![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Nov. 10th, 2015 02:18 amRewatched "Clear," the 3rd season Walking Dead episode introducing Morgan's derangement. The single bullet gift in 6.4 is a callback to Michonne's action of handing Rick the one bullet she can find in his old office. She'd overheard Rick and Carl talking about whether she could be trusted, since they didn't yet know her well and she'd deserted them at a key juncture that I don't remember anything about, contributing to Oscar getting killed, whoever that was ("Clear" is one of the few oases in S3, and by far the lushest). Rick tells Carl that their interests are united right now, but won't always be. This comes right after a tiny new failing, echoing the previous one, annoys Carl: Michonne gets their car stuck in the mud whioe navigating around a roadblock because she slows down to look at a zombie trapped under an overturned truck. I think her failing at Governorville maybe had something to do with the zombie heads in fishbowls? Anyway, doesn't matter, as it served as a neat little recap of the larger problem. Rick points out that it "was an honest mistake," but also says that other stuff that makes her realize she isn't in the circle. So she spends the rest of the episode risking her life to try to be. They're on a weapons run back to Rick's town and check his station first, which has been cleaned out. The offer of the bullet, the one thing she can find, suggests she's giving all she can but has nothing to give. He takes it, and almost shoots the homicidally insane Morgan with it but is beaten to that by Carl. I don't think it becomes significant beyond that. But in 6.4 the point of what's given is how empty the beleaguered couple's pack is. They're offering everything they have except their lives, though it's not quite clear (or I can't quite recall) if that's to not be killed or if they just want to help him as much as they can since they assume he just did the same. We're at least worried he'll kill them at the time, whether they are or not. But he nods at the gesture, or anyway the accomopanying thank you, showing he's no longer in his "clearing" mental space as we (and he) had momentarily assumed.
That whole incident is a bit of a callback to another aspect of "Clear," too: despite Michonne's winning a place in their circle, and despite Rick's attempt to save Morgan, they ignore a lone stranger crying for their help on the way in and ignore his corpse on the way back out, except to back up and pick up his abandoned backpack of supplies. How one treats a stranger is a recurrent theme on the show - Rick goes through a couple of attempts at "xenos" rules, I think - and there's pretty much a spectrum:
1. Welcome with open arms - Eastman's way.
2. Welcome after absence of proof of harmfulness - Rick's way for a while.
3. Welcome after proof of usefulness/trustworthiness - where he's at in "Clear."
4. No welcome, except TO use - close to where he's at in 6.3. Hospital group exemplifies this, though it likes to think it's instead #3.
5. Murder unless they can be of use in the existing group - the Governor's way.
6. Murder for the benefit of the existing group - the Terminus set.
7. Murder because everyone should die - Wolves', also feral Morgan's but less steadily.
In practice, where welcoming fails you must assume you're letting the stranger die - whether you fsce this fact or not. The spectrum's really about extending trust. Eastman believes that you must keep trying to trust - people are trustworthy not in the sense that they'll nin no circumstances attack you, which is a ridiculous belief, but in the sense that they have in them what is worth showing trust to, because they'll give back when they see you giving. This worked even with Dallas, who Eastman considered pretty much the only truly evil man in Atlanta. Put more simply, trust isn't something earned but given, in this view. And then given again.
2. thinks you should give it until a reason's been presented to not - trusts that people are mostly but not always good. 3. thinks many people are bad, and requires that the good prove it. 4. on up don't care if you're good or assume no one can be. All of them tend to serve as self-fulfilling prophecies anout how the strangers they meet will act: the hospital assumes human frailty, so produces consistent cowardice; the Terminus people are converted to being 6ers by another group of 6ers - and come close to converting Rick.
In 6.5 just seeing her son appeal to the looters (an appeal that works, since it both respects their freedom and points out the self-fulfilling prophecy of mutual untrusting in that act) gives the Congresswoman her new lease on life, where she trusts that she and her people will be able to gain strength and renewed cohesiveness from their hardship. Finding out he was lying in order to take the food himself (going straight to 5) re-crushes her.
Enid, the "Just Survive Somehow" girl, is a sort of 7a to the Wolf guy's 7b, or maybe a 6.5 or something. The Wolf and Morgan both frankly want to die - their finding everyone else's life worthless is an extension of how they feel anout themselves. She finds her life to have more value than what she can afford to assign to anyone else's, so no longer truly has a group. She's presumably sold out Alexandria to the Wolves, but doesn't actually buy the Wolf ideology. She's just surviving somehow by complying with them, since Alexandria was too weak to be a safe haven for her.
In "Clear" Rick says of Morgan's clearing-madness that "this can't be the end of the road." Given the show's amusingly doubled-down hiring of Wire actors a line in the trap scene - "Watch the wire, Carl" - is likely a deliberate reference, and a relevant one, since on that show wherever trust in another's choices is extended prior to being earned or after being dis-earned according to #2-rules (the drug legalization, the boxing lessons, the successful school efforts) people do better, civilization springs back up. Could the road line be too, to The Road? A father and a son are alive together until one dies, in Morgan's story and McCarthy's. The end of the novel we get is hypothetical - may be the father's dream for his son, of absorption into an intact family who accept him at once. But suppose the son had died instead, since it was he who kept the "spark" of goodnss going in his father, mostly by the father's realization that the son needed a reason to live beyond merely living or he wouldn't. (Morgan's chalk ravings even refernce an arrow wound, I think?) If the logic of the world is that it can and eventually will kill everyone you love then your "endgame," your approach to it when fully cognizant of this fact, is important to all of us, since we need to accept or know how to refute it. Morgan's fate is explicitly set forth as something that could have happened to Rick ("we started at the same place"), so Rick really does need this to not be the rational response to a world this bad - getting everyone out of it.
I think the message at the beginning, the Erin bracelet, and the would-be hitchhiker left behind are supposed to prime for us a statement neither Morgan nor Rick straight out make: Rick didn't come back here for Morgan, hence has in intention though not fact left him behind. It seems like he didn't even remember he might be there. "I keep getting pushed further out," he says, and in retrospect we can see that this means out from 1. toward 7., that end of the line, that terminus, that (thinking of 6.5 now) end of the world. When did Rick stop leaving signs, stop trying to radio him? Maybe doesn't matter - he just did, over the course of trying desperately to keep his group and self safe.
Were the gradations this defined in The Road? Not far from it: the son and father reach one negotistion point about the blind man, but a more selfish one about the thief by the sea. The father changes his mind and comes back to give him clothing, maybe food, but the thief has already gone off to his (unseen) death. The hitchhiker scene revises that one a rung or two further out from the spark, as though the blind man has been stripped and abandoned. Well, njust abandoned. Does Rick ever get as far as the stripping? Maybe with some of his words about Alexandria late in S5, about how he'll take over the nice town they've got there and is fine with the possibility of them no longer being in it.
Gimple wrote "Clear" and became showrunner the next season - making their scone and third Wite hires. Also killing off two of those Wire actors, both black males (and a non-Wire black male later on), which got the show a lot of negative publicity. I think both the Wire ones were dress rehearsals for what he's doing with Morgan, here, though, and their race is relevant because what he's going for is resonant of Sunset Limited. Bob dies with hope on his lips, and tries to imoart this on Rick (a few episodes later Rick kills another black man named Bob who also acts out of hope, and quite brutally, so it does not take). The boxing guy in a weirdly underpraised (bcause fantastic) episode dies refusing to take his eyes off the horror of the world - which had earlier driven him to pacifism, though one he tacitly admitted in the kids episode couldn't be sustained. McCarthy's Black is a Magical Negro but de-magicked sufficiently to be a real character by his doubt - helping the white person os also about re-proving to himself that he's correct. Rick's way can't be the end of the road (The Road having been published a few weeks before Sunset Limited, I think?).
Gimple's run hasn't been flawless but has been better than anyone could have expected from this show - certainly infinitely better than Game of Thrones, which even at its best is a much clumsier learner from Gimple than he is from Braking Bad or McCarthy.
The spark thing: Glenn trusts the Governor's sister in law (or whatever), who trusts the psychiatrist-turned-surgeon/GP (bolstered by the example of the young mother Rick is after). Paying forward is happening.
Rick lets Michonne drive again on the way back, after Carl reveals he now trusts her. She lets Rick know she's picked up on his hallucinations - he, too, makes honest mistakes like whatever she did that killed poor unmemorable Oscar. Morgan's breakdown happened because he couodn't kill his wife, who then came back and killed his son - who also couldn't kill her. He's consumed by guilt but his excuse is right there in his story - the son couldn't either. It may not be an honest mistake, but it is a natural one, parallel to Rick's failure to stop seeing his wife's ghost, despite its interfering with his leadership. Two people taking over driving from one another, when needed - hinted at by Michonne's saving Rick from one trap then her from another, though that also comically baffled her from getting him to owe her trust - as had her fruitlessly risky attempt to get the jump on Morgan a bit earlier. Rick gives his trust to her because Carl has given his. Why did Carl? Because she let him choose to go into the building to get his mother's picture - and went in with him. (Once she had his trust she ordered him to stay outside where he was safe, of course. He's a kid.)
There's also some comedy value to Michonne's exasperation with Rick's considerstion for the welfare of the guy who tried to kill them all, when he'd announced to Carl that he has no particular interest in maintaining a relationship with her once their mutual problems were solved. (Which also made the hitchhiker they don't stop for serve as a warning to her - be useful or be outside the sphere of concern - though since it was her driving this point is less clear. I guess we're to understand, in retrospect, that she didn't feel she was truly "driving" yet, just taking the wheel conditionally and on the sufferance of Rick, so it wasn't for her to stop till he said stop.) Hence Morgan's bulletproof vest, in comparison to Michonne's open one (? Can't even remember clothing details of people I just watched). Rick doesn't have a protective vest, representing how Morgan has expelled him and everyone else from his own sphere - thus that awful, Saving Private Ryan-ish stabbing. I guess the bullet's significance comes in there, too? It announces Michonne's willingness to kill for him. Which he immediately baffles by not letting her kill this guy? But also shows that it's not about quid pro quo, bit preestablished trust. Once you're in, you're in. So then she tries the Carl stuff, which works.
Or does he shut Morgan out too? He doesn't insist long that he come, or hit hij on the had and drag him back in a bag or whatever. Doesn't leave a map, more relevantly, or a renewed offer to stay in contact, probably because he doesn't trust an apparent psycho. The welcome is revoked, which we have no reason to think (other than Morgan's position as apex predator of the town) isn't as momentous a refusal as that of the now-dead hitchhiker. I should have paid more attention to their last words. They were about how Rick had come for guns, so those walls of his his weren't just about keeping zombies out. Rick wasn't offering s true poace of safety, because others would try to take that place, and would succeed and kill him ans Carl, and Morgan refused to watch that again. He himself was weak, he said, and the weak would live forever - because they'd refuse difficult choices. (I guess another highlighted parallel between them is that they both see and speak to the dead? As had Michonne, she admits.) So since that was the reasoning, why doesn't Rick leave the offer open by telling him where the prison is? Not wanting to hear this bleak message, or see its messenger, because he feared it might be true? I guess the important thing is he meets the refusal to be in his circle with a refusal to keep a refuser in his circle. Lets a lonely mentally ill endangered friend stay alone with his mental illness in danger.
There's an ideology here.
"Away With You" - this one makes it into the credits, where the words remain chilling. Given the multiple readings simultaneously demanded by Clear and Here Is Not Here, and of course the Terminus signs, should we look for something in that?
Away with you: go away.
[There is] A way with you: if I trust your reality as a feeler and choice-maker like myself then we both have a way forward together; if not, not.
[You have] A way [about] you: like the Billy Joel song. Why thank you, I do like to think so.
[My thoughts are, my hopes went, my best self went, the world went] Away with you: the wife, the son. All he had, believed, now gone.
[Your hopes of peace, the angels of your better nature go] Away with [your fear-caused failure to see each new other person as another sort of] you: yeah, that.
[The world is] A way [not for you in particular, folding up when you're gone, but one existing apart from you escept for the equally relevant fact thatnit exists] with you [on it]: okay, I' officially stretching.
That whole incident is a bit of a callback to another aspect of "Clear," too: despite Michonne's winning a place in their circle, and despite Rick's attempt to save Morgan, they ignore a lone stranger crying for their help on the way in and ignore his corpse on the way back out, except to back up and pick up his abandoned backpack of supplies. How one treats a stranger is a recurrent theme on the show - Rick goes through a couple of attempts at "xenos" rules, I think - and there's pretty much a spectrum:
1. Welcome with open arms - Eastman's way.
2. Welcome after absence of proof of harmfulness - Rick's way for a while.
3. Welcome after proof of usefulness/trustworthiness - where he's at in "Clear."
4. No welcome, except TO use - close to where he's at in 6.3. Hospital group exemplifies this, though it likes to think it's instead #3.
5. Murder unless they can be of use in the existing group - the Governor's way.
6. Murder for the benefit of the existing group - the Terminus set.
7. Murder because everyone should die - Wolves', also feral Morgan's but less steadily.
In practice, where welcoming fails you must assume you're letting the stranger die - whether you fsce this fact or not. The spectrum's really about extending trust. Eastman believes that you must keep trying to trust - people are trustworthy not in the sense that they'll nin no circumstances attack you, which is a ridiculous belief, but in the sense that they have in them what is worth showing trust to, because they'll give back when they see you giving. This worked even with Dallas, who Eastman considered pretty much the only truly evil man in Atlanta. Put more simply, trust isn't something earned but given, in this view. And then given again.
2. thinks you should give it until a reason's been presented to not - trusts that people are mostly but not always good. 3. thinks many people are bad, and requires that the good prove it. 4. on up don't care if you're good or assume no one can be. All of them tend to serve as self-fulfilling prophecies anout how the strangers they meet will act: the hospital assumes human frailty, so produces consistent cowardice; the Terminus people are converted to being 6ers by another group of 6ers - and come close to converting Rick.
In 6.5 just seeing her son appeal to the looters (an appeal that works, since it both respects their freedom and points out the self-fulfilling prophecy of mutual untrusting in that act) gives the Congresswoman her new lease on life, where she trusts that she and her people will be able to gain strength and renewed cohesiveness from their hardship. Finding out he was lying in order to take the food himself (going straight to 5) re-crushes her.
Enid, the "Just Survive Somehow" girl, is a sort of 7a to the Wolf guy's 7b, or maybe a 6.5 or something. The Wolf and Morgan both frankly want to die - their finding everyone else's life worthless is an extension of how they feel anout themselves. She finds her life to have more value than what she can afford to assign to anyone else's, so no longer truly has a group. She's presumably sold out Alexandria to the Wolves, but doesn't actually buy the Wolf ideology. She's just surviving somehow by complying with them, since Alexandria was too weak to be a safe haven for her.
In "Clear" Rick says of Morgan's clearing-madness that "this can't be the end of the road." Given the show's amusingly doubled-down hiring of Wire actors a line in the trap scene - "Watch the wire, Carl" - is likely a deliberate reference, and a relevant one, since on that show wherever trust in another's choices is extended prior to being earned or after being dis-earned according to #2-rules (the drug legalization, the boxing lessons, the successful school efforts) people do better, civilization springs back up. Could the road line be too, to The Road? A father and a son are alive together until one dies, in Morgan's story and McCarthy's. The end of the novel we get is hypothetical - may be the father's dream for his son, of absorption into an intact family who accept him at once. But suppose the son had died instead, since it was he who kept the "spark" of goodnss going in his father, mostly by the father's realization that the son needed a reason to live beyond merely living or he wouldn't. (Morgan's chalk ravings even refernce an arrow wound, I think?) If the logic of the world is that it can and eventually will kill everyone you love then your "endgame," your approach to it when fully cognizant of this fact, is important to all of us, since we need to accept or know how to refute it. Morgan's fate is explicitly set forth as something that could have happened to Rick ("we started at the same place"), so Rick really does need this to not be the rational response to a world this bad - getting everyone out of it.
I think the message at the beginning, the Erin bracelet, and the would-be hitchhiker left behind are supposed to prime for us a statement neither Morgan nor Rick straight out make: Rick didn't come back here for Morgan, hence has in intention though not fact left him behind. It seems like he didn't even remember he might be there. "I keep getting pushed further out," he says, and in retrospect we can see that this means out from 1. toward 7., that end of the line, that terminus, that (thinking of 6.5 now) end of the world. When did Rick stop leaving signs, stop trying to radio him? Maybe doesn't matter - he just did, over the course of trying desperately to keep his group and self safe.
Were the gradations this defined in The Road? Not far from it: the son and father reach one negotistion point about the blind man, but a more selfish one about the thief by the sea. The father changes his mind and comes back to give him clothing, maybe food, but the thief has already gone off to his (unseen) death. The hitchhiker scene revises that one a rung or two further out from the spark, as though the blind man has been stripped and abandoned. Well, njust abandoned. Does Rick ever get as far as the stripping? Maybe with some of his words about Alexandria late in S5, about how he'll take over the nice town they've got there and is fine with the possibility of them no longer being in it.
Gimple wrote "Clear" and became showrunner the next season - making their scone and third Wite hires. Also killing off two of those Wire actors, both black males (and a non-Wire black male later on), which got the show a lot of negative publicity. I think both the Wire ones were dress rehearsals for what he's doing with Morgan, here, though, and their race is relevant because what he's going for is resonant of Sunset Limited. Bob dies with hope on his lips, and tries to imoart this on Rick (a few episodes later Rick kills another black man named Bob who also acts out of hope, and quite brutally, so it does not take). The boxing guy in a weirdly underpraised (bcause fantastic) episode dies refusing to take his eyes off the horror of the world - which had earlier driven him to pacifism, though one he tacitly admitted in the kids episode couldn't be sustained. McCarthy's Black is a Magical Negro but de-magicked sufficiently to be a real character by his doubt - helping the white person os also about re-proving to himself that he's correct. Rick's way can't be the end of the road (The Road having been published a few weeks before Sunset Limited, I think?).
Gimple's run hasn't been flawless but has been better than anyone could have expected from this show - certainly infinitely better than Game of Thrones, which even at its best is a much clumsier learner from Gimple than he is from Braking Bad or McCarthy.
The spark thing: Glenn trusts the Governor's sister in law (or whatever), who trusts the psychiatrist-turned-surgeon/GP (bolstered by the example of the young mother Rick is after). Paying forward is happening.
Rick lets Michonne drive again on the way back, after Carl reveals he now trusts her. She lets Rick know she's picked up on his hallucinations - he, too, makes honest mistakes like whatever she did that killed poor unmemorable Oscar. Morgan's breakdown happened because he couodn't kill his wife, who then came back and killed his son - who also couldn't kill her. He's consumed by guilt but his excuse is right there in his story - the son couldn't either. It may not be an honest mistake, but it is a natural one, parallel to Rick's failure to stop seeing his wife's ghost, despite its interfering with his leadership. Two people taking over driving from one another, when needed - hinted at by Michonne's saving Rick from one trap then her from another, though that also comically baffled her from getting him to owe her trust - as had her fruitlessly risky attempt to get the jump on Morgan a bit earlier. Rick gives his trust to her because Carl has given his. Why did Carl? Because she let him choose to go into the building to get his mother's picture - and went in with him. (Once she had his trust she ordered him to stay outside where he was safe, of course. He's a kid.)
There's also some comedy value to Michonne's exasperation with Rick's considerstion for the welfare of the guy who tried to kill them all, when he'd announced to Carl that he has no particular interest in maintaining a relationship with her once their mutual problems were solved. (Which also made the hitchhiker they don't stop for serve as a warning to her - be useful or be outside the sphere of concern - though since it was her driving this point is less clear. I guess we're to understand, in retrospect, that she didn't feel she was truly "driving" yet, just taking the wheel conditionally and on the sufferance of Rick, so it wasn't for her to stop till he said stop.) Hence Morgan's bulletproof vest, in comparison to Michonne's open one (? Can't even remember clothing details of people I just watched). Rick doesn't have a protective vest, representing how Morgan has expelled him and everyone else from his own sphere - thus that awful, Saving Private Ryan-ish stabbing. I guess the bullet's significance comes in there, too? It announces Michonne's willingness to kill for him. Which he immediately baffles by not letting her kill this guy? But also shows that it's not about quid pro quo, bit preestablished trust. Once you're in, you're in. So then she tries the Carl stuff, which works.
Or does he shut Morgan out too? He doesn't insist long that he come, or hit hij on the had and drag him back in a bag or whatever. Doesn't leave a map, more relevantly, or a renewed offer to stay in contact, probably because he doesn't trust an apparent psycho. The welcome is revoked, which we have no reason to think (other than Morgan's position as apex predator of the town) isn't as momentous a refusal as that of the now-dead hitchhiker. I should have paid more attention to their last words. They were about how Rick had come for guns, so those walls of his his weren't just about keeping zombies out. Rick wasn't offering s true poace of safety, because others would try to take that place, and would succeed and kill him ans Carl, and Morgan refused to watch that again. He himself was weak, he said, and the weak would live forever - because they'd refuse difficult choices. (I guess another highlighted parallel between them is that they both see and speak to the dead? As had Michonne, she admits.) So since that was the reasoning, why doesn't Rick leave the offer open by telling him where the prison is? Not wanting to hear this bleak message, or see its messenger, because he feared it might be true? I guess the important thing is he meets the refusal to be in his circle with a refusal to keep a refuser in his circle. Lets a lonely mentally ill endangered friend stay alone with his mental illness in danger.
There's an ideology here.
"Away With You" - this one makes it into the credits, where the words remain chilling. Given the multiple readings simultaneously demanded by Clear and Here Is Not Here, and of course the Terminus signs, should we look for something in that?
Away with you: go away.
[There is] A way with you: if I trust your reality as a feeler and choice-maker like myself then we both have a way forward together; if not, not.
[You have] A way [about] you: like the Billy Joel song. Why thank you, I do like to think so.
[My thoughts are, my hopes went, my best self went, the world went] Away with you: the wife, the son. All he had, believed, now gone.
[Your hopes of peace, the angels of your better nature go] Away with [your fear-caused failure to see each new other person as another sort of] you: yeah, that.
[The world is] A way [not for you in particular, folding up when you're gone, but one existing apart from you escept for the equally relevant fact thatnit exists] with you [on it]: okay, I' officially stretching.
