The best part about cautious pessimism is that it leaves just enough room to be proven wrong and not feel too bad about it. The worst part is that the cowardice of the lack of position allows no ability to gloat when you end up being sort of right. So when I wrote last fall that this third season of The Walking Dead had all the pieces to form a really solid action/horror/drama series but it that it might not do it, I wasn't saying much. I had been burned by the show before, but loved the spirit of it too much to bury the thing. And here we are, about to enter the second half of a mostly-terrific third seasons and I haven't a cowardly leg to stand on.
That'll show me. I won't be looking, but it'll show me.
Quick rundown on what went right in the first half: Lori is dead. Carl's growing into a stone cold zombie apocalypse survivor. Rick is half-mad. The Governor is more so. The town of Woodbury is one of the most interesting sociological experiments I've ever seen on television. We now have real inter-character conflict brewing, rather than a dull back and forth "what now?" And Daryl is still Daryl.
The dialogue remains a wet fart in a dark room. Too many of the characters (particularly the female ones) are still wooden and conspicuously bad at decision-making. And come season's end, we might be able to look back on some uneven pacing. But the show has made enormous strides. And for someone who's wanted to be a fan since the first promos back in 2010, that feels great to be able to say.
I've recently been playing through The Walking Dead tablet game. As an interactive, plot-driven story, it delivers a far more immersive experience than the show does. It features characters that the player may not necessarily like, but are developed enough to have what qualifies for pathos, something rare even amongst the more popular characters of the show. And because the plot branches into new directions with each decision from the player, there's much less remove from the events of the story and it's easier to feel the emotional impact of bad consequences. I haven't yet gone back through to play the game with different decisions, but it seems that most consequences are bad consequences.
The narrative differences between television and video games deserve a post or two to themselves, so I won't go too in-depth with that analysis just now. Suffice to say, there are some types of moments that may always fail to land as well as we'd like. But the moments that do are sweet.
A few episodes ago (specifically, "When The Dead Come Knocking"), Glenn was tortured for information about the group and then narrowly avoided becoming walker-chow while tied to a chair. These made for some genuinely harrowing moments, made all the more dire by Maggie's parallel experiences, after which she gave up the desired information in order to save Glenn. I don't know if the writers intentionally chose to put two of the characters the audience likes most in this situation (at least I do; my wife has expressed some misgivings about Maggie), but the episode is better for that decision.
This is what the show needs. They've shed a lot of the--sorry--dead weight. And I look forward to more of the good times. Good times for us... Rick's people suffer for our entertainment, after all.
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