(no subject)

Sam on the outside steps gets re-terrified by Carol, who'd earlier traumatized him by vividly describing how she'd tie him to a tree to be eaten alive on some random day if he told people she was stealing guns from the town armory.

Then he retreats back upstairs, where his mother'd installed a lock in his closet in case his violent father ever hit him - and also so that he'd be locked away from seeing her beaten. He won't come down. She lets this happen and leaves cookies outside his closed room. I believe these were the cookies backed by Carol that Carl takes out of the oven after the Wolf fight, which took place within the space of an hour?

So he's sheltered from harsh realities relevant to his existence, fostering a delusion of an implausible degree of safety. He'd originally demanded cookies of Carol - had followed her to demand cookies, then seen the guns. He liked her despite how mesn she was because she seemed like she might speak to him honestly. He was curious about what's really going on. And she told him (and modeled) terrible, atypical versions of what does. Things he could never defend himself against. So he stops bothering to feel he could try. He doesn't stop thinking about it, though. He draws pictures of the scenario Carol had described.

And eats just half of the offered cookie, or anyway half of the last one, which because the window is open becomes swarmed by ants (yet another zombie/animal parallel). Why? Because that's too much coddling. But Carol baked (I think) the cookie. With a standing army taking care of things the populace is told not to worry, and doesn't in the sense of not opening its eyes to what's goin on - but does in the sense that it believes the terror tales told to permit the army to keep on standing. Are these the same cookies baked with applesauce? And what was uomwith all the chocolate she stole? Was she munching some herself - corruption proper? Or just using it to pacify, to circus up the bread?

But the missing half also suggests the coddling is only halfway responsible. The ants come from above - "heads up" - because no attention's being paid to any threats but those to the established fortifications. But nature doesn't work that way. It takes wherever eyes have been averted. There is no space of truly sustained safety and none of truly sustained terror. Fear creates the sense of the latter, leading to dreams of and attempts at the former, which in turn lead to terror when the safe is taken away, as it must be, since walls block the view and the things that go wrong are never fully walled out, exist inside the walls - and inside the material of the walls and of their watchers.

In the end they're tiptoeing through the garden, pretty much, hence I suppose the song? It's a song about an implausibly idyllic life, I guess. And the sound drowns out invasion. It's a womb. You will have to be terrified for your life in your own home if you've avoided seeing how you shouod be sensibly cognizant about possible threats of all sorts in all places. Leaving your home, rather - where the walls fall the world changes to "out," to fight or flight.

...

Why did the disaster not quite shown to happen yet happen?

Because Sam attracts the attention of the zombies by crying for his mother because she's told him this is a game of pretend where he must act like he is thoroughly brave when he is in fact thoroughly fearful. He's used to being given the cookies no matter what he does, to having sommeone else stand between him and threats, sights, decisions. So because of Deanna's dream of a safe space. Because of Alexandria.

But he fell back on these provided protections, on helplessness and blindness, because Carol was presented a world too bleak to be adjusted to, because she had decided that being weak in any way would finally lead to her death so she would at last instead and forever be strong. Sam's A stamp retraumatizes her: this A of Alexandria is that of the cattle cars of aterminus or Auschwitz. Path A, established by the Terminus people to lead their victims to their deaths. You're an A in this world or a B, so for God's sake be B. But she's not auite like the Terminus folks, or anyway not yet. She wants to protect others by hardening them, by killing for them. To Morgan she says, "I'll kill you to kill him so nobody else will die." That's it in a nutshell. And the Wolf does get free and takes a prisoner and goes - she may be wrong, Morgan may be wrong. You never get to know. But since you don't maybe killing two people, one looking as bad as can be, one as good, is not the best sort of math. And we see that all the bad the Wolf is doing may just be misguided, and that his actual impulses are friendly, almost apologetic. And he has a long-standing fever, a festering injury. Carol mistrusts Morgan most of all, because his overgoodness may get everyone killed, so neglects the real threat in order to neutralize what protects it. Does Morgan neglect it? He does point out the stupidity of what she's doing. But it's his staff that gets taken away. Still, he couldn't have modeled better behavior if the Wolf could be changed - short of being Eastman himself, who would have left the door unlocked and removed the Wolf's bindings. And the doctor helps, saying "you're so full of shit," a surprise the Wolf enjoys. People must all be killed for their own sake but he misses them, is surprised by them. He's just a bit farther than Carol, who wants to kill everyone who might get others killed, their intentions be damned. He's a bit like Gareth, who also explained why he was doing what he did so there'd be no hard feelings, and like Martin, whose adopted convictions sat ill with his impulses.

Sam's foolishness attracts the zombies. Ron's madness lets them into the house. The tower's fall lets them into the walls. The truck horn leads them up to the gates. Rick's imperfect plan leads them into the area. The fall of the semi makes the plan the only choice. The negligence of the Alexandrians let the quarry fill up with too many zombies.

Meanwhile the Wolves send the truck into town. And Aaron's dropping of his pack attracts the Wolves. And his Alexandrian mindset lets him abandon a person search for a food one that gets him trapped where he loses it.

But Ron has gone mad because Rick killed his Dad and marked his corpse unsacred. But arick did that because Pete had killed Reg. But Pete killed Reg because Carol blinded him with rage. But carol blinded him with rage because she thought he'd kill his wife. But Carol thought he'd kill his wife because she accepts onky the worst case as true. But she accepts the worst case as true because a man like Pete beat her. But Pete beat his wife because the Alexandrians let it happen.

But the tower that's cracked only falls because all Rick lets anyone care about is the walls.

(no subject)

Sam attracts the zombies (caused by his mother suggesting this is all pretend; also caused by Carol making him too terrified to feel he can handle this)

Ron lets the zombies into the house by attacking Carl (caused by his refusal to realize his father was unhinged; also caused by Rick's killing his father, rejecting his father's corpse, manhandling him back into town, arming him, and teaching him to fire a gun; also caused (likely insufficiently) by jealousy over Enid)

The falling tower lets the zombies into town by smashing the walls (caused by Rick's directing everyone to focus on bracing the walls)

The truck weakens the tower because a Wolf runs it into it during their attack (caused by Aaron's having left his pack in their trap; caused by Rick's leaving the town ill-defended while pursuing an elaborate proactive plan against a probably non-existential threat; possibly caused by Ron's and/or Enid's helping them invade the town)

The zombies are at the gates because of the truck's horn (caused by the reasons given above)

The zombies are near the gates in the first place because of Rick's inadequate plan (caused by the (presumed) sabotage by Ron (and/or Enid and/or Wolves) of the truck preventing its kinks from being ironed out; caused by Rick's slippery slope logic where posible thrests are interpreted as certain ones)

The zombies aren't drawn in a different direction because Glenn and Nicholas have failed to lure them to a fire (caused by Nicholas' PTSD about his prior cowardly failure to save four comrades; also caused by Glenn's doubts about Nicholas' abilities being apparent to Nicholas, increasing his self-doubt; also caused (probably insufficiently) by the chance occurrence of a foammable building's habing already burned down)

The zombies aren't preemptively led away by Rick because his RV dies (caused by his having to leave its steering wheel to kill the Wolves freed by Morgan's pacifism; also caused by his being without help because he refused it when offered repeatedly)

The zombies are relased from the quarry because the semi blocking them in falls (caused by the neglect of the Alexandrians to come this way and notice it should be shored up; or caused by Ron's sabotaging it as vengeance for what Rick did; or caused by the Wolves' sabotage enabled by Aaron's negligence and possibly Morgan's; or caused by Rick's developing an offensive strategy rather than shoring up the weak point; or caused by Enid's sabotaging it in order to be spared by the Wolves or to help Ron)

The zombies accumulate to a critical level in the quarry because the Alexandrians blocked its exits then never checked back on what might be happening (caused by their habits of running from and/or denying danger)

All the smaller losses have similarly dovetailing or tangling or ambiguous causes. The Wolf's kidnapping of the doctor is caused by Morgan's pacifism AND Carol's total warfare notions AND the doctor's being an easy victim because unready - and of course by his own brand of metaphysical nihilism. The show is not against running, hiding, fighting or surrendering per se, just against their becoming principles followed in all situations. These four represent pretty much the whole gamut: giving up too much, becoming too spoiled by provided safety to keep yourself safe when it's gone, fighting when it's not clear you have to, risking or taking others' lives to improve your own. Ignoring risk, imposing risk, hallucinating risk, inviting risk. Only killing, never thinking of killing, thinking only of killing, never killing.

(no subject)

Looks like Walking Dead has gotten in trouble with critics, and conceivably audiences, by not making what it's doing clear enough. You can kind of see why - in the recent sequence the characters' mistakes are fairly far upstream from their consequences, which helps explain why they're able to keep making them. But for those identifying with the characters, it just seems like everything that could go wrong is going wrong for no reason, or that the characters are obviously making dumb mistakes for no reason, thus risking their identification. But the show's trying hard to show that none of the mistakes are in fact dumb. What's stymying that effort? Maybe the fact that it's doing that with several distinct points of view, so those audience members agreeing with one will find everyone else's actions moronic?

Yeah, something along that line. The show's premise creates its reality, so the audience thinks, "don't try big things, they'll fail; don't turn your back on a possible threat, as it's a certain one." Gimple must be going crazy about being misunderstood, but I guess he's hidden too well? Because he's been using our assumptions about how things have to go in this world so we take the hits the characters, who are doing the same thing, do: a point comes when the world is not the same one, but if you stay the same you'll MAKE it the same one. Simultaneously presenting a new group who refuse to see that the world HAS changed in many ways, what with a zombie apocalypse, muddies the waters too much, when combined with that one-step removal rule applied to consequences of persistent mistakes (with no remove they'd never persist). And PLUS nihilism and pacifism are tossed in, and treated much more seriously than the audience that assumes both are batshit might realize. And they too are treated as non-obvious mistakes with delayed consequences. And in the case of pacifism I'm not yet sure a mistake has been made; Michonne's insistence that things don't reduce to four words reminds one of the conspiracy theory/anti conspiracy theory loggerhead: "You just don't want to believe a single person's madness or stupidity could cause so much damage" vs. "You just don't want to believe that forces greater than a person control us all." There's complexity involved in judging all life precious, but not necessarily contradiction. And if Morgan's wrong he may prove a lot less wrong: his mistakes MAY have killed people who would otherwise have lived, Rick's, Carol's, Deanna's, and it goes without saying the Wolf's very clearly have at this point.

I mean, the mosaic that the show is DOES demand that everything go wrong. But that doesn't any longer mean that any particular sort of decision will make that happen. Doing nothing is also risk. People shouldn't even be attacking Rick's basic plan given the circumstances. Perhaps the show should have revealed the semi's fall was sabotage? I think it doesn't want to give its hand away blatantly. But it's looking like maybe it ought to have.

My worry's that the sense of disconnect will make them stop trying to do the neat things they're doing, which would risk the show falling back into the genre crowd-pleaser that (apparently) everyone assumes it's been trying but failing to be anyway. That Adventure Time problem.

What's the answer? The Martian's point was hard to miss because it made different versions of it relentlessly, and what subtleties existed were about defending that claim from rival ones via clarification. Mad Max more or less did the same, and both did it with a crowd-pleasing arc that Walking Dead's denied by its nature. Even Interstellar got to do that. Yeah, that premise - means it's hard to sustain hero OR antihero arcs, and those are the two sorts people seem to know how to watch. Probably mostly because it seems impossible that anyone would try something else on television.

But Gimple has to, to avoid repetition. And he doesn't have the Game of Thrones out of zapping off absolutely anywhere and having just anything happen - the one group has to be doing more or less the same thing in more or less the same place, and ultimately reacting to the same danger. So it's the reactions that have to carry it. Meaning nearly everyone has to be a little bit wrong (unless the show itself commits to nihilism, which it hasn't, and which would presumably create an unsustainable sort of malaise - a movie can be nihilistic, but probably not an ongoing, complex, expensive, mainstream(ed) enterprise). And if everyone's wrong who do we identify with? We can't know or we get that hero problem, which would become one good person rightly fighting an endless losing battle and would feel repetitive and depressing - and even lend some justice to nihilism about the world depicted.

So the show should obviously go the antihero route, but there's problems with that: 1) three seasons have already gone by with (Gimple's earlier attempts to elbow it out of this groove aside) the hero model, so it's going to need to be convincingly transformed, 2) any slow slide into antiheroism may still be taken as a sort of heroism given the absurdly stepped up threats in the world presented in the first three seasons, where trust really was a bad idea and where extending your sphere of sympathy just meant you'd be burying more friends soon enough - mere endurance could thus seem heroic - hell, SUICIDE could, 3) there's lines you can't cross once a character's in the hero position - even Breaking Bad couldn't - and there's more of them when you don't flag from the start, like Breaking Bad took pains to, that the character has bad in him or is hesding for no good end. First impressions matter, and we won't believe in huge changes in a character - it has to be precedented. The show's worked extra hard to precedent the fuck out of a major shift in Rick and the others, but it eventually has to run out of rope.

And the premise isn't wholly compatible with antiheroics, either. Even once we're bored by zombies they still take up a lot of the villain oxygen in the room, first off. And they're so bad, or anyway what they do and represent is, that it can never be made clear, rather than a provocative possibility, that any person is worse, so it would be hard to have that sort of reveal (and rereveal) that The Sopranos, Breaking Bad etc. specialized in, where the casuistry making the antihero seem enough like a hero to justify the audience's symoathies get suddenly lifted and you realize this person is (at least given what s/he could be, should know to be) perhaps the worst of them all. Both shows walked that back, but that's pretty much what it takes to shake the hero off enough to make a clear point. Walking Dead tries extremely hard with that too, but Rick keeps getting re-heroized just because of the combination of being in a leadership position and leading against a horrible omnipresent danger. Something almost George-Bushish about this audience sympathy problem (well, first term), and while the show exploits that connection too it doesn't mean its hands aren't at last tied.

It's how meaning is created within (and about) these sorts of constraints that's brilliant in the Gimple run. But not all the rules can be obeyed at once: don't repeat, don't reveal your final position, don't be TOO depressing, don't deny short term satisfactions to those we like, don't permit long term satisfactions for those we like. Make everything fall apart but not in a way where we felt it was bound to, make everything come back together but ditto, have it all feel like it means something real, don't quite tell us the real thing it means. Don't make it seem like zombies can reliably be escaped, nor that they can never be. Don't make it seem like people can never be trusted, nor that they can always be. Don't make us feel like metaphors are driving things rather than supplementary (a commandment no tv show has come close to breaking, but a price is still paid to keep it - here, a whole mess of them). Don't make us feel anyone's unkillable, don't kill those in whom we're sufficiently invested.

The character killing thing is very interesting. They had no idea if they could get away with killing a child we'd spent ANY screentime with, so spread out the shock across several episodes, early on. Where we were partly relieved when she proved to be dead - partly resigned. They needed this because not only did we not want her to die but we expected that she couldn't possibly be dead: television rules can't be ignored, so their bending has to be announced. The show wanted to see if it could kill a character we actually liked, and one who appeared at the start so seemed foundational. And had a personality - Andrea never really did, presumably because Darabont thought of her as a female heroic lead, and heroic leads can only have temporary or superficial personalities past competence, to keep identification easy. But no one really liked her so she lost lead protectiom. And there's still the problem of finales - and for this show mid-season ones - where we're used to contracts being up (or whatever) such that people who one wouldn't normally see die might die just this once. Even Six Feet Under (even Game of Thrones) only backed up major exits by one episode, and that was shocking enough. Sort of implied the last episode would be a coda, too - so there was a touch of precedent even there. Even Andrea died in a finale. It was difficult enough for the show to establish the precedent of a midseason finale, too. It's also been playing with beginnings - there was sufficient continuity in the first three episodes to make Glenn's apparent (and mid-episode!) death feel somewhat acceptable - or anyway to help out some brskes on how much more unacceptable it could have been. It came about where the end of a movie might - and where Bob's death had in the similarly movie-like first three episodes of the previous season. And I think th broken ice of Beth's death made them feel like they could kill Tyrese before things sewed back up. They're in waters not even Game of Thrones approaches, so they're all the ice-testing they can. I suspect the Glenn thing, too, was an ice test, and maybe a clever one on Gimple's part, since it may help convince the network that NOT getting to kill major characters on a random interval schedule will hurt the show's ratings in the long run. Given the widespread annoyance, to regain credibility they're going to have to drop an A-lister. Thus they get to! Unless they went too far in their attempt to not go too far. It's unclear if viewership has much relationship to internet ridicule, at least initially. Hopefully the brass at least realizes that ridicule eventually damages, or at last prevents expansion, of a brand.

I dunno. I do admit that the latest episodes weren't non-stop fun, though a lot of the decisions, setups and payoffs of previous setups were facinating and admirable. The ties held them back.

Maybe nonrepetition more than any. Alexandria couldn't be yet another CDC/farm/prison, or even church. You can't end on safety, you can't again end on the same note of despair. So here's a different note of despair, they venture. One that IS the final piece of what Gimple's been building here: the final consequence of the even-worse fusion of the Rick group's mistakes with Alexandria's mistakes. The consequences of those consequences don't actually need to be seen. And I guess the cliffhanger's supposed to keep both hope and despair alive in the right proportions?

Yeah, my fear is the network's going to just stomp all over the show and insist that the good and the bad be plainly labeled, that stories be to a greater extent stand-alone etc. etc. Without understanding how ridiculously tough this balancing act is, and especially how intricately Gimple's come up with SOMETHING answering to all the pressures involved that still can mean.