(no subject)

Been looking back to see what thematic continuity there is in the Gimple run. The subtext comes and goes, interestingly. The first eight episodes of season 4 are soaked in it the way the two main Morgan episodes are, and then it's mostly light (i.e. heavy-handed, paradoxically) in the diaspora episodes of the 2nd half, but comes back with a vengeance in The Grove, and there's some summational bits in the finale. Maybe individual writers were allowed to call the shots more, there? Or maybe there was just a bunch more plot and action stuff that needed to happen given the shuffleboarding of so many scattered people to a new "town."

The Sanctuary sign in 6.4 is an old one, after all, though made to mean something new - or at least to more clearly mean what it meant the first time.

The one bullet thing comes up early in 5: Morgan enters the church and puts a rabbit's foot, bullet and cookie packet on the altar, before praying. He's praying for luck, food, and the ability to defend himself - and the suggestion is that he only asks for just enough from each category. We later find out Eastman has a crate of these cookies, find out the rabbit's foot is one of a series - he finds one after he loses another. And the bullet is of course also the same one from 6.4 - the one the two travelers give him. He doesn't even have a gun, so it must be.

The fifth season premiere echoes (pre-echoes? I forget it it was in Clear) the "here is not here" line: Carol says to the Terminus mother, "I'm not here. And you're not either." In context this means that Carol is covered in zombie gore, so will be mistaken as one by the zombies she promptly lets into the room - just as she was by the Terminus people when she shambled in. The mother isn't there because she's about to be eaten alive, so it's adding psychological horror to the other kind by making her realize she's past choice. The added meaning, for us, is that Carol bears a distressing resemblance to the mother, who has just explained that her people started out at more or less the place Rick and Carol are moved to by the Terminus people's atrociousness - were moved to that place by the rapists who took over their station, who they seem to have subsequently won it back from. Since Terminus has been repeatedly identified as a place of Sanctuary, we're led to think about how neither is in one (the episode's title is No Sanctuary, which Rick alters one of the signs to say at the close). The warning that getting to the point of not helping strangers quickly slipped everyone downslope into Hostel-meets-Holocaust territory is lost on Carol, given her amazingly cruel revenge, which makes us worry all the more for her. To not share one's home (within reason) is to lose it even as a concept. The Terminus people are cold-bloodedness about the death of Alex, one of their leaders, and the "I don't have friends" speech of the one Tyrese and Carol kidnap may be manipulative but rings true given the bitterness with which it's said. The show is good at insisting they haven't lost their humanity (since that's Rick's and Carol's take, accompanying their inaugural moments of sadistic rather than necessary violence) but have nevertheless lost everything else worth keeping by letting fear limit their sympathy for others, you know, terminally. So the season is announcing we need to be worried about Rick, worried about Carol. If we weren't already.

The Grove is tricky. Lizzie is insane, but her barriers of sympathy make as much sense as those of the others, in context. She feels human and animal life are valueless compared to zombie life, while Carol feels animal and zombie life are valueless compared to human life. Mica refuses to hurt people or animals, while being fine with killing zombies. Tyrese doesn't have a firm position (yet, anyway), but is swayed by Lizzie to not kill the zombie trapped harmlessly on the railroad tie, which at the end of the episode he glances at again before walking away, either because he agrees on some level or in tribute to her wish. There's a carefully placed plant to make us certain Carol hasn't seen the zombie, implying her own decision would have been to kill it. This is clever, as it dodges the question of why she'd bother, since they were leaving the area. Suggestion plays by slightly different rules than statement does.

The deer thing is pretty crucial: they have plenty of nuts, so there's not much excuse to hunt except for variety. Mica conscientiously objects, and Carol and Tyrese can't find one when they try again. Carol finally sees one after killing Lizzie, but lets it go. She's temporarily shaken - as she says to Lizzie, she's not sure what she's doing is right. The parallels between the David and Karen executions and Lizzie's are close enough that in her confession to Tyrese pretty much everything she says applies equally well to both instances. Which is part of what sways him, of course, since he's tacitly condoned the recent one.

"She can't be around people" echoes what Rick said about her, to justify her exile. Tyrese's hope that she can be talked back to normal seems supportd by Lizzie's feeling she'd done the wrong thing by pointing her gun at Carol. She wants to be told what to do, to have Carol firmly in the mother role. Her murder of Mica comes in response to misunderstanding (or anyway misapplying) words spoken by Carol about the necessity of changing - with "changing" meaning being willing to kill people. The change to zombie-hood was Lizzie's literalization of that suggestion. I'm not saying she wasn't crazy etc., since that's made clear enough, but her craziness is in the same category as David and Karen's illness and Carol's own overwillingness to kill to protect - all of these are things that might get lots of people killed, but aren't sure to. Probability can't even be assigned, really. But all three illnesses might be controlled, even cured, by compassion and patience, like the elderberries or like Tyrese's proposed approach with Lizzie and actual one with Carol. While Rick doesn't kill Carol, it persuades her of the logic of her course by basically reproducing it - his own horror at her callousness about abandoning the watch boy who "may" survive is rendered strange by how he is abandoning her in the exact same manner, apart from the technicality of her damage being mental while the boy's injury is physical. The insistence on acts like hers not being committed by "strangers" is related: Tyres's desire to kill the murderers is part of the same othering process, the same putting up of arbitrary walls separating those like us enough to deserve life and those not. We can't know the zombies or the deer, but they have desires, and in the case of the deer also fear. We don't know what's enough to qualify as sentience. Presumably the movements of vegetation are pretty much those of a Rube Goldberg machine, mere reactivity; presumably those of (say) dogs are not. Carol probably wouldn't want to kill a dog without a pressing reason. But in between the two levels, who knows? And who knows how much a human being who's gone dangerouslh selfish or mad should be discounted in relation to a healthy one? If someone's going to kill someone for no good reason and the onky way you can stop them os by killing them first, then yes, do it. But don't enjoy it and don't assume there's any situation short of that that justifies the tiebreaking logic (which is likelier based on the fact that a murderer has some likelihood of murdering again, hence is killing 1 plus X people by killing at all).

Anyway the animal stuff is ubiquitous once you start looking, like with the butcher or cattle line - echoed, though I forget how closely, by Rick at Alexandria toward the end of 5.

The early episodes of 4, the very start of th Gimple run, consciously (!!!) dramatize a number of asoects of Plato's Pharmacy. The gathering of the elderberries is probabky the clesrest exmple of this: Hershel and Carl go outside the walls to gather bits of the same nature that has caused the disease - symbolized by a zombie lodged in the ground and covered in moss and plants, Right there by the fever-reducing elderberry bush. No wall, fence, or mention of either word is insignificant in the Gimple run. Th Terminus fence is porous but strong and overgrown, the Alexandria ones have cracks and face inward etc. The irony of the prison refuge was of course present even in season. 3, but gets deepened here. The barn episode plays with the idea that the group has become its own set of walls, its own mental sanctuary, with the consequences of thst soelled out clearly when the Alexandria recruiter shows up.

I like 4.5 the best, re. walls and whatnot, because it shows that, yes, these do become necessary at some point. But that's the point at which their need is obvious - apparent, not feared. This is remarkably similar to where late Derrids ends up, though I don't notice him admitting as much. He insists on the self-evidence of our not quite being like the other animals, and on our need to not die, despite the fact thst under his system you actually don't get to do that. Pathocentrism gets off the hook where logo- does not, I guess, but if you think about it that wrcks his whole scheme pushed far enough. Just declare something emotionally obvious and language can no longer mislead us about it.

Because of course the show is not on about logocentrism, but pathocentrisms using words, actions, and whatever else to mark their territory from one another. The "you are my brother" moment is supposed to move us one one level while making us very alarmed on another - Rick has just stabbed into a pulp a human being he has decided is scum, and, as Still has reminded us, Darryl's brother Merle was a sadist. And of course Darryl's worry is that he looks exactly like the attacker's group, and in the series' earliest episodes was prsented as being pretty much what they are. Bit in part because Rick trustd that there was more to him, Darryl has changed. Rick no longer gives people this chance. Michonne's subsequent speech to Carl makes all of this pretty clear: vengefulness led to sadism led to profound isolation, which she was only brougt back fm by loneliness and being trusted. Having her gift of one bullet accepted - Gimple uses Clear as something of a Rosetta Stone for his run. When Carl admits he feels he's a monster too she just hugs him, which maybe works where the words failed. She wasn't her when she was like that, she says: as in Blake, we can pass through Nan states but are always Kate. No thought is your mind. She and Darryl are well on their way to Eastmanhood, in these seasons.

Maybe not as far as Bob, who seems to have read that Psychopathology of Fear book carefully. He's not even religious, in season 4. He just thinks we can make meaning if we try, and share it. Can't if we don't try, and it doesn't much matter either way if we don't share it. Michonne lesrned th same lesson the same way, and we see Darryl doing it in Alone himself in the same way Bob had in the flashbacks.

Glenn keeps being tossed into fascinatingly literalized him-or-me situations and successfully getting out. (Darryl and the Alexandria guy get out of one the exact right way, too, no? The spirit of community is strong in them, hence its avatar shows up to save them.) I think we're to understand with the most recent setpiece that he's finally failed, though maybe not fatally. He's made a show of trusting Nicholas on principle, but Nicholas picked up on this sufferance, hence doubts his own value, assumes it to be less than Glenn's. Thus makes for his crippling lack of self-confidence, and for that one last bad decision. As with Rick, Glenn's expectations about the Alexandrians' behavior became self-fulfilling. Rick's were that these people would fuck up and mostly be destroyed, Glenn's that Nicholas might come around with help but could screw up again at any time. And Nicholas, without meaning to, gave him the appropriate thank you for that level of trust. Like with Eastman and the 825th man, no? "You are my brother - I think." Whereas with the Governor's sister in law he gave full trust once she'd signalled her commitment. The "too fsr gone" thing is crucial. If you assume anyone is, rather than merely do exactly as much as you have to do to stop their harmful actions once it becomes obviously necessary, then you yourself are at once too far gone. Assuming slippery slopes are irresisitible is a very slippery slope.

Slopes down to where here is not here, I am not I. And the show's considered nihilist! The animal thing seems deeply felt. Something of a Coetzeean outrage, even? Those pigs... Cue Upstream Color.