So Rick, Glen, and Herschal are all trapped in the saloon while [del]Dumb Bitch[/del] Lori is trapped in an upside down car on the side of the road.
Well, if “Survival Cancels Programming,” Lori just had a major data dump and reformatted her hard rive to become Action Chick. I guess it’s all just a matter of motivation: if a Walker is snarling/growling for your flesh and is 2 inches from your face, you get smart real quick, or get eaten.
This show is going to run into a “Walt problem” with Carl. He is quickly outgrowing his role.
Oh, I liked how Herschel put Shane in his place.
Wow. Everybody is pissed off.
It was interesting to watch Andrea and Lori trying to manipulate their men. Andrea tries to soften Shane and Lori tries to harden Rick. 
Lori’s behaving like she’s in a daytime soap. Yeah, put the two strongest men at each other’s throats. What a bitch.
And she was stupid yet again, believing Shane. If Rick was back at the farm, wouldn’t she have met him on the road? And even if they had taken different roads, wouldn’t she wonder why Rick was at the farm instead of searching for her?
I was confused about what Glenn said to Maggie. When was he hiding?
Herschel needs to put some drops in catatonic girl’s eyes.
I’m not sure ‘loved it’ is the appropriate term for something so harsh and intense, but I found it the best written and directed ep of the season so far. Top marks.
Rick and/or Herschel called out to him to see if he was hit/OK - he didn’t answer, presumably (based on his statement) to prevent calling in fire on his position. Which meant Rick had to head down the alley to check on him.
Behind the dumpster. When the dude who had his face eaten off first took a shot at Glenn, Glenn ran and hid like a scaredy cat and was too cowardly to even whisper a response to Rick. Not so great behavior in a combat zone when others may be putting their lives in your hands.
Oh, right. But he held his own before that happened. Glenn’s too hard on himself. Poor kid.
I suppose Shane and Rick as antagonists makes for good drama, and at some point Lori and Andrea will be at each other’s throats too. But I’m disappointed that they aren’t back on the road, or at least scouting. Relationship drama isn’t why I like post-apocalypse stories. This is like Days of Our Lives With Zombies.
I get that Shane still loves Lori but at some point – like when it’s the end of the world – a guy should be able to put his feelings aside. What does he want? Has he even stopped to think?
I did like Herschel’s instinct to try and save the kid. It looked like he wanted to help the one who was eaten too.
Waffled between clicking “Didn’t Like It” and “Hated It”. Finally went with the latter. Starting with the carry-over of Lori going into the town to find Rick, it just seemed to have too many instances that just did not make sense.
-Lori leaves when it’s light, staggers down the highway at night. All that time, no one noticed Lori had left the damn farm??
-Rick shot the guys in the bar in the daytime, but when the friends show up, it’s night
-Rick shot the two guys out of fear they would follow them to the farm, but didn’t worry about their friends following them?
-Rick just had to save the kid stuck on the fence, but had no compassionate qualms about leaving the other guy screaming on the grass
-No one thought it would be a problem cutting through the largest bone in the body with a 3-inch pocket knife?
-What the hell IS Rick playing at by bringing Randall back to the farm? For all his talk about how everything he does is to keep Lori and the baby and Carl safe, he really makes stupid, impulsive decisions.
-And what is Lori playing at, with her Lady Macbethesque whispering over Rick’s shoulder about how Shane basically needs to be taken care of.
I’m surprised at how completely opposite my reaction is in comparison to the previous posters here. I normally find my thoughts and reactions to the show and characters are pretty similar, but I genuinely thought this was one of the worst written episodes of the series.
That was truly awful. There was no reason for darkness.
I agree with all your other points as well. As for Randall, unless he has family in the other group, he might not be a danger. He owes them his life, after all.
Speaking of families in the other group; did any one else catch when on of the “thugs” said he didn’t want to tell Jane about another death? :dubious: This roving band of brigands could well have women & children in it (not that would make them any less of a threat).
And Lori just gets dumber and crazier. Carl was standing right there while she tried to justify going back out to find Rich herself despite; it being night, her having zero skills that would be of use in the search, her being pregnant, and other than Rick Carl’s last surviving familymember. I guess being a half-orphan is much worse than being a full one. :rolleyes:
I thought it was a strong episode, even though it stumbled out of the gate with the whole thing about how it got dark all of a sudden for no reason. There are errors that will seriously screw up a narrative, and there are errors that merely reek of sloppiness, and I felt like this was the latter. If only they hadn’t made a point of showing Rick holstering his gun. Lori waking up in darkness didn’t bug me at all – she’d been in a car wreck, after all. And the guys in the bar? If you wanted me to think that they were still in there a few hours later calming down after the confrontation, I probably would have played along, but only if it they hadn’t made it so clear that the confrontation had just ended.
Up until now I haven’t had much of a problem with the group, but the last two episodes has made me think I’d be better off on my own. Well, there’s one team member that’s OK.
Shane of course hasn’t been trustworthy for a while now.
Andrea is becoming like Shane and of course is his biggest cheerleader.
At first I liked that Rick was getting more aggressive and practical, but when he talked about killing to protect what was his… There was something unsettling about it.
While I understand Lori’s fear of Shane, her manipulating Rick really put her in a negative light for me.
Daryl can make a grate ally… when he feels like it and you’re on his good side.
And finally Dale, Carol, and Glenn are, and thinking about it, have been pretty useless.
That leaves Theodore. I could see myself teaming up with him and not worrying too much about my safety.
Not why he shot the two at all
I find these criticisms miss the mark, and quite widely. (Note that it’s not all of them.) I can go through them point by point if you like, but suffice it to say that I felt similarly reading this post as you did watching the episode.
Agreed that the day/night problem was really quite jarring, though.
Although I haven’t missed an episode, and probably won’t in the foreseeable future, I can’t say I don’t have problems with the show. It just doesn’t seem like enough HAPPENS. It drags. It’s like they’re stretching out the material for 2 episodes into 3 or 4.
The day/night issue was just stupid and inexcusable.
Glenn needs his ass kicked up around his ears. If the strangers had come in the doors, Rick and company could’ve gunned down some or all of them before they knew what hit them. Instead, he throws himself against the door and pushes it shut, thus warning the strangers that people are inside. Then Rick starts a ridiculous, pointless dialog wherein he suggests they let bygones be bygones, sorry sorry about shooting your buddies, but hey, that’s life. While he’s doing that, whoever was outside had plenty of time to cover all the entrances. Just one Molotov, and Rick’s band of morose morons were screwed. Luckily, the strangers seem as stupid as our intrepid group of zombie slayers are, and that didn’t happen.
Also, it looked like they were going to leave the bodies lie there before the new carfull of strangers showed up. I would’ve worked to hide the bodies if I wanted to keep a large group from finding my homestead. Throw the bodies in the trunk and drive the car elsewhere - maybe a garage, into a ravine, or something. Make it so no one ever knew what happened. The blood would’ve looked bad if they saw it, but after the zombie apocalypse, I bet there’s a lot of bloodstains around. Of course, all that went out the window when several hours passed between Rick shooting them and holstering his gun (day into night) and the new strangers drove up, but they had time to indicate they were leaving, and they did not bring up anything about the car or corpses.
Don’t take this as a threadshit, please. I watch the show, and will continue to do so, but yeah, I think they could do things better.
I find a few of the gripes in this thread have merit, others don’t, but at least you touched on what was *the *most grating issue to me.
For as brilliantly and smoothly as Rick handled the more direct and threatening encounter with the first two thugs, he handled the subsequent encounter with their associates like a complete fool. In that undetermined amount of time when day turned to night, did he somehow forget all his police training?
His best course of action when they showed up was to call out and tell them to go away or he and his friends would blast them away. Don’t try and reason with them, don’t tell them their friends are there and they’re dead, don’t tell them shit other than GTFO of here! With the guns they brought, and the guns they got from the two dead guys, they had enough firepower to convince the interlopers to go look elsewhere for their friends.
If you have to tell them anything, (because their friends’ car was nearby) tell them that their friends wanted to come in too, and the massive pack of zombies that chased them away is probably going to come back as soon as they hear more gunfire or any other type of commotion that will get their attention.
Going from handling the initial altercation perfectly where he stayed tough, firm, and let his gun do the talking, then immediately acting like an idiot for the subsequent one, was just frustratingly inconsistent.
As for him softening towards the guy who was impaled, that was much more understandable. At that point, he did want to either leave the guy behind or give him a mercy bullet to the head, but he only spared him for the sake of indulging Herschel. Poor old Hersh was at the point of nervous breakdown if he had to see someone else killed. Rick found the right compromise by finally violently jerking the guy’s leg free and getting the hell out of there. Herschel was paralyzed by the situation, and had he got his way, they would have died trying to stay there long enough to extract him the medically proper way. At that point, Rick said “fuck it” and found the middle road out of the situation.
As for the people complaining about how conniving Lori tried to turn Rick against Shane, don’t you think she has good reason? Shane was at the point where he was obviously hoping Rick and Herschel wouldn’t come back so he could have Lori and Carl to himself and rule the whole farm. (He probably doesn’t care either way about Glenn, but I doubt he’d lose any sleep for him either.)
Totally agreed. This was, by far, the best episode of the season, if not the show. Tense, drama-filled, and had character development (even if not always the good kind.)
With that said, the instant-night time was distracting, and whoever described Lori as “behaving like she’s in a daytime soap” nailed it–those final lines felt way too contrived.