9.3

The Walking Dead: “A”

(Episode 4.16)

Geek Reviews The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead: “A”

Shane Ryan and Josh Jackson review The Walking Dead each week in a series of letters.

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Josh,

AAAAAAAAAASDFLLKJFHL;ASDFJLK;ADSFJLASDJLFALLL.

I just finished watching, and I had to get that out of my system. I think you and our readers probably know what I mean.

First question: How can they end the season this way?!?!? Howww?!

FA;SJF;ALSJFKL;ASJFL;SADJF;ASFLJ.

Sorry, but I guess it wasn’t out of my system.

I realize I have to pull myself together fast here, because of professionalism and all, but I’m not sure if I can be cohesive about this episode at the moment. Let me throw some thoughts at you right now and see what sticks.

1. RICK CHANNELED HIS INNER ZOMBIE. HE ATE A DUDE. HE IS THE WALKING LIVING.

2. Apparently there are hipster douchebags in the zombie apocalypse. Who knew? I’m speaking, of course, about Gareth, the Terminus head honcho, who even has a hipster douchebag name. To me, he looked a lot like the hipster douchebag professor that Julie Taylor slept with when she went to college. I swear I haven’t looked this up yet, and am doing it right now…and no, I’m totally wrong. That was Gil McKinney. But tell me he doesn’t look like Andrew J. West, Josh. Gil. Andrew. Right? They’re cut from the same hipster douchebag cloth.

3. What do you think Carl mouthed in the car with Michonne when the camera panned down to him? It was just one word, I think, and it came right as Rick was telling Daryl that he’d do anything to keep him safe. At first I thought it was “bullshit,” but it doesn’t really make sense in context with everything that came later.

4. Did the Hershel flashbacks work for you? I thought it was okay, and I think I understand that the contrast was meant to highlight the idealism of rebuilding a normal world (growing something, quite literally) versus the reality that the world is full of danger and treachery and you can never bank on security for very long. Still, I don’t think it really hit home for me. The rest of this episode was so compelling for me that when we flashed back, I more or less just wanted it to be over.

5. Except for Patrick! He’s not ashamed that the legos are for ages 4-12, Josh! Great to see him again. Wish he hadn’t died.

6. Well, I guess the gang’s back together. Sure, they’re unarmed in hostile territory, stuck in a train car and probably about to get eaten or brainwashed, but they’re together.

7. Seriously, Gareth really annoyed me with his sardonic-ironic tone right from the start. THERE’S NO SOFT IRONY ANYMORE, GARETH, YOU HIPSTER DOUCHEBAG. THERE ARE NO MORE JULIE TAYLORS FOR YOU TO SEDUCE.

8. What the hell is this Terminus place? As Rick and the gang quickly found out, they chose not to kill them when it would have been super easy. I mean, it’s got to be a cult, right? And the more I think about it, the more I think brainwashing is the end game here with the prison gang. When they found themselves in the room with all the candles, the words “Never Again,” “Never Trust,” and “We First, Always” were painted in bold black letters on the balls, and there was a concentric circle of names written on the floor…in memoriam, you’d think. There was also the lady recording the creepy cult vocals when they entered—the kind of thing you’d hear playing on a loop at a re-education camp—and they seem to be armed to the teeth. Maybe I’m crazy, Josh, but I do not trust these people.

9. Pretty badass closing line from Rick, right? I wanted him to end with AMC’s first f-bomb, personally. How hilarious and awesome would it have been if he looked back and said, “they’re screwing with the wrong motherfuckers.” You’d never see it coming!

10. Remember that bag of guns he buried out in the woods beyond the perimeter? I bet that comes in handy next season.

Bonus: Our pal Joe, with his code, isn’t as noble as we thought, is he? I could’ve sworn last week that he wasn’t the kind of dude who would unnecessarily kill a kid, but not only was he up for it; he seemed to really enjoy the prospect.

So, I guess later we’ll have to get into thoughts on the season as a whole and predictions about next season, but I’m curious what you thought about this episode first. Overall, I was pretty satisfied, and it was tense as hell. One thing I can say is that after four seasons, The Walking Dead has not lost its mojo.

—Shane

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Shane,

Reading The Walking Dead comics series and then watching the show amounts to one huge misdirection. This whole season when you’ve been worried about the ominous nature of the name Terminus, I’ve thought, “Actually, it’ll turn out to be a nice safe haven for our survivors, but Joe’s gang is going to be a persistent problem all through next season.” But the TV show’s writers must have been with you in thinking that introducing a place called Terminus and then not making it some freakish cult is like introducing a gun in Act One and by Act Three, that gun hasn’t belonged to a douchebag hipster running a freakish cult. Now I just don’t know where it’s all going. And I greatly appreciate that.

Once again, the show hinted at a more complex villain then revealed him to be an absolute villain, but I was okay with that. I loved Daryl’s line about connecting with this group of thugs—something like “They had a code. It was a stupid code, but it was something.” The ethics of “Claim” apparently extended to women and children. That big creep who appeared at Carl’s window looked he had more in mind than just killing the boy. These were the worst kind of people, and it was good to see them finally go, however gruesome it got. It takes a lot to get a civilized audience pulling for a guy to bite a piece out of someone’s throat, but they succeeded with me.

And that’s where I thought the Hershel flashbacks worked (plus more Patrick!). The father who—when he had the luxury—sheltered his son from the horrors of the world was also willing to go primal to fight against those same horrors. In the apocalypse, you want to retain your humanity, but you must first be alive to be human. And I don’t know what Carl whispered to Michonne, but that’s the same thing he’s struggling with. He calls himself a monster—and he killed a fleeing kid when he thought it necessary. But Michonne’s story about losing her own child and the cowering men who couldn’t protect him made it clear that in the show’s point of view, those unwilling to fight for each other are as damned as those willing to prey on others. It’s good to be a farmer. But even the farmer must be a warrior.

Now on to Terminus…

I really thought we were seeing A-Team-villain level of bad shooting from the roof, and I was glad when it became clear they were herding them through a gauntlet and not just unbelievably bad with a gun. But Terminus made for a powerful twist in the Season finale, an area where the show has always excelled. The candle room was effectively disorienting for both Rick’s group and the viewer. What the hell is this place? They clearly aren’t intending to kill them—unless they’ve become cannibals [shudder]. They’re intentionally luring in people as a matter of course. The messages “NEVER AGAIN” and “WE FIRST” hint at an intriguing history. Like Woodbury, we’ve got another group of complex antagonists who could turn out to be future allies or the creepiest kind of enemy or some mixture of both. Maybe not everyone in Terminus is brainwashed. Maybe some of them don’t want to eat kids. Maybe some of them liked Gareth before he got big and sold out but now they’re all like, “Eh, Gareth’s early leadership was so much better.”

But yes, the gang is back together—at least most of them. Tyreese and Carol (whoa, I almost wrote “and the girls”—dagger to the heart all over again) are on their way to Terminus. And Beth is now the Bride of the Undertaker, whoever that turns out to be. But we gained four new friends, including the two best/worst haircuts of the apocalypse. There are guns buried outside, reinforcements on the way, and Rick is pissed. I can’t wait for next season.

So where does this season rank among the four so far? I’m surprised to say that between the final episodes of the Governor, the drama of “The Grove” and another strong finale, I may put it first.

—Josh

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Josh,

Just so you know, I liked Gareth before it was cool. (I read some of his early stuff in a bootleg script back in ‘07, back when the show was supposed to be an indie stage play.)

I think I might agree with you about Season 4 being the best. At the very least, the highs matched the highs of every other season, and though we had a couple duds in the second half (Daryl + Beth needs to be retired from syndication ASAP), overall there was some dark, interesting, smart stuff. And at least three iconic episodes (Governor, the Grove, the finale). In terms of legacy, it’s a tie between seasons one and four for me…and it might be an unfair comparison, since season one had the luxury of packing all the good stuff into six episodes.

I do like your point about the Hershel flashbacks showing the various ways you try to protect your children; sometimes physically, in the moment, and sometimes with longer-term strategies. For Rick, the farming was about teaching Carl skills that would help keep him alive, but there was also a moral component to the whole thing. As in, look, there’s a whole part of life that doesn’t revolve around killing, and this is what we should be striving for as everything else goes to hell. I thought there was a pessimistic outlook to the contrast, though, in the sense that the “god” of the show was telling us, “things are too screwed up, and you can’t have it both ways.”

Oh, and how about the revelation that Michonne’s original zombies were her husband and friend! I loved that detail, and I loved the revelation about why it happened. I also loved (total love-fest alert) that she recognized that what she did was dark and disturbing in some crucial way. Even though it protected her, she lost her humanity for that period until she met Andrea. Which, again, hints at the balance required to be the ideal person in this hellscape. It’s so easy to die, and it’s so easy to sacrifice your goodness if you manage to stay alive. That middle ground between death and depravity requires a lot of work, and that’s why Rick is the moral hero of the whole show. More than any other character, he strives to always be in that sweet spot, and his only divergence was when he went nuts chasing the ghost of Lori. Every other character, at some point, is either too good to stay alive (Patrick, Hershel, Dale), or goes off the deep end into a state of near-evil (too many to mention). Even with Daryl, you get the sense that if the man they were chasing hadn’t been Rick, he’d have either stayed with the group, or left in disgust without doing anything to protect the victims.

Looking ahead, are we pretty much agreed that the aim of the Terminus clan is either to brainwash or eat the newcomers? I didn’t see many examples of slave labor or anything like that, so this is either a matter of food or getting new recruits, right? And how long do you think we’ll stay in Terminus before the whole thing gets blown to pieces?

Two final notes. First, I want to point out that even though his time on camera was brief, Abraham Ford’s sullen, half-resigned half-hopeful performance was awesome. Second, when Rick and Carl and Michonne ran over and found the guy in the clearing being attacked with zombies, am I the only one who noticed that he had a very clear alley to run into the woods? I only bring this up because unless you’re in an enclosed space, I still don’t understand how anyone with the ability to run ever gets caught by a zombie. This is my one technical beef with the show, after four seasons.

—Shane

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Shane,

This episode almost served as a thesis for the show: When the apocalypse comes, you will struggle to both stay alive and keep your humanity. It’s that moral middle ground that’s most interesting to explore. How do you protect yourself and your allies while still remembering the life that’s worth fighting for. How do you rebuild civilization (whether that means life at the prison, Woodbury, Terminus or even the roaming bandits with their code) in a way that’s sustainable and worth protecting? When The Walking Dead can both explore those themes and build the tension of survival, it’s at its best. And if this episode sort of beat you over the head with those themes, its thesis was interesting enough that I’m willing to forgive.

So I can’t even begin to guess how things will turn out at Terminus, but I hope it’s really complicated and messy and the lines between protagonists and antagonists get blurred. I hope this group isn’t just a bunch of evil cannibals, but normal people with their own different sets of baggage who are trying to build something good and protecting it in their own creative ways—ways that maybe have become twisted. Internal conflict about what’s right at Terminus would be more interesting than just having Rick’s group just overcome more clear-cut evil.

As to your final notes, yes, even a Ford cameo makes the show that much better. I would have loved an inappropriate, tone-deaf comment from Eugene. And yes, all it takes is an open lane for slow zombies not to feel like a threat. I always thought the same thing about Sleestaks in Land of the Lost, but at least they had crude weapons. Maybe this guy’s leg was broken?

Until Season Five—or at least until our letters about Game of Thrones—I’ll sign off with a twist on our tradition. He gave us a scare by offering himself in Rick’s place but…

Glad you didn’t die, Daryl Dixon,
—Josh

Follow Shane Ryan and Josh Jackson on Twitter.

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