proximoception | (no subject)

That they're wasting any time on Enid suggests she'll be relevant. That's one problem with having a large cast: anyone we even see has to be up to bat shortly.

Rosita's in an odd place. Denise was worried she was feeling alone for the first time. Abraham and Sasha didn't hide their happiness from her. She takes Glen and Michonne to where she knows Daryl will be, then doesn't want to go after him to stop him, then joins him. So another nihilizing response to loss?

Daryl is having the guilt response. Special guilt leads to a special sense of mission re. setting things right, on this show, which makes one hold one's own life cheaply and (apparently) blinds one to how others DO still value that life and will be drawn into your wake and therefore heightened risk of harm. Happens all over the place in this penultimate episode: Darryl draws Glen and Michonne and then Rosita, Carol draws Morgan who draws Rick. And then they all split up further because of further guilt missions.

Are we to take it that the man who won't show his face is Negan? That will mean Morgan will be shaken in his faith again, and maybe Rick in his friendship, since I doubt the show will let the Wolf redemption arc be repeated. Some qualification to "all life is precious" in the works? Or just a strenuous illustration that Morgan's way doesn't open an account for him at the Bank of Instant Karma. "Everything returns" can't be counted on, whereas "the only way to be wrong that doesn't drag you down" perhaps can? Or is it that even that can drag you down? That right isn't right because it pays off for you in other ways, but because it just is? Does seem like whatever goes wrong from this point can now be considered coauthored by Rick's decision and by Morgan's, so maybe they're just trying to keep the conflict of ideas alive. The second the show actually endorses Eastman's philosophy it's kind of over, is I guess the worry?

What are they doing with the clocks? A Sound and the Fury allusion, wasn't it? Some balance between living one's life and fighting and/or witnessing?

Flowers people don't notice - do these come upon every Gimple-written episode?

Yeah, the guilt at killing who you maybe should not have and the guilt at not killing who you maybe should have are being directly compared. How Rick looks away in the car when Morgan brings it up - inability to face what one did enabling a downward spiral. Glen faced it, literally, in the photos of the head-bashed victims: what you have done is exactly as bad as this, even though you look away, kill the sleeping, stab just once. Carol came to see that. If anything the show's getting too overt. Maybe that was bound to happen sooner or later?

Enid's descent was multistage: not risking her life to try to save her parents, not trying to help someone in need of it despite the risk to her not having even been surveyed (the not trusting stage? the looking away one?), not holding off from killing one who wanted to kill her but was prevented from doing so (the zombie), killing and eating the turtle alive (the crucial bit) despite not clearly being about to starve to death. That's the fear slope. Things to note: 1) JSS moves from thin dust to the soil to the turtle's bones to her own flesh, 2) the jumps take place where she makes her "survival" decisions do they're not PTSD but denial: the "somehow"-ing of specifics. Oh and 3) her decision to enter the town is presented as that same sort of blackout. She's moving away thinking about it, stops, blackout, then is walking in, making the same marks she does after each increasingly morally questionable act. Which suggests this is one, and perhaps the last sort possible since the JSS is now a part of her.

Meaning she was up to something sinister, going in. They gave Ron his own slope's-end so don't strictly need to make him responsible for that truck giving way. But he did hang out with Enid, saying we know not what. She's responsible for something. Working with the Saviors? She relishes going out in S5, by mid-S6 doesn't want to anymore. They come across a message soaked away by rain at that time. Instructions for her?

Glen's heart is in the right place but his head follows the others, has been his role. It's increasingly been ceded to Michonne, though, just as Rick's role as leader (and lately "antihero") is being picked up by Maggie. Glen may even be passing over into full enlightenment, an extremely dangerous hat to wear on this show, as witness the various fallen old white guys and any-age black guys who've most clearly worn it. Morgan's safe for a while because no one's listening to him - he's an outsider, a reformed killer and madman, has screwed up in a big way recently, seems idealistic hence suicidally extreme - so can keep the debate going by not winning it. But you only need one conflicted figurehead for that side; whereas, since all unhappy families diverge in fiction, the other side can have various avatars of sub-types of attractive-looking wrongness. So I think Rick's safe and Glen is not. If he dies Maggie can go full-psycho, Heath can go full-guilt, Daryl double-guilt, as can Morgan if the horse guy's the one that kills him - plus Rick can be knocked back into full life-ain't-preciosity, so dramatically a lot can be done with just one event. And if Negan absent-mindedly outs his lapsed spy Enid in the same scene, then BAM, we got a whole season set up.

Plot speculation sure is useless. What they'll do with Carol next interests me. Seems like she and Morgan will be converging on the guy who's been shot and wants to avenge his many dead friends by stabbing her with her own crucifix? So maybe we'll get a "hitting bottom" scene where Morgan talks her into not killing him. And if that actually works out, there will be a great victory for life-prizing to match the great defeat any deaths caused by horse-guy will constitute. The show may assume the latter will make Rick and most viewers go back to thinking preemptive striking is the less bad option, and forget that Rick started this by escalating (since every escalation is a new start). Yeah, they'll need to continue give Morgan the tiniest, most ambiguous victories and Rick large apparent victories that in fact suck, while keeping him at a moderate causal remove from catastrophes that can look blameable on pacifists like Morgan or avoiders like the people of Alexandria. (Heath and Holden are still filling that role in a muted way; not sure about Spencer, whose personality's still rather uncongealed).

Didn't notice subtleties in this one, unless the way personal loyalties are pulling people about to their own detriment and that of the group counts. Daryl gets someone killed indirectly, tries to "solve" that but may end up just getting someone else killed too. Similarly Carol leaves to kill no one and ends up killing 4 more and endangering others. Rick fails to find Carol, Rosita et al. fail to bring back Daryl before he gets captured. Everyone correctly prophesied the failures of the stayers' missions, then failed in their own in not stopping those. Only Morgan's might still work. So the episode's pretty much agreeing with his "we're all wrong but only one way to be wrong doesn't drag us down" formula? Since it has him explain the apparent success of his Wolf conversion to Rick, he's both somewhat destigmatized for the audience and those events are brought back to their attention, exactly as the full, horrible ramifications of Rick's Zero Dark Thirty "success" are revealed. So this is maybe the point where people hostile to it are gradually realizing Morgan's side may be the one that's right, here? Not just a moral but a rational high ground? Hard for me to see this since I've been noticing he's the default hero for a while. I mean, I assume there's some things he's still supposed to be getting wrong, but he's close to the goal, while everyone else has run downfield to score what's in fact the enemy's point.

Mostly it's setting the finale up.

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I'm years away from getting to this point, so this will be forgotten later, but anyway they seem pretty keen on this Negan character based on the promo stuff I've seen.

I watch no promo stuff but they've been building him up for like ten episodes now. He's clearly Season 7's Governor.

If you get to the end of 3 do yourself a favor and think of 4 as an absolute relaunch. None of the characters are quite who they were. With "Clear" back in 3 as a buried Prologue. Julie still has trouble with the show because the original characters were all so damn tiresome by 4.1, so she reflexively hates them, and she's not alone - that's still its albatross. It's not that no events, themes etc. are carried over, but they get unobtrusively reestablished or summarized (and usually rerouted) such that you don't need to think back much, except to the Pilot and Clear. And maybe Gimple's "This Sorrowful Life" late in 3. The cyphers get personalities.

Thanks this is helpful. I will get back to TWD soon. I have to finish Hannibal, which has been slow b/c I have to watch it on my laptop and I don't like the sound and screen. Also been amazingly entertained by the OJ show. If there's a Johnnie Cochran spinoff it will be the best show on TV.