(no subject)

[proximoception]

Risky episode. Kind of fascinatingly so.

Underbrush points:

They get away with letting Morgan get a "thorn-pulling" reward because a) it's not that dramatic an immediate reward (he might have gotten Carol safely to Alexandria, stitched her mediocrely, given her Denise's antibiotics), and b) we're so massively distracted by the horrific buildup.

Morgan kills the hanged zombie who's making clanging noises and, despite being dead for possibly mere hours, has already attracted several others up to the metal fence. He's thus a threat but not a clear and present one. Morgan hesitates before doing it and is thoughtful afterwards, and then cuts him down. So he's at least close to the final rung on the "don't kill" scale. But even the one wrong decision one can still make at 9.9 has its karmic consequences - Carol's slipped away during his. What was the right decision? Waiting for the threat to be clear and present - but suppose we agree thst it already is, or could become so overnight. Well, suppose he cut the zombie down. Its legs would be broken - thus it would now be a negligible threat - but it would be alive, which for all we can tell is something that might be in its interest.

He also gets over his not killing thing, though may be sad about it next season. He's hit Warden Hershel's point: kill when it's totally obvious you have to kill in order to save. When not then don't. I hope they don't dwell on it, in fact, because it's one of the few areas where almost everyone agrees, and the few who don't tend to stay away from areas of life where they're likely to have to make the decision to. And the point is kind of made by the math itself, in these cases. He doesn't do it for an us-or-them reason - the guy is going out of his way to murder someone helpless out of hate, which is the tiebreaker (along with the fact he might shoot Morgan next). A human mad dog's = a slightly less valuable life only because likelier to harm or end another life than the next person. Morgan lets him know explicitly that he can survive if he backs off, the man's shot is clearly aimed right at Carol at close range, etc., just like with Hershel when he has to make his lockdown decision etc. back in 4.5. Every pain has been taken to show us in what case preemptive killing is truly justified and how vanishingly rare that must be.

The main karmic sin this episode is, as usual, Rick's, though perhaps Negan will become character enough for the murder to eventually count. Aaron and the mullet guy want to shoot the chain of the hanged man in order to save him - a shot the mullet guy won't make but Aaron might. Abraham says the shot won't work, i.e. won't break the metal chain or not in time even if it hits, which seems probable but not certain. Rick agrees that it won't work and adds that anyway they need the bullets. (Pains were taken to show us earlier in the episode that he knows the mullet guy has figured out how to make new bullets.) The double uncertainty of the difficult shot and what a bullet might do to a thick chain distracts us from this afterthought - and how it may have been Rick's first thought, since the other was Abraham's. The very distant chance that Aaron would use all his bullets up that day such that one or more of the Rick group would be harmed because of it seems to be what makes his decision.

Logically, this might not be a plausible source of instant karma, but it's a possible one: suppose the library man knew something about what was being planned or where the Saviors were massing. But it's a good dramatic one - and a reminder of previous wrong decisions Rick had made on us vs. non-us terms rather than "there's no way that can work" ones.

Most importantly, it enhances the fascinating thing done to viewers in the final moment. How to describe what that is?

You don't know who might die today, so be nice to all of your people, the Savior lieutenant repeats.

The amazingly awful whole-episode buildup, like some sort of intolerable nightmare extravagation of the Saving Private Ryan slow-mo stabbing scene, builds not to what we thought it would but a subtle variation on it. One of the people we hope, to varying degrees, will not be killed is killed, leaving everyone angrily and fearfully speculating for several months. Looks like a big, terrible publicity stunt, the way the Glen stuff in Autumn was seen (which now looks like an at lesst interesting setup for this moment.) Which it may also be - but we shouldn't care. The point is we're shaking in our boots that some person we like might die horribly, and when we don't know who that person is, just that it's someone, we don't feel the awful feeling, but something not unlike what we felt with the hanged man: that that was really gross and unpleasant but he was probably doomed, so, y'know. We're in fact hoping it's the person we like least of those shown, one by one, in closeup, that's going to die! Because if it has to be somebody... And then the show puts us in that somebody's shoes. We don't have to watch a death, just a killing, complete with alienation-effect blood and gross but ungrounded skull-pulping sounds. The one who dies today may be you - not really, but as a suggestion. You may be someone else's ... well, mullet guy, since I can never even remember his name. Oh, Eugene. I hate that name. Which is the kind of dumb thing that helps us place others, fictional or real, nearer to or farther away from us in ways that actually can matter to our decisions, and certainly can to how much sympathy we let ourselves feel for others' hardships. Our wince at Rawlsian Everyprotagonist's death is ... not so terrible compared to what we'd been readying for. It will become more terrible next year when their identity is revealed, we know, which is part of the reason everyone will be going apeshit on social media for a while. But as of now since we don't know who the person is it's like we don't really know the person! It really does seem like we'd better think nicely of all of them - these people of different sexes, ages, colors, sexual preferences, accents, beliefs, sins, personality types. And especially of different degrees of closeness to us when it comes to the number of years known, total screen time, total amount of time the screen showed what they were seeing, amount of dialogue-presented interiority, and proof of possession of first person semimagical "hero" qualities we thoughtlessly imbue ourselves with - various sorts of luck, free choice-making, inherent trustworthiness etc.

Hence the guy at the bridge. It is a problem that we are able to dismiss him to any degree whatever (the amount of special effort they out into the colors of his dead face were striking, as vivis detailed though covering less of the spectrum than those on that Nero-ish king on Game of Thrones). And sure, there are plenty of reasons the show gives us to do that: he's the last of his group, we've never seen or heard of his group at all except dead, he's dressed in tatters, he's very nondescript under all the blood and whatnot, he's presented as outnumbered and doomed from the start, it's The Walking Dead so maybe it's all a trap and if he lives he'll screw something up or turn on them or etc. etc. But they show gets us anyway because we can't deny it: we should still care more. We don't lend caring automatically, but differentially prize life (hence that Morgan zombie scene, reminding us of the zombie on the tracks in Clear that Tyrese spares when begged - and at the end perhaps spares again because he wants to). And while maybe we can't help that, we can help whether it affects our important decisions - and notice how it's affected the decisions of people we DO lend caring to, the various members (of various standing) of our "us."

The library ... seeing where the guy lived, seeing his ALSO hanged-high-for-an-example friend, these things subtly make his death worse. Which we're also asked to think about, and how that had earlier affected (say) the Zero Dark Thirty style massacre. That was the least home-y of indoor homes, but it was still a home-space, a sleep space, and literally everyone has one. Which once we remember we categorize people as belonging to a different sort of "everyone" than a second before.

The "Fiction" over that library door ... was that just supposed to remind us of how fiction helps us remember those sorts of things, thus how our initial "stranger"-empathy must itself be a more fictional sort of fiction, since it misses such important facts as that everyone has a home and not just a house? Or was there some more local function?

Negan's actions draw out suspense and maximize both fear and our sense of his level of control over the group (and the narrative), in a way even borderline tolerable only because his power is clearly based on sustaining exactly this impression - he's the head of a sort of period scheme, taking half in a world where half is not quite enough, thus forcing places like Hilltop to collaterally exploit places like Alexandria where possible and (hypothetically) so on. So this pageant is plausible. But it's also compatible with his not actually wanting to do this, as compared to wanting have what it can net him and wanting to be seen doing it (this is a performance - he is basically costumed, like a hangman). The randomizing of the murder fits the show's point that all of us are 1st persons who can't prove we're not 3rd and ultimately depend on the tutoyering that creates an average of the two in both participants. But it also fits the Persian Empire-style justice of his injustice; as with Terminus, this is not personal, but something one in role A does to those in role B. Which is dehumanizing, but one point of dehumanization is that the dehumanizer gets to still feel human. The absurd delays of Negan and the blown-up road guy fit their not wanting to actually kill people. It fits the minimalism Negan displays, too: you kill (mostly murder) 20+ of my people undemonstratively, I kill one of yours demonstratively. The killing is ritualized and spoken of as a matter of course, as a custom, basically a regrettable entrance fee into the new civilization. We think of Negan as being behind it, as he may well prove to be, but we think too of the "all of us are Negan" mantra some Saviors met death with in the Carol episode. That may be one further protective aspect of the pyramid scheme he's created, of course, but it does emphasize how everyone BUT him (and the road guy) involved in this is at worst a social murderer, as it were.

The actual beating to death is designed to be inefficient, to take time so as to horrify, but given that constraint it's enacted fairly efficiently and passionlessly. And he turns the outbursts of a frightened father and a frightened husband into opportunities to threaten rsther than kill - and with his Eeny Meenying he also has chances to stop women, one sick, which he doesn't take. Plus he skips some words near the end, perhaps because doing so lets him zero in on a single male so as to do the least damage. Which he may also be doing for show, so as to keep everyone both fearful and convinced that he is not a monster. But the philosophy of the whole damn show is that nobody is a monster unless all are, so I'm thinking that's going to apply here too.

I assume what they'll do with Negan is frame him as a second coming of the murderer of Eastman's family: the one person who we get to think of as evil. And gradually, subtly let us doubt we can do even that, just like with that guy. With the Governor it was revealed fairly early on that he had his demons - more and worse than the rest of us, perhaps, thus explaining his actions. They'll withhold Negan's story as long as possible so we can hope he doesn't have one - as characters in Fiction sometimes don't, and as we often neglect to give those in the fictions we can't help whipping up to fill in our many knowledge blanks.

This is one ballsy show. As soon as it became clear that the audience needed it to kill protagonists semi-regularly but irregularly so but also not main main ones etc. or it would be viewed as soft or fake, Gimple was like, well clearly what we need to do is not only not kill a major character for an entire season, but also 6.3 every viewer in the face for four weeks, and also kill damn near the entire crop of characters just below this safety zone to make it obvious, and then at the very end make them all think about what's behind this insane series of demands for several months.

I don't know what Gimple looks like but I'm now kind of wondering how closely Negan resembles him. That closing of all Rick's paths, after leaving one open at every point ... because of course it was Rick who closed them off. Though, more truly even than that, it was what Rick didn't know about why he made his decisions that closed them.

FICTION. This show is officially amazing, and better than that astonishingly brave. It's great in its weird way, despite the thin spots in the dough where Gimple is delegating (16 episodes annually rather than 6-13, several overlength, and with no lag-months or off years like Fargo, Hannibal, Mad Men etc. got to take). The show's rules are so weird that fucking with them was maybe inevitable for survival, but this ... this is commitment.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

This pulls be back in. Thanks.