*** The Walking Dead airs on AMC and can be found on channels 16 for Insight Communications Customers and channel 54 for Time Warner Customers . For HD channel versions, check your local cable or satellite provider for more information. ***
In Sunday Night’s episode of The Walking Dead entitled ‘TriggerFinger’, both the living and the dead begin to showcase a problem for Rick, Herschel and Glen, whilst Lori struggles with surviving after her car accident and those on the farm begin to choose sides between Shane and Rick.
By all accounts, The Walking Dead is a show that is full of suspense, action and drama, and by episodes end, like always, one is excited for the next episode. But after mulling over what you’ve watched after a few minutes, it’s quick to see there are still flaws in the series as a whole. An episode like ‘Triggerfinger’ exposes what is both great and lacking in the series.
And it’s really more execution than anything, as The Walking Dead on the surface is a fantastic show; despite our initial instincts as viewers is to see more action and zombies and less character development, the show does the latter anyway, in an attempt to give us something or more importantly someone to care about.
Therein lies the rub though; besides a select few of characters, who do we really care about on the show?
A lot of goodwill for the character of Daryl (and even Carol) felt mostly squandered tonight after a nice build-up over most of Season 2. While the general trope of lashing out ‘in the only way they knows how’ is okay, it feels, along with Carol’s treatment of Daryl, a bit out of place. While it creates tension between the characters, it feels false and unjustified upon further scrutiny, especially in their exchange in ‘Triggerfinger’.
The most of ‘Triggerfinger’ despite it’s gun-toting action in town, really came down to the overall arc between Nature vs. Nurture, or more succinctly Shane vs. Rick as the one true leader the group in this post-apocalyptic-hell. In retrospect, Shane’s ideas are correct, but when it comes down to it, you, and myself, as a viewer, are on the side of Rick.
The problem is ultimately is that Rick lives in a world where he tries to maintain a sense of balance, a sense of rules that the modern world (that no longer exists) used to hold as the standard. Another problem with the series, which relates to the Rick vs. Shane situation, is that Shane is more bark than he is bite as a villain on the show.
To get what I mean by that, one must first look at a show that well developed its characters and rivalry between them, such as ABC’s L0ST. There was no greater overall series rivalry than between Jack Sheppard and John Locke. Despite any misgivings you may have about the show and it’s mythology, I believe one can view the series from start to finish and understand or grasp where both men came from when it came to doing what they believed with conviction, even if we knew it was wrong.
I bring this up here because in The Walking Dead, they are clearly painting Shane to become ‘the big bad’ and I get that. As a viewer of any film or television show, one appreciates the good guy to root for and the bad guy to go against. Yet despite any reasoning you may have to make Shane feared and loathed as the big bad so we can root against him and root for Rick. My response to this is to at least make it plausible that we can then root for Shane too. No villain can be better than one that we can sympathize with his plight. * Heck, I guess it could be best explained via the scene between Andrea and Shane from the episode in question and it is a valid one; Shane has good ideas, but the presentation is off.
(*) Granted, nothing is wrong with an overall bad guy being bad for the sake of being evil, but in a story like this where it’s just literally friend vs. friend, it feels like the show is not achieving what it might be trying to do. It feels like the show is trying to make us sympathize with Shane but it is doing the exact opposite, and the performance from Jon Bernthal, while great, is further driving this point home
With that said, the show does more than make up for these little snafus in little moments. The idea that Lori in a very Shakespearean way is leading Rick further to a confrontation with Shane, and the duality between people who for the sake of love cower and those who run towards danger (like the differences between Rick and Glenn) were all well done. The Walking Dead succeeds on many levels and as a show does make me beg the question as next Sunday rolls around…. What is going to happen next?
But what do YOU think, examiners?
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