, with a story in place about the kid pulling off the kill.
The group, however, has a master woodsman and tracker who pieces the real story together --- this time not from an ass-pull, but from reading the trail and the evidence. Not that it matters, because Rick and Shane have their showdown anyways elsewhere.
STUPID STUPID RAT CREATURES
Bang bang, Shane is dead.
Which attracts a zombie horde.
Which, to this point, despite being on the farm for weeks, no one has made any plans for. Mind you, they DID make some basic plans for farm defense --- regarding the bigger group of scavengers.
So there's a spotting tower. No one is in it. The horde isn't spotted until the last minute, not until Rick and Carl stop and talk to each other for a moment, at which point Rick FINALLY notices the hissing and growling which has followed them out of the woods.
And the house is boarded up, but hey, let's not defend from inside --- let's go out and have a whirling shoot-em-up from a variety of vehicles! Let's park the RV right next to the barn full of zombies, in fact right in the middle of a horde, then get up out of the driver's seat for no reason at all and OH NOES THE DOOR BROKE IN I AM DED.
Do they, at least, get in their vehicles and go while they still have time to do so? Oh, HELL no. Instead they shoot it up, wasting ammo on a horde that's clearly bigger than they have bullets to deal with, and as I already mentioned they lost the RV to sheer stupidity.
So they lose more people simply by letting the horde get too close, then they scatter in what vehicles are left, then they finally link up at the point where they originally began their search for Sophia.
And then, finally, the stupidest thing of all: "let's get out of here, away from the highway, and never think to fuel up while we have a chance!".
Their biggest surviving vehicle, a Suburban, then runs out of gas on a back road. They don't have enough room in the other vehicles to take everyone, so it's suggested that the guy with the motorcycle scout up the road for more fuel.
Rick, having finished his evolutionary trend towards Complete Moron, says no, because he considers keeping everyone together to take absolute precedence over anything else. Guess who was driving the SUV and didn't keep it fueled, thus stranding them all because he's too stupid to let anyone go do what has to be done anyways?
So Season Two ends with Rick once again putting everyone at risk because he is an idiot.
SO.....
I suppose this means I really like the show despite its flaws, and I do. Every episode has me yelling the equivalent of "Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures" at the screen, but still I watch.
In the end, what I really look for in a show is internal consistency. Rick is an idiot, sure, but in real life people can be just that stupid. The only thing I found really unbelievable about Season Two was how Dale "figured out" Otis' murder without anything to go on. And I do have a problem with some of the ham-handedness involved in the writing.
But art is really rather the opposite of life: stupid can be fixed. Characters can learn. It's bad writing which rarely changes for the better.
I'd like to see The Walking Dead smarten up its focus and get away from drama-for-drama's-sake. Other than that, so long as dumbass characters have a reason for being dumbasses --- and here, they generally do --- I can deal with that.
Rant over.
But in Bone, they at least did it in pursuit of a specific goal. Their fault was that they did dumb things as a result of being overly focused --- like, for example, leaping onto the very thin branch of a very tall tree in an attempt to eat the comic's main protagonist. All three fall out of the tree, with the protag yelling the "stupid, stupid" line, their idiocy being likely to have killed them all.
The Walking Dead, right up to the end of Season Two, is loaded with such moments.
Which is a damn shame. Everything else about the show is excellent. I love the characters, I love the dialogue, I love the tension of conflicted relationships, and of course I love the friggin' plague-motivated zombies. There's such attention to detail, here, that it's easy to get caught up in the show from moment to moment.
The problem is that the show's writing ALSO seems to get caught up and lost in it.
It's like the writers are so fascinated with the amazing navels they've produced for themselves, that they can't stand up and look around until someone says "oh, by the way, the season's coming to a close... do something extra-dramatic". The result: characters often do whatever would be most dramatic, as opposed to what would make some kind of sense. Sometimes, these two things happen to dovetail, but almost by serendipity rather than intent.
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Let's examine a few problems with Season Two in this regard, SO SPOILERS AHOY:
1) SHANE HAS TO DIE
One of the key dramatic elements of the show to this point was that police officer Rick (the nominal leader of our ragtag band of survivors) had been in a coma when the zombie plague broke out. Shane, his partner, comforted his wife during the collapse of society, to the point that the two got it on. There's a lot of Guilt and Secrecy and Knowing Looks, all against the backdrop of a do-or-die survival story, creating mondo tension.
And it was good.
But, apparently, that cow finally ran dry. During Season Two, Rick's wife determines she's pregnant. More secrecy, and lies, and carrying on, inevitably ensue.
Shane, throughout Season One and into Season Two, has been losing faith in Rick as a leader because Rick keeps making decisions that get members of the group killed. Worse, it's not just that he makes bad calls --- but that he does so "from the heart", at times dumping all sense of logic and even his own experience as a police officer out the window.
In short, he waffles on long-range planning while excelling at tactical snap-decisions during an immediate crisis. He can get people out of trouble, but he's not very good at avoiding or planning for it in the first place. In the end, he relies so heavily on luck that it almost requires deus ex machina to ensure there even IS a Season Two for this show.
Worse, when Shane brings his concerns to his best friend and long-time partner, he gets nothing but a load of platitudes in response. Rick's concern is that his leadership is being questioned; with rare exception, he essentially pats Shane on the head and shushes him. So Shane is already worried for everyone in the group, not the least of which being Rick's wife --- whom he still loves and wishes he could have to himself --- and now this concern is exacerbated by Rick's poor record of decision-making.
This tasty little stew is brought to a boil in Season Two, when Shane discovers that Rick's wife is pregnant. It could, in fact, be his. And because Rick keeps blowing him off, including after yet another bad call which gets people killed (see Point #2 below), he is driven to drastic steps to protect himself, his unborn child, and the woman he still loves.
I had a lot of sympathy for Shane's viewpoint. I imagine a lot of viewers did.
So, in order to nip that in the bud, the writers made Shane into a murderer several episodes before the pregnancy issue was even introduced. His character is made darker, grimmer, less likable or supportable, because we're going to kill him off by the end of the season, see?
I really hate deus ex machina writing. Even when it's wrapped around an otherwise excellent story. And this story arc is loaded with it.
"BAMBI MOMENTS" AND YOU
All of this is set up with a goddamned "Bambi Moment".
A Bambi Moment is when someone is in the wild, sees wildlife, and approaches it with the same attitude as though they had just left a screening of Bambi. Wildlife is innocent, playful, a victim of humanity's essential evil, and if we could just reach out and touch it we would regain some of our lost innocence blah blah blah yakkity-schmakkity.
In real life, about half-a-dozen people are gored to death every year by deer who respond to someone invading their personal space in the same way deer do with everything else: with a good solid poke from their ANTLERS. That's what the damn things are for, you idiots.
So Rick, Shane, and Rick's kid Carl come upon a deer in the woods. When it doesn't run away, Carl approaches it while his dad and his dad's best friend stand there going "d'awwwww".
Frankly, I was expecting the deer to gore the kid. Instead, a hunter somewhere past the deer puts a round clean through it --- and right into Carl. The hunter, Otis, leads Rick to the farmhouse which Season Two revolves around, where a country veterinarian removes the bullet fragments and sews the kid up. But they still need advanced medical gear to save him. Otis, a former paramedic, knows where to get the stuff and how to identify it.
How convenient. We're given a reason to go to the farmhouse, we're given a new character who just happens to have the crucial information to save a child's life, and oh by the way he's a fat guy. This is important later.
DEATH BY BAD WRITING
Shane and Otis go to get the medical stuff, but the school and clinic where it is has been overrun by zombies. Initially able to distract them with flares, they grab the gear, but then get cut off and split up trying to get back out. There's a long sequence of hiding and evasion, culminating in the two linking back up outside and making for their truck.
Here's where things go not just stupid, but "Stupid, Stupid": the zombie horde is huge, so Shane and Otis have no real chance of killing enough of them before running out of ammo. But they STILL slow down and turn around, sometimes stopping entirely, to shoot the closest ones. All this did was let the remainder of the horde close the gap, unimpeded.
If they'd just kept moving forward, they'd have been in no danger, despite Shane's limp. I guarantee that limping forward is faster than limping backward. It also attracted more zombies with the noise of gunfire... so, yeah, Stupid Stupid Rat Creatures.
So why did they do it? Because they needed a reason for the horde to get close enough, so Shane would be "forced" to kill Otis as a distraction. After all, Otis is fat and having trouble breathing and slowing Shane down...
...well, he would be, if it weren't for that limp making Shane just as slow, so I guess Otis being fat really wasn't an important point after all. For a limp-less Shane, it could have been the reason for the killing, but in the end? Not really.
Oh, but Shane doesn't JUST kill Otis. No, he does it in such a way as to be completely nonsensical: he shoots Otis in the leg, presumably to slow him down further. Then grabs his gun, struggles with him, and fires off the last shot. THEN wrestles Otis' bag of medical gear away. Spending all that time, when he could have just shot him in the head; it's not like the zombies really care much if their distraction-meal is moving or not.
So Shane turns to leave him to his grisly fate... and the truck is right f***ing THERE.
In the time it took to shoot Otis, grapple with him, and get the bag, they could just as easily have gotten away in the truck together. If this'd been a Left4Dead match and I was the equivalent of Otis, I'd be raging at the teamkilling douchebag. There was no point to the killing at all.
Weeeeell... except we needed that reason to dislike Shane. A reason that he couldn't really be forgiven, a crime worthy of capital punishment. Which brings us to:
THE ASS-PULL
It's a Trope, look it up.
See, Shane and Otis went off by themselves. No witnesses to the betrayal. Shane comes up with a reasonable enough cover story. That should be the end of it, save for any guilt issues.
Except that the old guy of the group, Dale, just plain decides out of nowhere that Shane killed Otis. No reasoning. Just "something doesn't sit right" in Shane's story, and suddenly he knows that Shane killed off Otis to distract the zombie horde. He's even able to shop that story around to other members of the group, successfully undermining Shane's reputation in their eyes.
In defense of the story at this point, Shane's taken a dark turn himself over the killing and become more ruthless --- but not stupidly so, not yet. He's just a lot less willing to put up with Rick's continual waffling. It makes Dale's story more believable for the other members of the group, watching Shane's downhill trend --- but how the hell did he come up with the idea in the first place? And it's still a load of assumptions, even if they just so happen to be absolutely correct.
All of which finally brings us to Point #2.
2) The Search for Sophia
A little girl, daughter of one of our group's members, gets separated in the zombie-infested woods from the rest of the group. It would be heartless to move on and not at least try looking for her...
...so, Rick stops the entire group, dead in its tracks, until they do.
Okay, you know, a few days' searching is fine. But it's not just a few days. It's at least a week, where they are stopped on the highway, having already been hit by a migrating herd of undead in the same spot. Hell, they're still there even after Sophia's mother has begun to resign herself to the idea that her daughter is dead.
In clinical terms, this is called "asking for it".
It's because Rick won't give up the search, badgering everyone else into staying and looking, that they're still in the area when Carl has his Bambi Moment and gets shot. Leading to the farmhouse, Otis' murder, et cetera. Most of Season Two revolves around life at the farm, which has managed so far to escape a zombie incursion by sheer cussed luck... well, sort of.
Rick insists on staying at the farm, using it as a base to maintain the search for Sophia, after which point some evidence is discovered to suggest she may still be alive. Thus, they're given a stronger reason to stay, despite the desire of the locals that they leave.
And why, besides the obvious, is their departure desired?
Because the veterinarian who saves Carl's life also believes that the whole zombie thing is just an illness. He's been rounding up the few that wander near his farm and sticking them in an old barn, going so far as to feed them with live chickens until "the sickness runs its course". Some of these zombies are his family, too. So he doesn't want them discovered and killed by the group.
Whoops! That didn't last terribly long, did it? The zombies are discovered, there's a huge to-do about it, and while the group is still trying to figure out what to do about it, Rick goes off to help grab more zombies for barn storage, out of sheer courtesy to the locals. Even he has kind of a "what am I doing?" look on his face when he and the others emerge from the woods with a restraining loop around a zombie's neck.
Shane responds by forcing the issue, setting up a firing line and breaking the barn open. The zombies are shot down, with Shane himself pumping rounds into one in order to demonstrate how this is not "just a sickness" to the old veterinarian.
Well, you know, that's just darn-well over the line, isn't it?
Zombie apocalypse? Can't be doing the smart thing, now. We have to be considerate about the delusions of others, because we're guests on their farm and all.
So Rick gets up in Shane's grill about it, with more platitudes and head-patting.
Shane's response to that is to decide that Rick is going to get them all killed by being butt-stupid. I can't say I disagree with that rationale.
3) HOW NOT TO DEAL WITH RAIDERS
Season Two's climax is set up when a roving band of survivors shows up in town, and everyone involved in the key events decides that it's cool to be dumb.
THE SHOOTOUT
The veterinarian, Herschel, has finally come to terms with his own stupidity about the plague. So of course he goes into town, the one overrun with zombies, to get stinking drunk by himself in a bar. Rick and the group's scavenger-extraordinaire, Glenn, go after him.
While the three are finishing up a good old heart-to-heart, two guys from Jersey walk in. There's a little tension, then everyone relaxes, and one of the Jersey guys starts asking about Rick's group. Rick clams up, the Jersey guy presses, makes some educated guesses, starts talking in more desperate terms. Rick stays mum.
Then for no reason at all, the Jersey guys go for their guns. Why not just walk out? What would shooting anyone gain, except the attention of the nearest zombie horde? Well, for whatever reason, Rick guns them down, being a much faster draw.
But before they can leave, the badguys' buddies show up looking for them, try to walk in the door, and Glenn leaps across to barricade it. Although it shouldn't work, it does; the newcomers argue amongst themselves, shouting through the door and at each other until they actually talk themselves into leaving.
Can't have that! Having said nothing to this point, Rick then shouts, "they drew on us!".
Yes. Because one, they will certainly believe that, and two, you needed to say it at all because what --- you felt guilty or something? All Rick needed to do was keep his damn mouth shut, but no, NOW there's a bunch of guys out there with a reason to stick around and avenge their fallen. Only the show's writers know why Rick thought he'd just be taken at his word through a closed door, without even showing them the bodies or his face.
So we segue into a pointless siege, which ends only because the zombie horde has been attracted and the Jersey guys' friends are running for it. One of them falls off a roof and impales his leg on a wrought-iron fence with a big-ass barb at the top.
THAT POOR DAMN KID
So what's Rick do? Why, insist on saving the kid who was shooting at them, of course! How noble!
Um, but he's hung up on that fence. Let's amputate! Sure! That'll only take a load of time we don't have, because the zombies are coming in force... how about you put a mercy bullet in the kid's skull? No! We have to save him somehow, for no reason that anyone can think of!
So Rick just yanks his leg off the fence. They take him back to the farm and patch him up.
Oh, but now we're not sure about him. After all, he was shooting at Rick and Glenn and Herschel! He's a threat! Let's not discuss WHY he was shooting at the people who killed his friends, no, in fact let's take him into a shed and manacle him to a wall and torture him with techniques that even Gitmo guards would frown upon, until he tells us that he's with a group about twice our size.
THEN let's take him out about twenty miles away to cut him loose. Whereupon he voluntarily says he knew one of the farmhouse folk from school. Now they're shocked; he might know where the farm is! We can't let him go now, he might tell that group where the farm is...except the entire point is, he knew that already.
The only new information he has is that people he grew up with are still alive. And that there's an armed group protecting them. This is the point where the two groups could parley, meeting up at some distant spot to negotiate for -
- oh, sod that, right? That would be sensible, not dramatic.
Instead, they continue to treat the kid like crap, continue to squabble, and finally have a nice little murder-by-committee meeting where it boils down to killing the kid because they can't trust him. Gee, I can't think why trust could possibly have been an issue after all the blood-knuckled beatings...
SETUP TO A FALL
Enter Shane's plot to kill Rick. As mentioned before, Shane really just wants to protect the people he loves, and he's come to the anguished conclusion that Rick is going to get everyone killed with his lousy leadership. To save everyone else, he figures, Rick has to die.
He sets the brutalized kid loose with the story of wanting to join his group, follows him out a ways, then murders him. He bloodies himself on a tree to provide a cover story, goes back to the farm, and gets everyone up in arms over the kid's "escape". Shane manages to get Rick to go with him, planning to kill him when they're alone, with a story in place about the kid pulling off the kill.
The group, however, has a master woodsman and tracker who pieces the real story together --- this time not from an ass-pull, but from reading the trail and the evidence. Not that it matters, because Rick and Shane have their showdown anyways elsewhere.
STUPID STUPID RAT CREATURES
Bang bang, Shane is dead.
Which attracts a zombie horde.
Which, to this point, despite being on the farm for weeks, no one has made any plans for. Mind you, they DID make some basic plans for farm defense --- regarding the bigger group of scavengers.
So there's a spotting tower. No one is in it. The horde isn't spotted until the last minute, not until Rick and Carl stop and talk to each other for a moment, at which point Rick FINALLY notices the hissing and growling which has followed them out of the woods.
And the house is boarded up, but hey, let's not defend from inside --- let's go out and have a whirling shoot-em-up from a variety of vehicles! Let's park the RV right next to the barn full of zombies, in fact right in the middle of a horde, then get up out of the driver's seat for no reason at all and OH NOES THE DOOR BROKE IN I AM DED.
Do they, at least, get in their vehicles and go while they still have time to do so? Oh, HELL no. Instead they shoot it up, wasting ammo on a horde that's clearly bigger than they have bullets to deal with, and as I already mentioned they lost the RV to sheer stupidity.
So they lose more people simply by letting the horde get too close, then they scatter in what vehicles are left, then they finally link up at the point where they originally began their search for Sophia.
And then, finally, the stupidest thing of all: "let's get out of here, away from the highway, and never think to fuel up while we have a chance!".
Their biggest surviving vehicle, a Suburban, then runs out of gas on a back road. They don't have enough room in the other vehicles to take everyone, so it's suggested that the guy with the motorcycle scout up the road for more fuel.
Rick, having finished his evolutionary trend towards Complete Moron, says no, because he considers keeping everyone together to take absolute precedence over anything else. Guess who was driving the SUV and didn't keep it fueled, thus stranding them all because he's too stupid to let anyone go do what has to be done anyways?
So Season Two ends with Rick once again putting everyone at risk because he is an idiot.
SO.....
I suppose this means I really like the show despite its flaws, and I do. Every episode has me yelling the equivalent of "Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures" at the screen, but still I watch.
In the end, what I really look for in a show is internal consistency. Rick is an idiot, sure, but in real life people can be just that stupid. The only thing I found really unbelievable about Season Two was how Dale "figured out" Otis' murder without anything to go on. And I do have a problem with some of the ham-handedness involved in the writing.
But art is really rather the opposite of life: stupid can be fixed. Characters can learn. It's bad writing which rarely changes for the better.
I'd like to see The Walking Dead smarten up its focus and get away from drama-for-drama's-sake. Other than that, so long as dumbass characters have a reason for being dumbasses --- and here, they generally do --- I can deal with that.
Rant over.
