It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, and 2015.
When this episode ended we only had two more in the season. Which means that this week is about taking a breath and relaxing before the shit hits the fan. And we all know the shit is going to hit the fan. But we don’t even get out of the episode before that happens.
“Twice as Far” is a mixed bag. The majority of the episode focuses on Eugene (Josh McDermitt) and Denise (Merritt Wever) on parallel paths as they try to prove, at least to themselves, that they are not dead weight. The Eugene storyline is fairly predictable and as I’m really not a fan of the character, especially when he’s paired up with Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), their jaunt to an abandoned machine shop where a newly pony-tailed Eugene explains his plan to make bullets, is just tedious. Of course a zombie appears from out of nowhere, and of course Eugene is determined to kill it on his own.
But he can’t. Because he’s Eugene.
And when Abe steps in and kills it for him, he throws a temper tantrum which, in turn, inspires a temper tantrum in Abraham. It’s all just so tired that I want them both to die. Neither character is bringing anything to the story anymore, so maybe it’s time to send them to look at the flowers.
If you’re a reader of the comics, you know that this is exactly the point where Abraham is killed with an arrow through the eye as the Saviors ambush them while they’re feeling comfortable.
But no, that is not to be.
Meanwhile, Denise leads Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Rosita (Christian Serratos) to an apothecary she saw some time in the past, in the hopes that they will have a stash of drugs to resupply their dwindling medical lab (if you could call it that). As it turns out, she’s right and she actually accomplishes what she set out to do – to a degree. But finding the drugs isn’t enough. Like Eugene, she wants to show that she can kill a zombie, as if that’s the only way one can carry one’s weight.
She’s their fucking doctor, but that’s not enough.
The psychology here is sound, I admit. She’s afraid all the time. She wants to prove to herself, if not to the others, that she can take care of herself. She wants to be strong for Tara when she returns. She’s upset that she didn’t tell her she loved her before the supply run.
In the best scene Merritt Wever has been given on the show, she makes all of this plain and it’s beautiful and heartbreaking and inspiring all at the same time.
Then she gets an arrow to the eye and is dead.
Oh, I’m sorry. Did I not spoiler alert that shit? Too bad.
This actually pisses me off. Mainly because there’s just no reason for it, other than to provide anguish for Daryl.
Yes, Daryl. It’s not about Denise or Tara at all.
Because the guy who puts the crossbow bolt in Denise’s face is Dwight (Austin Amelio), the asshat Daryl let live, who then stole his crossbow and motorcycle in the burned woods. This entire scenario is set up not to provide a sudden painful loss for the audience, although Denise is cute and adorable. Dwight kills her with Daryl’s own weapon. By accident, since he was actually aiming for Daryl.
So Daryl let him live. Daryl was the intended target. And it was his own weapon that killed her.
This is all about Daryl, and Denise’s amazing speech about strength, courage, and love is lost to the shock value of making sure Daryl suffers for the weakness of sympathy.
And then Eugene bites Dwight in the dick.
Yeah, so there’s that.
If we ended there, I might have been able to move past it. To say, all right. Daryl is the character everyone loves and the audience wants to feel his pain and watch him emote his awkward sadness and repressed sexuality. It will make his eventual death at the hands of Negan all the more poignant because he’s just lost the will to keep going by that point. Of if someone else dies in his place, the grief will become the forge that turns him to iron and then Season 7 becomes his time to shine as an avenging angel.
But the show wasn’t over.
Then we were back at Alexandria, burying Denise, getting back into our routine.
And from out of the blue, we get a voiceover from Carol (Melissa McBride), spouting some nonsense about how killing is coming and she can’t kill anymore, so she can’t love anymore, so she’s got to leave because she doesn’t belong or some such bullshit. And then she’s gone, leaving a sappy note to the nameless guy she’s been banging for the past episode.
It’s such a spineless way to take her out of the equation for when Negan does show up. Which means that she’s either gone for good in the lamest story arc that The Walking Dead has ever put forth, or she’ll be back as a captive of Negan and may be sacrificed for the eternal flame of Daryl’s sad eyes.
It’s about the shittiest way that the most interesting and complex character on the show could go out it simply turns my stomach. It’s almost as though after the Wolves attacked Alexandria, the writers realized that they’d made Carol into something too badass – too unstoppable. Negan couldn’t stand against her, so she has to go. And if we’ve learnt anything from the past (the hospital raid that took Beth from us, for example), it’s that when you want things to go wrong and the worst outcomes to manifest, you’ve got to take Carol off the board.
So get ready for violence and sadness that could be avoided if the creators stayed true to the characters.
That Morgan is still around and Carol has left really undermines my enjoyment of The Walking Dead.