I was thinking about the local natural gas main still working. An off-grid propane system makes sense I guess.
Finally a great episode!
After discussing the episode with my brother, I think a few things could have made it unforgettable.
First, if they would have shown the execution of the kid. I know sensors would never do it, but they should have. It would have been such a more powerful scene if it were shown. Carol’s character and the girl, upset but not understanding how bad she fucked up, and how it goes down after even a few seconds. It was already good, but could have been unreal.
The second thing that I talked about was Tyrese's potential killing of Carol. He could have done it in the woods early as a shock kill. But I think that if he took Carol's offer of taking the pistol and shooting her right then and there, right after she admitted it, it would have defined the show in a new light. He would have been left there, alone, basically free from the show and still remained a genuine good person. It would have been one of the most surreal things on television I've seen, and, as far as the characters go, realistic.
Still, bravo on the episode. After watching Breaking Bad finish, and True Detective just trounce every show on TV, it is finally nice to see an episode of one of the shows that drew me back to TV in the first place remind me of why it was that I was obsessed with the show to begin with. Whomever on the writing staff wrote this episode, keep bringing these great stories. Whomever on the writing staff didn’t, step off and give the viewers back the show they fell in love with.
Well, Lizzy needed to die. They could let her be bitten and turn, or they could mercy kill her. That’s the same choice Carol was facing with the two patients. They could wait for them to die and turn, or they could mercy kill them. Tyreese probably wouldn’t have understood before he was forced to conclude the same thing with regard to Lizzy.
Or they just turned the gas back on and relit the pilot and didn’t show it on screen.
…dude we get it. You hate the baby on the show.
Shane demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that walkers are not people during Barnaggedon, which IMO was possibly the best scene of the whole series.
I’ve been a major pooh-pooher (poo-pooer?) of TWD all along, but I have to admit this was one outstanding episode.
Daring, emotional, focused…and what was that that I saw? Was that good acting??? Even from the young-uns.
I almost walked away (get it?) from this show a few different times; glad I didn’t.
mmm
Every episode is worth the wait … But this one is the best so far… Now on the last two episode before this season ends 
Sometimes this show wants to show unsettling things but fails to actually have the balls to go through with it. As examples, when Carl had a gun on the fleeing survivor after the first woodbury assault on the prison, the show implied it was trying to show us what a cold blooded killer Carl had become, but they actually went quite soft and didn’t show that at all - they presented the guy as an ambiguous threat that Carl pretty much had to kill. But then they had the character react as though Carl was a cold blooded killer. Similarly, when Maggie and Glenn were captured by the governor, the characters all acted as if Maggie had been brutally raped and tortured, but they didn’t have the balls to show that, so they showed no one actually touching her but had the characters react as if something horrific had happened.
So I thought there was going to be some sort of cop-out like that here. I was glad to see they didn’t, and actually showed what they meant to show, with the full emotional impact. I do agree that the actual killing blow shouldn’t have been a cutaway, and they should’ve hit us in the gut with the entirety of it, but it was nice to see that they finally actually went through with some distasteful shit.
Incidentally, what the fuck is wrong with all the people who believe that Walkers retain the personality/consciousness of the person they once were? Hershell herding people into the barn, the governor keeping his daughter, various other examples. If you think your loved one is actually alive in there somewhere, reduced to some horrible monstrous existence that couldn’t be anything but a living hell, it should make you want to kill them that much more. To believe that it’s a person in there, and for you to keep that person in that inconceivable, horrible state - what the fuck is wrong with you? Prolonging their suffering is the worst possible thing you could do.
Although, in retrospect, it would’ve hit harder if we could’ve seen Lizzie’s perspective, or if she had one. She never explained, and no one asked, what it was that she thought the walkers were, or why she acted as she did. Her craziness was basically unexplained and unrelatable. There was no step by step process where you could say “aha, even though it’s crazy, I can see where her thought process ended up here” - there’s no thought process to examine, the character never really makes sense. So you can’t relate to her - she’s a little mystery box. Which undercuts the power of the whole plot line.
An example rationale might be - after her sister had almost been eaten by a walker, she realized that it’s their world now - that the walkers were the normal “people” of this world, and that to be safe, you had to be one of them. So if she mercifully killed her sister, she’d turn, and still be some sort of person, but now she’d be safe, she’d be a natural part of this new world. That might explain why the close call with her sister and the walker freaked her out, and made her decide to kill her sister, but the episode didn’t imply anything like that. It didn’t give us any insight into her thought process.
Didn’t help that the actress was probably not up to the part, but it’s hard to find kids that young that can pull something like that off. On the plus side, the adult actors in the episode sold it.
Both this one and “Clear” were written by the same person, Scott Gimple. He’s also the new showrunner. He’s the best writer on staff, IMHO, especially when he’s given a sort of “bottle episode” away from the main story, like this episode, “Clear”, and “18 Miles Out”.
It is getting better as the show goes on, true.
Why assume that it’s so awful to be a walker? It might be fine, or even preferable to being human, we simply don’t know. Stashing an infected loved one somewhere secure, as the Governor did, in case some way to reverse the process is discovered, seems sane and seasonable to me. Acting like they hadn’t changed wouldn’t be, of course.
I like the concept, shades of I Am Legend. Some sort of insight into what Lizzy thought was going on would have improved things, I agree.
Seconded. “Stay away from that encampment - if we thought a Governor was bad, imagine how bad a pope would be!”
I thought she did very well. The tantrum looked real. At one point early on she was staring off into the distance and I remarked, “She’s nutty as a fruitcake.”
I said the same thing…it’s even one of the same songs, isn’t it?
Ok, so the fire…specifically, the smoke from the fire. I’m curious if anybody else had the same reaction I did.
When they saw that, I got a really creepy, nervous feeling. WAY out of context to the show. It took me 20 minutes to realize where I had seen smoke like that and why it made me feel jumpy.
[spoiler]The pillar of smoke from Lost! The Others are coming!
Just a sign that I need to watch the first few seasons of Lost again, I guess…[/spoiler]
I can’t speak for Lizzie, but Herschel and the Gov hoped to get them back someday when a cure was found. (Herschel moreso then the Gov, but I think they were both thinking the same thing).
The sad thing is that you probably didn’t miss any needed context or anything really important by skipping all those other episodes. This show is ripe for a “fan edit” that combines something like all the existing seasons into one consistently good season.
This ep was as tight and encapsulated as a decent stage production, not the least of which was the evolution of “We could stay here” across the short arc. With just a few dialogue changes, it could stand alone.
It also deals with something that’s been glossed over so far: mental illness, from PTSD, shock and conditions pre-dating the ZA. Sure, Rick went loopy for a while and we’ve seen some outbursts, and maybe the Governor’s overall sanity was questionable, but everyone prior was either a walk-on or functional. This is the first case I recall where they let us look right into the eyes of someone too crazy to deal with, and took it right off the only cliff there is in that world. Brutal.
I am getting a little tired of the micro-stories, though. Is there any confirmation that this season’s intention was to save money on cast and major sets? Sure looks like it.
The runners do seem to rely a lot on truckloads of Zombie Helper™ to pad out the shows and seasons. A reduction to prime ingredients would mean a ten-show arc.
The logic is simple. She can hear them talk, so they’re like normal people, just a little different.
Me: “I would have locked Lizzie in a room with dead-body-Mika and just waited it out.”
My husband: “You’re fucked up, honey.”