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Nov. 25th, 2015 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionGot to 5.9 in my Gimple-era Walking Dead rewatch. I thought at the time it was the best episode of the show, by far, to date, and I mostly still think that, despite having become aware of how much better most of them in fact have been since 4.1.
I thought the same thing about Eko's death on Lost - that it was by far the best scene, the enduring one, however exciting things like the bit with the cellphone in the 3 finale had been at the time. There are other similarities, I see now. Strong influence (one notices lots of steals and homages, rewatching - the hires are all Wires but the pedigree is clear). The hallucinations ... the governor even shoves him at the same point "I am not your brother" assaults Eko - right after the firm rejection of debt to such a power and the affirmation of self. But this story is better still. It's the Mulholland Drive, the deathsong, of someone who doesn't need an audience to do the forgiving.
Like the Lost episode nobody likes this one - a big dip on imdb. Surprise death of a loved character again the problem? Probably not, since Walking Dead was on a streak of dropping those like flies. It's that it was an art film, or arty enough - Mulholland Drive itself took years to break 8.0. And of the people who wouldn't mind that it alienated a bunch by seeming to give a simple, Christian answer.
"God has given us a home in the heavens." That home is earth, the Earth. Scripture gets entirely reinflected, as it had a few episodes earlier, with the "ouch" shot of a plaque reading "He who drinks my blood and eats my flesh will have eternal life" as the zombies take over the church. Its events and characters aren't directly referenced in 6.4, but the connections between that and this are as important as those between this and The Grove. The house in the forest in the picture is the Grove house that he felt they had to leave after blood had hit it. He'd looked away, there. Whereas when Eastman's house was destroyed he took the part that was left - and when that part was cut he did the same.
Walls stop you from seeing that this world is all one place. And you're still part of it when you die, though not in the same way. It's better in one respect: you no longer have to hear of suffering. When you're dead you get to stop listening and looking. But only then. And it's okay because it was always going to happen, is part of what's going on. There's life mode and death mode, and when you're on the last approach the responsibilities shift - once you're *really in it*, can see it like Hershel saw when killing was needed, locking doors was at last temporarily called for. Dying, it's okay to stop. To let your existence be something else's affair. This is the stuff religion twisted around, but did not invent.
He unflinchingly watches the zombies killed, as they try to pass through the gate. Animals are here too: he looks at the roadkill. The radio describes what was done to them by the governor and at Terminus, but also what they had done - the machetes, the girls. And you remember that at those moments he had looked. The girls ... one of the twins in the photos is looking away, the other straight on. It's not clear which sees what's going on, but it doesn't matter. One does. We're reminded of the previous episode where Sasha tells him she'd changed but he hasn't, but also of the girls in The Grove, fixated on different things, neither quite seeing what Carol thought they were supposed to. In the hallucinations they're facing slightly different directions. Lizzie was in death mode prematurely, or something like it, in her madness. She saw it was okay, though not that what was okay was not at all okay yet, where pleasure and surcease of pain for you and all (where possible) still mattered, and that when the other okayness happened it would not be quite the zombie sort.
Not seeing: revenge stops it, forgiveness permits it. They all talk about the hospital, reacting with a kind of blindness and a simultaneous desire to kill, realization that it was not right to, and conviction that nothing mattered. Let one life not matter and none do; take your eyes off what matters and none do. This is a difficult series of equations but Gimple sticks with them. The episode addresses a possible objection: how can we find life of infinite value when it ends? Doesn't our own life's ending cheapen everyone's we meet within it? No, because the values change, the responsibility ends, it says. But only and exactly with breathing, not ever in anticipation.
And poor Rick again reveals he is only doing a good thing for someone outside his group out of loyalty to someone in it. Though in the previous episode, in tears, he demands the other wards be freed to come with him if they wish. Like Carol with her tears accompanying doubt at her own decision in The Grove. It's hard to be the monsters we'd like to be. That's why we call those beings monsters, rather than bears. They're not stable. You can't rally be them even while you are one.
And Glenn is almost with him, deeply shaking Michonne. More echoed dialogue here (Gimple uses tons everywhere, most of which I missed watching these weekly): Glenn speaks of being where Rick had been the way Rick spoke to Carol in 4.16 of now being where she had been back at the prison. And then Michonne says they've been out there too long, in the same sense and phrasing that Bob 2 had used just before Rick basically murdered him.
The broken walls, the bodies. Our home is a mass grave. And yet also the lone red flower. Hidden from the characters by a frsgment of wall. And not yet in focus for us, as it becomes in 6.4 for Morgan. Look at the flowers, Lizzie.
Nobody could have guessed or (apparently) has yet guessed how thoroughly this resurrected show has become damn close to the best it ever could have been. I mean, zombies? What? But from a dead stop it suddenly started lurching its way after Breaking Bad. And, as Eugene observes, it seems to be getting faster.
(Last couple (seeming?) sucky episodes hopefully just a stumble - as well as maybe the recent one, which we haven't seen but have heard is exasperating).
I thought the same thing about Eko's death on Lost - that it was by far the best scene, the enduring one, however exciting things like the bit with the cellphone in the 3 finale had been at the time. There are other similarities, I see now. Strong influence (one notices lots of steals and homages, rewatching - the hires are all Wires but the pedigree is clear). The hallucinations ... the governor even shoves him at the same point "I am not your brother" assaults Eko - right after the firm rejection of debt to such a power and the affirmation of self. But this story is better still. It's the Mulholland Drive, the deathsong, of someone who doesn't need an audience to do the forgiving.
Like the Lost episode nobody likes this one - a big dip on imdb. Surprise death of a loved character again the problem? Probably not, since Walking Dead was on a streak of dropping those like flies. It's that it was an art film, or arty enough - Mulholland Drive itself took years to break 8.0. And of the people who wouldn't mind that it alienated a bunch by seeming to give a simple, Christian answer.
"God has given us a home in the heavens." That home is earth, the Earth. Scripture gets entirely reinflected, as it had a few episodes earlier, with the "ouch" shot of a plaque reading "He who drinks my blood and eats my flesh will have eternal life" as the zombies take over the church. Its events and characters aren't directly referenced in 6.4, but the connections between that and this are as important as those between this and The Grove. The house in the forest in the picture is the Grove house that he felt they had to leave after blood had hit it. He'd looked away, there. Whereas when Eastman's house was destroyed he took the part that was left - and when that part was cut he did the same.
Walls stop you from seeing that this world is all one place. And you're still part of it when you die, though not in the same way. It's better in one respect: you no longer have to hear of suffering. When you're dead you get to stop listening and looking. But only then. And it's okay because it was always going to happen, is part of what's going on. There's life mode and death mode, and when you're on the last approach the responsibilities shift - once you're *really in it*, can see it like Hershel saw when killing was needed, locking doors was at last temporarily called for. Dying, it's okay to stop. To let your existence be something else's affair. This is the stuff religion twisted around, but did not invent.
He unflinchingly watches the zombies killed, as they try to pass through the gate. Animals are here too: he looks at the roadkill. The radio describes what was done to them by the governor and at Terminus, but also what they had done - the machetes, the girls. And you remember that at those moments he had looked. The girls ... one of the twins in the photos is looking away, the other straight on. It's not clear which sees what's going on, but it doesn't matter. One does. We're reminded of the previous episode where Sasha tells him she'd changed but he hasn't, but also of the girls in The Grove, fixated on different things, neither quite seeing what Carol thought they were supposed to. In the hallucinations they're facing slightly different directions. Lizzie was in death mode prematurely, or something like it, in her madness. She saw it was okay, though not that what was okay was not at all okay yet, where pleasure and surcease of pain for you and all (where possible) still mattered, and that when the other okayness happened it would not be quite the zombie sort.
Not seeing: revenge stops it, forgiveness permits it. They all talk about the hospital, reacting with a kind of blindness and a simultaneous desire to kill, realization that it was not right to, and conviction that nothing mattered. Let one life not matter and none do; take your eyes off what matters and none do. This is a difficult series of equations but Gimple sticks with them. The episode addresses a possible objection: how can we find life of infinite value when it ends? Doesn't our own life's ending cheapen everyone's we meet within it? No, because the values change, the responsibility ends, it says. But only and exactly with breathing, not ever in anticipation.
And poor Rick again reveals he is only doing a good thing for someone outside his group out of loyalty to someone in it. Though in the previous episode, in tears, he demands the other wards be freed to come with him if they wish. Like Carol with her tears accompanying doubt at her own decision in The Grove. It's hard to be the monsters we'd like to be. That's why we call those beings monsters, rather than bears. They're not stable. You can't rally be them even while you are one.
And Glenn is almost with him, deeply shaking Michonne. More echoed dialogue here (Gimple uses tons everywhere, most of which I missed watching these weekly): Glenn speaks of being where Rick had been the way Rick spoke to Carol in 4.16 of now being where she had been back at the prison. And then Michonne says they've been out there too long, in the same sense and phrasing that Bob 2 had used just before Rick basically murdered him.
The broken walls, the bodies. Our home is a mass grave. And yet also the lone red flower. Hidden from the characters by a frsgment of wall. And not yet in focus for us, as it becomes in 6.4 for Morgan. Look at the flowers, Lizzie.
Nobody could have guessed or (apparently) has yet guessed how thoroughly this resurrected show has become damn close to the best it ever could have been. I mean, zombies? What? But from a dead stop it suddenly started lurching its way after Breaking Bad. And, as Eugene observes, it seems to be getting faster.
(Last couple (seeming?) sucky episodes hopefully just a stumble - as well as maybe the recent one, which we haven't seen but have heard is exasperating).
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no subject
Date: 2015-11-25 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-30 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-02 06:36 pm (UTC)I did try that one. The first two Eccleston episodes, which were fairly terrible. Then Blink, which was very good. Then The Doctor's Wife, which was pretty bad and annoyingly Gaimany.
I dunno. Maybe Blink was enough to sustain a retry, now that it's a strictly Moffatt joint.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-03 02:05 am (UTC)The Davies era was all goofy and fun and melodramatic. Moffatt's time has been smarter and more serious, but also overambitious and muddled. But he's definitely found a voice and a rhythm with Capaldi.
5.9 made me quit the Walking Dead for a while (I caught back up). I was annoyed with the writing up to that point. Not on a microscopic level, the larger story arcs. How it was clear they had no ability to write large-cast scenes and so were finding excuses to split everyone up, or had people go bafflingly silent for whole episodes. And they were killing off characters left and right for reasons that didn't seem story reasons. 5.9 seemed like an attempt to make lemonade with the necessity of killing Tyrese, the necessity of making it different than all the other heroic deaths we've had, and the necessity to not let him go out like a punk, 'cause, you know, Tyrese.
The killing was leading to a sort of reinvention of the core cast, so it got better again. Though I still haven't rewatched 5.9.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 06:02 am (UTC)1. The Bob, Beth, Tyrese domino fall helped make Rick's descent believable. Being "out" leads to intolerable attrition. Given how many people the earlier showrunners killed even when they were "in," to make this point they'd need to surpass that frequency.
2. Their deaths also removed all the most positive presences - even Glenn and Maggie are both seen temporarily going dark. The world grinds up the best people first, so fuck scruples, Rick decides - and we have to find this plausible to unlearn it alongside him. Daryl and Michonne still have some of it but don't know how to articulate it. So when Morgan comes back in 5.16 as a sort of representative of Rick's own past the difference is night and day.
3. Bob and Tyrese also pose the danger of Magical Negro buildup, alive; but dead they work more as prefigurations - hence also some connected moments with Bob 2 and Noah. Beth, too, comes to know a little too much to stay alive. Suspense here, given the unique nature of the show, has to come from the characters never being clearly right. So the Lost practice of axing characters who achieve any sustainable enlightenment is pretty much indispensable. The show's own position can't be infinitely deferred, even if unambiguous statement of it has to be, so these little glimpses serve the functions of keeping it live but seemingly unviable.