The Moth Chase

Hi all,

To be clear, I was mostly bored in this episode – to me it ran like a recap of all the emotions we are supposed to be feeling, and all the themes we are supposed to be thinking, without actually building on any of them. The climax – at least in the ‘talking about the themes,’ not  actually ‘showing the themes’ came with Rick’s assertion that death has always been with us. If we didn’t give up hope before, why would we give it up now? It’s not about what we believe. It’s what we do. (Yes, Rick – I believe we’ve heard this speech before). Said with that gravelly voice, it’s almost convincing – but of course, once I can tear myself away from Rick’s authoritative presence, I remember that the death of this post-apocalyptic world is qualitatively different than the death of the pre-apocalypse. Once death comes to life, it has the power to swallow hope entirely.

Nevertheless, Herschel seemed convinced.

Enter a couple of creepy guys from Philly to prove that the line between human and walker/lame-brain really does become blurred in a world that runs on violence. Rick, it seems, has less pause at killing a couple of dangerous humans, than he had at shooting down a little girl zombie. Carl is not the only one poisoned by this new order.

As a result, in the last episode Rick killed wisdom (Sophia being Greek for wisdom), and in this one, he killed truth…or, at least, the first guy to speak some real, dark truth about the world in which they now live: “Ain’t nobody’s hands clean in what’s left of this world.”

What I can’t figure out is why, when they all knew that Beth was in a catatonic state back at home, in dire need of medical care, the guys sat around drinking the afternoon away with these sinister new friends. At first I thought that Lori was stupid for heading out to find Rick and the others (and really, you gotta look at the map while you drive when you know how dangerous these roads can be…argh, women drivers, eh – just the worst! At least that’s what I learned from this episode.) But it actually turns out that these guys might need reminding of the needs back at the ranch.

Indeed, Rick is so busy defending the farm (which is not even his farm) against newcomers who look a lot like he did just a few weeks ago (and yeah, they were trying to draw that connection…but off I found it overly obvious and boring…the only glimmer of intrigue in it was to watch an external threat solidify the bond of solidarity between Rick and Herschel), that he forgets he’s on a mission to take care of a dire need playing out back at said farm.

In sum, the action of this episode seemed to rely on poor, snap decisions being made by usually at least somewhat level-headed people. And this is never a good narrative device!

Sorry to be negative – perhaps I was hoping for too much? What did you guys think?

xoxo,
Natalie

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I am right there with you, Natalie, in being disappointed by this mid-season premiere. After the explosive barn showdown in November, I was ready for some serious action, the end to the pastoral farm retreat and the chance to put into (probably violent and conflicted) action the various philosophical debates we’d watched unfold while everyone felt relatively safe. But until the very end of the episode it all just felt like more of the same: the same arguments, the same debates about morals and codes of justice, the same posturing and hand-wringing.

Until the showdown in the bar. That was my only glimmer of hope that the show might be headed in the right direction. What it means (about me? about the show?) that I was exhilarated and enlivened by cold-blooded murder I will save for another post. What stood out for me in that fantastic scene was the menace of human-on-human violence in this world. The threat of violence erupting among the humans has hung over the series (and Shane’s sacrifice of Otis has been the touch point), but for all the tension between the farm-dwellers and the road-travelers, there has been surprisingly little violence. Even Shane has not suggested the obvious solution to Herschel’s bullheaded insistence that they leave: take the farm by force (please tell me I’m not the only one who thought this was an obvious path). For all the talk of civilization crumbling, the veneer of civility has held. Until two fast-talking, lower class guys from Philly walk into the bar, flouting good manners (what an animal! He is pissing in an abandoned bar!) and threatening to bring their bad manners to the farm. I knew exactly why Rick and Co. didn’t leave the bar – because the Philly dudes exuded bad and no way in hell Herschel and Rick are going to let them touch the sanctity of their women and children. The racial and class clues worked amazingly well – all the ways undereducated and urban can stand in for all kinds of “undesireables” – to generate tension and pull the audiences sympathies toward Rick when he shot them. On the one hand, Rick shooting two humans in cold blood seems to signal the beginning of the new world order Shane has been prophesying. On the other hand, it reminded me that sometimes an apocalypse is just a license to violently enact the prejudices and bigotry that haunt civilization. Playing with these themes is part of what this show does best of all and maybe that is why I was so heartened by murder.

Kathryn

p.s. oh, and Natalie, I completely agree about Lori: she is about to top my list of most frustrating female characters of all time: how can she be so overwhelmingly shocked to discover Carl is “cold” in this new world. And really, is it “cold” to realize that life and death ethics have changed? And good god why did she decide, without telling anyone, that she, of all people, should just drive herself into zombie-infested town? It makes no sense and her doe-eyes are not doing it for me anymore.

Natalie and Kathryn….

I didn’t have a lot of expectations ramped up for the return of the show. I recall how much we appreciated the cinematography of the final shoot-out, and I wasn’t surprised that they started there. What would be the immediate after-effects of this massacre? I was wondering, before watching this episode, whether this would bind the group together in some way, whether the collective event would bring them together (perhaps thinking along Girardian lines here). But, I agree, things did not change that much. The usual suspects went back to their expected roles–Maggie and Glen are still sweet on each other, Carol still resembles an injured animal, and Shane and Dale are still at odds. The only turn was, as Kathryn says, the human-on-human violence. It was pivotal that Otis was revived in their memories. The moment that Shane ‘sacrificed’ Otis to save himself is still one of the most chilling moments of the entire series. It was the first human-on-human killing. And here Rick joins Shane in the act of unjustified killing (was trying to move through the points of just war theory here — preemptive strike?) What is justified in the name of protection? I found the hope discourse lifeless, and I was trying to resuscitate hope in the writing of the show. I was even hoping that there would have been a little more philosophical waxing about memorializing the dead and what that means for the living….but, not too much there. So perhaps the question, for all of the bloggers, is this: where should they go with the plot? I was more inspired by your attempts to carry the show somewhere.

–Shelly (oh, I did love the final song….does anyone know the artist/title?)

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Hello friends,

OK…first thing’s first. Shelly, the song is “The Regulator” by Clutch, one of my favorite bands (from MD, no less!) It’s on Blast Tyrant, one of their best albums, imo. (I, too, thought it was the perfect end-song, and was so excited to hear Clutch!)

Now, onto substantive matters. I really, really liked this episode. So, I have to disagree with y’all. Let me say why. Let me say that I agree–as with all of the episodes on this show, there are moments of really annoying stylistic melodrama (some of the music just irks me). But that doesn’t detract with how awesome this show has gotten, imo. I think the show works best when it’s slow, not particularly action filled, and just prodding because, to me, that’s when its greatest theme emerges: as I’ve been suggesting, the status of normative authority and the practical actualization and instantiation of those norms (say their vivacity, using a somehow apt word given the context).

In this sense, I agree that this week’s episode mostly continued this theme, but it gave us a few new riffs on it. One, is that it showed how the real problem–at least as far as I take the show to suggest–is not that norms lose their vivacity (but nonetheless linger on, in the same way that the walkers do) or that their authority is up for grabs as much in the post-apocalyptic world as in ours, but rather that the true problem is how we go on in light of this fact. We see through this episode how something like the ties of family persist even in light of the collapse (and say, the practical impossibility) of most other norms (say, the norms of the pre-apocalyptic world–but here, too, I see the show blurring such distinctions…Carl’s “coldness” is meant to suggest ordinary “bourgeois” coldness as much as post-apocalyptic zombie coldness). What is a family? How do we understand it? What function can it still serve? How do we go on when elements of the family are one way (say, Shane), while others are another (say, Hershel), and, what are the bounds of family and how are they negotiated. We see how the norms of class and something like affect (Katheryn, I took the friction between the Philly boys and our group to be one of affect and sensibility as much as anything else) persist even when there’s no good reason for them to, and we see, with this episode, that sometimes it’s impossible “to go on” together…the spade is turned so to speak, and violence the only option for resolution (and, I rewound the scene several times, the Philly guy definitely draws for the gun he had placed at the bar).

To conclude, if we see the show as fundamentally about something like “social space” where the gimmick is that the show trades on conditions where not only are we able to put a variety of different persons in a shared social space (warping and shifting it, say, more than normal), but also proposes conditions where the boundaries and fixed landmarks of that social space are up for grabs, then what I see this episode contributing beyond earlier ones is giving us a detailed look into how we can go on together in such space (and to this extent, Rick’s crazy, but amazingly acted outburst to Dale is as much a way of going as Rick’s showdown in the bar–and, yes, I think the Western allusions here are no accidents, westerns often being the site of the frontier and dealing in similar themes).

Best,

Martin