I think it’s more than that. I think it’s also: with this level of irrationality, these people could have never made it this long. We’ve had folks sleeping in tents up till last season. They lost a girl in what can be likened to a slow moving swarm of crippled people (how on earth could they not all make it into the safety of the RV–it’s like they got surrounded by snails). A couple of episodes back, some of the residents of Woodbury were ready to strike out on foot. Seriously? We’re supposed to think these folks lasted, even within the somewhat protected walls of that town (they had to get there first)?
One more thing, Andrea’s costume is reaching a sort of Gilligan’s Island level of absurdity. “What to wear in an zombie-apocalypse? How 'bout a shirt that won’t button over my tits.”
I think the intention was to show that the governer was about to use it - and was willing to - right up until Rick took a drink of the whiskey - it was at that point that the Guv felt he ‘owned’ not only the conversation and the negotiations, but Rick as well.
IOW, had Rick actually tried to negotiate - the Guv would have shot first, as it is, the Guv is hoping he gets to do both - get Michone (the easy way) as welk as Kill off Rick and his ‘top men’ in one moment.
I agree, save that he decided not to use it when Rick refused to gallantly and idiotically lay his firearm aside.
I think the only point was to show that the Governor was being dishonest. He made this huge show out of putting down his weapon and then goes and sits in the chair with another weapon. He didn’t plan on using it unless he had too, he just had no intention of being weaponless.
You know, it’s not a personal insult to you if someone doesn’t find the show as enjoyable as you do.
Why do we still watch? I can’t speak for others, but I see glimmers of entertainment and talent with this show. I watch each episode hoping to see that on a consistent basis. That’s where my criticism of the show lies. It’s not so shit that I will turn it off. But it’s also not so good that it doesn’t deserve a lot of criticism.
This episode is a prime example. Had the series not specifically shown that Rick doesn’t mind killing people he feels threatens his group, I wouldn’t have minded so much that he didn’t kill the Governor where he stood. What was the deal with the gun taped to the side of the table? Never used, never really threatened to be used, and never retrieved. The cliche of two “enemies” bonding over a common foe. The time-filler ranting of Merle that ended up as nothing once he realized no one was going with him. The endless supply of gasoline. Robert Kirkman’s admission that he didn’t really have an explanation regarding the distance traveled from the prison back to Rick’s home town/the use of gasoline/Rick’s ignorance about knowing there was a prison 4 hours down the road.
And before you ask, I’m still watching for Carol, Michonne, and Darryl.
I think he’d have killed Rick as soon he got the chance, and his guys would have killed the prison people and tried to capture Michonne, however one spells her name. He just didn’t think that he could outdraw Rick.
I would be down with that. Can we manage to get Merle caught in the crossfire, too? And maybe Carl?
Heh.
You picked up on that, too, eh? It was pretty subtle. 
I actually liked this episode. It seemed like they were finally not being completely idiotic at all times - yeah, charging off to Woodbury probably would get all of your people killed, and yes, the Governor was indeed lying. And Glenn and Maggie finally talked to each other and managed to connect (and boy howdy, did they connect!), and Carol and Herschel are the voice of reason as usual.
So, what is Andrea planning for the Gov now? It sounded like she isn’t going to get close enough to gak him now.
Near the beginning the governor states flatly that he is there for one thing only, Rick’s surrender. But that line is just there to go to commercial on, because that never comes up again. That’s piss poor writing.
I still can’t buy into why they are fighting over a small piece of territory. Since we know that they can go anywhere in the world, it all rings so false that they are questioning whether it is worth sacrificing their loved ones to stay in that one crummy prison.
I agree the apparent determination to defend the prison makes little sense, especially when they can get to someplace like Rick’s old hometown in a relatively short time. Thanks to Morgan’s efforts, a decent portion of it seems defended from zombies. They could deal with Morgan himself easily enough, I think, and perhaps integrate him into the group. The Governor must have some kind of spy network watching the prison, hence knowing about the guns, but there’s no indication that it is extensive or that the group would be followed if they all just high-tailed out of the prison at once–or left separately in different times of the day. It would be hard enough for the Governor to locate them again, and they could then strike at Woodbury from a hidden location.
I took this as the Governor bragging that he’s been watching their every move (or more likely, one of his cronies).
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I don’t watch it for the realism
I really don’t understand why Maggie wasn’t raped. It would be a real issue in a lawless post apocalyptic society, it would serve to get the audience to hate the governor and emphasize his evil, it would make the following events about how everyone is acting like Maggie was gang raped by rabid wolves make more sense.
I agree, it’s like they wanted to imply and act as if she were raped, but they didn’t have the guts. They didn’t even leave it ambiguous - they explicitly said she wasn’t raped.
Someone this episode was listing off all the bad guy stuff the governor had done - and the third item was “Maggie” - not Glenn. Apparently it’s no big deal that Glenn was severely tortured. He’s a guy. Walk it off.
I thought the episode could’ve been good in theory - I don’t mind talky if it’s good talk. I think the scene in the bar at the end of season 2 where they meet the two guys on the road and they’re both probing each other to figure out what sort of people they’re dealing with was the best scene this show ever had. The situation was exactly the sort of situation you’d have in a post apocalyptic society, the acting was excellent (seriously how is Michael Raymond-James not in more stuff?), the dialogue was good, there was genuine tension, great scene.
Unfortunately, this scene had none of that. None of it was clever, none of it was really tense, no one was taking the smart or realistic approach to getting their way. No real dilemmas. Nothing of consequence actually happened.
I’m pretty sure given the choice between “take your shirt off” and “be violently violated”, most people would see a pretty distinct difference between the two.
I mean, ffs, this isn’t some first world book club meeting with suburban housewives. These people are battle hardened, they’ve survived the end of civilization. They’ve been living their lives hungry and dirty and in constant danger.
And then they were captured by an enemy. An enemy that wanted to torture them. In a lawless world, where they were completely under the enemy’s control. With no restrictions on what that enemy could do. With someone you love being actually tortured in the room right next to you.
Given those factors, “take your shirt off while I get all creepy” is about the best case scenario. “Holy shit, I lucked out on that one!” should be the reaction. Really, she should be far more emotionally disturbed that she sat by and listened to her boyfriend being tortured than anything that happened to her.
The fact that we think otherwise is sexist bullshit. Both that men are expected to endure all sorts of physical pain and no big deal, they’re men, walk it off, and that women are these delicate little snowflakes whose psyches can be shattered by the littlest thing - even after they’ve proven they can endure much worse.
Because the characters in the show all showed complete disregard for what Glenn went through. Several times now we’ve seen the characters express how horrible it must’ve been to go through what Maggie did. It was used on tonight’s episode in a list of what makes the governor evil, with no mention of Glenn. No one gave a shit about him, and what he went through was immeasurably worse. The show is clearly trying to tell us that what happened to Maggie, both by the writing and the reactions of the characters, was more important and worse than Glenn, who wasn’t even really regarded by anyone as being victimized. It’s ridiculous.
I get the point you’re trying to make, over and over and over, but my opinion is that it’s just wrong. Glenn was physically tortured, while Maggie was psychologically tortured. Why is physical torture so much worse in your book?
I will agree with you 100% that the worst part of Maggie’s torture was hearing Glenn get beaten, and that they shouldn’t be glossing over that aspect of it.
The real difference is that Glenn’s torture was empowering for him. He took the beating like a man, then kicked the shit out of a zombie while duct-taped to a chair. Hells yeah! Hard not to walk away from that experience thinking anything other than “That’s right, I’m bad, that’s right, I’m bad.”
By contrast, Maggie’s ordeal was disempowering, full of nothing but terrified helplessness.
It’s pretty well understand that emotional/psychological pain is worse (in the sense of being harder to cope with) than physical pain. This is what self-cutting is all about; transferring your mental anguish to physical pain.
Bruises fade; mental trauma can linger for decades.
Using this same logic can’t we discount Glenn’s experience as nothing because getting punched in the face is a picnic compared to Merle sawing your hand off as revenge?
It was mild psychological torture at best. To blow it way out of proportion is totally a delicate sheltered first world sort of thing to do, where we like to be overdramatic and pump up our victimhood like it makes us a part of some special club or something. You could line it up against 100 different random other forms of torture - including other psychological forms of torture, and I suspect the vast majority of people would choose her fate over all others.
It’s also inconsistent with the characters. We’re supposed to be watching people who’ve been hardened by surviving the apocalypse for over a year. They’ve seen everything they’ve ever known collapse. They’ve seen their family members eaten alive and turned into horrible creatures. They’ve had to kill what were once people in gruesome ways day in and day out. They have to live their lives in constant fear. They have to be suspicious of every single person they come across.
I can’t accept that someone who could survive and even thrive in such an environment would be so delicate that “some dude got really skeevy with me” would be horribly damaging psychological torture.
Let’s compare it to some other horrible, ongoing, gruesome tragedy in action. Imagine a Soviet woman from the middle of WW2, who’s lived through the battle on her city, who has probably had to be evacuated again and again in terrible conditions, survive random bombardments, who might have to sew some coats out in the freezing cold because her factory got bombed out, who’s probably been starving for a while, who’s seen her loved ones brutally killed, and has had to live under all the horrors of Nazi occupation.
One day some nazi soldiers pick her up and take her to an interrogation center. They think she knows the location of some partisans. She’s completely under their control, and she knows how evil these men can be - she’s lived the brutality for years. And then all she experiences is that she has to take her shirt off in front of the nazi officer with some implicit rapey overtones but nothing ever comes out of it.
What would happen? She’d think she won the “I didn’t get gangraped and then decapitated” lottery! She’d be thrilled.
Now, the audience is in this case is the among the delicate, no-real-problems first world suburban richest society in history. So we tend to evaluate the characters in the same way. But the characters - if properly written - should be a lot closer to that Soviet woman after what we’ve been through.
But it’s not just the people in the threads going “oh poor Maggie!”, that’s bad enough. But the characters in the show do it repeatedly too. That’s just a lack of understanding about how people would act in the world you’ve created.
That part should be, by far, the worst of it. People who are hardened against danger and trauma themselves are still more vulnerable to their loved ones being harmed. But then it’s sort of silly to care way more about Maggie’s distress at her boyfriend getting tortured than the guy who actually got tortured, isn’t it?
That’s actually a good point. I think that could have a bearing on how each of the characters recovered after the incident, but it shouldn’t cause the audience and characters to discount what Glenn had to go through.
Undergoing torture is not merely physical pain. It’s not the same as if you happened to drop a really big hammer on your toe. You’re being deliberately harmed by people who have total control of you, and you are powerless to stop it. You have all of the psychological anguish of that situation combined with the actual physical pain you’ve experienced, and usually some sort of lasting physical harm.
It would be weird if someone got punched in the face, and someone else got their hand sawed off, and the audience and characters couldn’t stop talking about how awful it must’ve been to get punched in the face while not even acknowledging it sucks to have your hand cut off.
What makes you so sure?
I hear (read?) what you’re all saying about Maggie and Glenn, but as I was watching this episode, I couldn’t help but think it would be weird if they mentioned what the Governor did to Glenn because, really, he didn’t actually do anything. He didn’t stop Merle, but everything that happened to Glenn was Merle’s doing, and I think it’d be a bit weird to use that as a point against the Governor when Merle’s actually in their camp at that very moment, and he can’t even use the “following orders” excuse. What Merle did to Glenn is completely on him, not the Governor.
There’s a better case of what the Governor did to Daryl and Merle than what the Governor did to Glenn.
I’ll have to rewatch, but is it in any way possible that Rick and then Hershel were being indirect about it when Andrea was around is somehow part of a plan to make the Governor seem as bad as possible to her?
The lack of direct exchange of information is indeed part of a plan. It has been a plan by the writers to maintain some semblance of dramatic tension and ambivalence on the part of a character that they want to keep viable - Andrea, without having to think really hard about a better, more complete and realistic way to pull that off.
Just like Mr. Furley or Mr. Roper overhearing only the mistakenly salacious portion of a conversation through the wall on Three’s Company, the rest of the story relies on this contrivance.
The thing that’s bothering me the most about this how now is that the zombies are no longer scary. Everyone’s an expert zombie killer, to the point of showing off about it. It’s like deer over-population now.
Zombies in low numbers are never scary. The scary part is that there are billions of them and they are everywhere. Areas with human settlements should slowly be getting depopulated of zombies with only huge migratory swarms to worry about.