I loved this episode. Shane’s meltdown had me watching with my jaw on the floor. When they had that zombie lady in the dog catcher harness, and he’s shooting her repeatedly in the chest, shouting ,“could a person come back from this?” followed by him saying, “that IS enough” then shooting her in the head. Wow. For Shane that was the ultimate sin…you don’t bring Walkers to your camp. It was go time.
As for Rick, I immediately thought ‘he had to step up and shoot Sophie. They just got done telling everyone that even former family members are dead now, so there’s no way we can keep one of our own.’
I read the spoiler about Sophia in last week’s thread, so when Shane gave Carl a gun, I thought “Oh shit, Carl’s gonna be the one to shoot Sophia.” Glad it didn’t turn out that way.
No kidding. What do you do with someone like that in your group? Kill him? You don’t have enough humans left to just waste one (we’ll assume Otis would have fallen behind and gotten eaten at some point). You can’t drive him away, because he’ll just come back and make trouble, either alone or with other malcontents. If you keep him in the group, he’ll be making trouble that way. If you keep HIM in a barn, you lose a strong, capable male.
It’s probably a tribute to Jon Bernthal’s acting abilities that the character still isn’t unambiguously evil (to me, anyway) - he’s acting rationally for the world they live in and the situation he’s in.
ETA: Forgot to say, Shane needs his hair back. He doesn’t have the head or ears for going pig-shave.
Yup. Maggie and Glenn will get to play out the Montagues and Capulets next half-season.
Really the abrasive, asshole redneck seemed out of character calling a woman a “bitch?”
Seriously though, Daryl has had a rough life and probably doesn’t know how to react to someone showing him honest affection. Seemed completely in-character to push her away.
I think it’s that he didn’t know how to react to someone who genuinely cared for him and because he really needed to believe that they were going to find Sophia for some reason. When even Carol was giving up hope, that forced him to face the fact he wasn’t ready to accept.
I had assumed it was because he perceived it as Carol giving up on her daughter and he was pissed at a mother doing that to their own child. I hadn’t thought that it was in regards to her voicing affection for him.
Ditto, it was important for Daryl to believe that there are children who have people who do NOT give up on them. Carol’s willingness to do it punched a hole in that.
Dale’s effort at taking all the guns and hiding them struck me as incredibly ill-conceived and arrogant. In a zombified world, when a walker could come staggering out of the woods at any moment, hiding all of your groups firearms – unilaterally, with no discussion – seems akin to a capital offense.
Even if Shane is a psychopath you can’t trust and don’t like, depriving your entire survivor group of their firearms would be treason of the highest order. (Maybe Rick and somebody else had guns on them at the time and so they wouldn’t be completely without firearms. But still, the point is that Dale was depriving the group of extremely important defensive weaponry in short supply.)
I suspect Dale would have found that the rest of the group was just as pissed off as Shane and reacted just as strongly. They wouldn’t put up with him speechifying in his wise old man whisper about how he knew best, not when it comes to something so important as having the tools to defend yourself against zombies.
If I were a member of the group, even learning of this incident after the fact – from Shane, for instance – would make me livid that Dale could be so arrogant and wrongheaded. I wouldn’t trust him any more than Shane after that.
Anybody else think Dale’s actions amounted to an extreme betrayal of the survivor group?
Eh–not really. Walkers don’t have guns so they aren’t at a disadvantage. They have on more than one occasion shown that using melee weapons is just as effective… It did move Dale completely out of the kindly grandfather role and into “dumb-ass old man” territory.
I suspected that he was going to surrender all the guns to Herschel… not bury them in the swamp. Or if it had been the plan to get Shane to follow him out into the woods to force the confrontation and Dale ended up actually killing Shane THEN I’d applaud Dale for his cunning. Instead…dumb ass old man.
I didn’t see it as a betrayal. I saw it more of him trying to protect the group from Shane’s actions. He knew that Shane wanted to mow down the entire barn full of Walkers but he also knew how Herschel saw them, as people. I saw it more of him trying to avoid a volatile situation that would end up getting them kicked off the barn. Because he also knew that Lori is pregnant on top of the whole ‘safe sanctuary’ of the farm being at risk. While I don’t think it was entirely STUPID for him to do that, I do sometimes think that Dale gets a bit too involved in things that he doesn’t need to get involved in. I think he kinda sees himself as the group counselor or something and tries to make things right in any way he can. Thus him approaching both Herschel and Lori when Glenn told him about his secrets.
And am I the only one who thought Maggie was way overreacting after the near miss? Sure it was her first time actually being faced with the whole life or death situation with a walker, but I don’t understand why she was so pissed at Lori.
Not at a disadvantage? Um, I’m not looking to keep things even-steven here. I would very much like to have an advantage over the crazy corpse trying to eat my brain, thank you.
Would have been kind of messy wading into that scrum at the barn and bonking them on the head individually.
Dale: Whatcha so pissed about? Yeah, I hid our guns and won’t tell you where they are, but hey, you still got a hammer and a big stick.
*
Me: Okay, Dale. When a dozen of those things are coming at us, I’ll hand you the hammer and let you take care of them. Wouldn’t want the advantage of standing 20 feet away and shooting them.*
I think the best bet for the Wanderers would be to make a strike at the next farm over. Between them it should take too long to clean a place of walkers, and then when they’ve established that one move to the next one and so on and so on. It would behoove them all- the nomads and Hershel’s family, with a rotating “home guard” doing surveillance duty until some kind of barriers can be built. (A really deep moat should be easily achieved if you could find some earth moving equipment and enough gas to run it.)
Anyone else coming along could clear off other adjoining farms. Basically, 17th century rules, but with zombies instead of Indians. And unlike with Indians, other than Hershel, nobody is going to feel bad or later judge you for ganking zombies.
I’m hoping they go True Blood at this point in going their own way plotwise and only taking occasional inspiration or characters from the graphic novels. For one thing it keeps those who’ve read the novels interested (and I think there are several parts we could easily do without seeing) and for another it would be a lot more realistic. Once you establish a base you can send out scouts to check on the rest of the world, but two or three grown people who know how to use firearms are going to have better luck than a ragtag caravan that includes older people and children.
It seems clear to me that the issue of Herschel demanding they leave is solved: he’s been living in a state of denial which just got decidedly blown up. And Sophie was critical to the story because Herschel had to see them do the same thing to one of their own (a child no less!) to fully understand that it is absolutely necessary and get over himself.
That’s what was driving his need to have them leave, so he’s over that now.
