I guess Darryl’s back story was okay, but unsurprising and unnecessary. The “quest for Beth to have her first drink because she just doesn’t care and can’t be arsed to live the minimalist survival lifestyle of camping and scrounging in the wake of the zombie apocalypse” was a REALLY lame reason to do much of anything.
Setting the huge ass fire in the middle of the forest and flipping it off…I get it, we’re putting Darryl’s past to rest but Jesus how hamfisted and stupid that was.
This episode rated a big “ugh” from me.
I actually wish that while our trusty band of survivors are separated that they writers would quit focusing on one group or another for an entire episode and instead give us morsels of information on each group. It’s getting tiresome.
About the only good thing I can say about this episode is that it showed Daryl’s stock of crossbow bolts are starting to run out…
I’m surprised that those graphite bolts have lasted as long as they did, graphite is quite brittle, and the constant re-use is really starting to wear on them
He needs to find a stock of aluminum bolts, they should be more durable, as long as they don’t end up bent, even then, a bent bolt can be straightened, whereas a fractured graphite bolt can only be thrown out…
Then again, there ARE a lot of trees around, and Daryl is supposedly a survivalist, I would hope he knows how to make his own wooden bolts
What, really? i thought that was about the stupidest thing anyone has done in this show so far. We are talking about the zombies you can easily distract with a rock or slowly walk away from right?
They would have been much better off IN the car. I understand what they were doing, but if one of the walkers leaned on the trunk and latched it, they would have been in trouble (until Daryl figured out that you can use the tire jack to push the trunk open).
The clock was tipped over which means the pendant wasn’t swinging.
What bugged me is that Beth managed to take a swig of moonshine like she’s been drinking all her life. Most people would have coughed that right back up. The director (or someone) should’ve taken her off the set and given her a shot of vodka so she knew how to act when she took that first swig. It was pretty clear those were just jars of water. At the very least they could have filled them with something she didn’t like so as she was drinking it, it wouldn’t go down so easy.
I also didn’t think it was all that realistic when she was acting like a recovering alcoholic in the middle of a zombie apocalypse when she’s never had a sip in her life. I can understand dad doing it, I could even understand her doing it if it was convenient, but not like that. It would have made more sense if they had her and Daryl on the road and happened to pass by the country club and gone from there.
I thought it was pretty smart - that was a whole herd of walkers, apparently, and I don’t think they can get away from a whole herd of walkers. I don’t think they would have gotten stuck in the trunk, either - it looked like the back seat was out, so they could have crawled out that way.
I was worried they’d hook up, too. Or, it would turn out Daryl doesn’t drink because he’s a violent evil drunk who smacks little blond girls around. He almost was, but that wasn’t his issue.
Anyway, this was another *acting *episode. Everyone gets to have Very Special Episodes so they can show off their acting. Bleh. Next week is another VSE with actors and characters I don’t care about. These aren’t filler eps. This is looking like most of the season’s material.
In defense of the characters, I agreed with Beth. Daryl was acting like a big baby and it would have driven me nuts. Heck yeah, barricade yourself in somewhere and get drunk. Burn something down and start a forest fire. Who cares? It’s the end of the world and you have to do something to entertain yourself and burn off steam. There’s no point to a life of just silently and sullenly surviving moment to moment.
So yeah, you are drunk and you want to burn down the past. But that’s a perfectly good shelter! You could have slept there. And now you are wandering in a zombie infested woods in the middle of the night and you’re drunk! :smack:
At least Beth did get a clean shirt. Well, for a minute.
Well, I think walkers would be really easy to avoid in “real life.” They’re dumb and not very fast and I don’t trip often and I refuse to believe the walkers per square mile could be as high as it seems. No matter where they are there are always 15 or 20 walkers just moments away.
They’d have been super drunk though. I’d have been violently ill and passed out walker chow.
Okay, I am going to come to the writers’ defense. In each of our splintered sub-groups, there is one member who either does not want to re-join up, or is just ready to give it up. After the horror of what happened at the prison, they are done with trying to live as a group. These people would be Rick, Michonne, Daryl, Carol, the pair with Maggie, and I guess Sgt. Ford. Each episode is laying the groundwork for how they wind up realizing that it is better to be a group than to be alone. At the end of this episode, Daryl “burns his past”, which will allow him to endeavor to go back to the group.
I like back stories for certain characters. I think it’s interesting that, for all his laser-focus now, Daryl was essentially his brother’s minion before the ZA. Didn’t he say something like “This [the ZA] made me have a purpose” at one point?
OTOH Beth is whiny and nerve-inducing because it’s so obvious she’s the youngest daughter of some privilege and, up until now, had no idea of the existing world beyond her own bubble.
It’s almost like the writers are following some kind of high school essay template which says to INSERT EVENT THAT REFERS BACK TO THE CHARACTERS AND WHY CHARACTERS DO WHAT THEY DO. In this case, the finger.
I don’t mind episodes like that in general because it gives you more information about each character. What I do mind is stretching them out for weeks on end. My guess is either next week or the week after everybody will be reunited at Terminus and the story continues from there.
They could’ve redeemed this episode if we had found out Daryl was an accountant or something, instead they went with the incredibly unsurprising cliche.
Wow - I am completely out of step with the rest of the dopers, I guess, since I really enjoyed this episode. I liked the slower pace and the chance to get to know Daryl a bit better and it gave me a chance to care about whether Beth lives or dies. I don’t yet but might eventually.
That makes sense. I’ve also noticed that they’ve split up the original survivors from season one so that they’re more or less one per group (the exception being Rick and Currrrrl still together, and I don’t think Maggie’s group has an Original One). Okay, maybe that’s kind of a weak point. The shows have been kind of weak on plot, too, though, so maybe that’s fitting.
That would have been AWESOME! He looks like a redneck, he acts like a redneck, then we find out that he hunts on the weekends to de-stress from being a dentist.
I also very much appreciated that Daryl and Beth didn’t hook up (yet). I was waiting for the drunken kissing to start, too, and was glad when they didn’t go there.
To quote myself from last week’s thread, last week’s episode “…introduced new characters, a new goal, a new potential enemy and sent Rick and the others toward Terminus.”
