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Jan. 15th, 2017 02:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception - the opening sequence of 3 is okay but after that it's mostly intolerable.
Gimple hits reset in the very first seconds of 4.1.
The opening shot is of flowers - the beauty in life that fear prevents you from seeing. Rick walks out of a series of shots in which he's caged into a spot of green where he is not, his garden - but there is a distant cage around this too, with zombies looming behind it. Along the way he's peacefully and happily drinking from a barrel, their protected water supply, the source of any safe existence (which of course becomes the unsuspected threat to that existence shortly). He digs up the gun he'd buried, considers it, discards it. He has come out of the prison of fear and into the prison of denying there is anything to be feared - one giant problem with which is that we go straight to panic (fight or flight) when at last blindsided by one of the many things we really ought to fear. He's thinking of his garden as a safe spot, but it's still part of nature, thus containing what's threatened and threatening, though also offering tools to handle the latter (tools that can be abused into counterthreats).
And it just goes on from there. In something like fifteen minutes Gimple establishes the zombie-animal connection, the zombie-person continuum, the zombies-outgroup connection, foreshadows Rick's banishment of Carol and subtle but momentous rejection of the Governor in his encounter with the foreign (etrange) woman, the distinction between people oriented "out" (toward danger and exposure to the full truth, leading to every man for himself or a lack of care for one's own life if unbalanced) and "in" (toward safety/insularity, leading to denial, unreadiness, and liability to panic of unbalanced), pretty much makes the wall zombies into an Argentine Ant type allegory about managing life's troubles by tackling one at a time, recharacterizes Tyrese as a troubled pacifist, Hershel as someone whose recent pronounced bad and good luck have given him perspective, Daryl as someone at home both out and in who thus ought to be leader but doesn't trust his own judgment, Michonne as someone who has been out but is now ready to come in, Glenn as a nice person whose love for his wife leads to his overvaluing her life in relation to others - thus leaving him open to the same sorts of fears and fear-assuaging temptations as an ingroup loyalist of the sort Rick will soon become, introduces Bob as someone who has been out so long he does not trust that he is in now so has not yet shaken his coping mechanism of retreating into world-dimming fantasy, makes clear that Rick will be a bad influence on Carl thus one way bad ideas get passed around etc. etc.
He hits the ground running and it's easy to miss 95 percent of it. The Glenn thing suggests he had his whole arc figured out back then. The patting down of the woman and how he sets Carl straight about naming pigs make it clear that Rick's bad ideas are his culture's, and that the sorts of bad logic buried in received ideas are not harmless because those are the very ideas we rely on when afraid, thus what we reconstruct our thoughts out of since the rest has been thrown out - meaning the values implies in them are extended and made explicit. His sherriffness becomes closely tied to all the worst things he does, in the Gimple run - e.g. the Bob 2 killing, the execution in 5.16, his callousness in 6.1. Authoritarianism versus sharing one's thoughts and freely extending initial trust in anothers' ability to decide, this becomes big.
Those flowers get to me most. You can tell flowers are going to be a crucial element the very last episode of the series, or anyway in Gimple's last if he's replaced at some point. There's been just one moment where someone even looks straight at them, I think, though Morgan comes close.
Gimple hits reset in the very first seconds of 4.1.
The opening shot is of flowers - the beauty in life that fear prevents you from seeing. Rick walks out of a series of shots in which he's caged into a spot of green where he is not, his garden - but there is a distant cage around this too, with zombies looming behind it. Along the way he's peacefully and happily drinking from a barrel, their protected water supply, the source of any safe existence (which of course becomes the unsuspected threat to that existence shortly). He digs up the gun he'd buried, considers it, discards it. He has come out of the prison of fear and into the prison of denying there is anything to be feared - one giant problem with which is that we go straight to panic (fight or flight) when at last blindsided by one of the many things we really ought to fear. He's thinking of his garden as a safe spot, but it's still part of nature, thus containing what's threatened and threatening, though also offering tools to handle the latter (tools that can be abused into counterthreats).
And it just goes on from there. In something like fifteen minutes Gimple establishes the zombie-animal connection, the zombie-person continuum, the zombies-outgroup connection, foreshadows Rick's banishment of Carol and subtle but momentous rejection of the Governor in his encounter with the foreign (etrange) woman, the distinction between people oriented "out" (toward danger and exposure to the full truth, leading to every man for himself or a lack of care for one's own life if unbalanced) and "in" (toward safety/insularity, leading to denial, unreadiness, and liability to panic of unbalanced), pretty much makes the wall zombies into an Argentine Ant type allegory about managing life's troubles by tackling one at a time, recharacterizes Tyrese as a troubled pacifist, Hershel as someone whose recent pronounced bad and good luck have given him perspective, Daryl as someone at home both out and in who thus ought to be leader but doesn't trust his own judgment, Michonne as someone who has been out but is now ready to come in, Glenn as a nice person whose love for his wife leads to his overvaluing her life in relation to others - thus leaving him open to the same sorts of fears and fear-assuaging temptations as an ingroup loyalist of the sort Rick will soon become, introduces Bob as someone who has been out so long he does not trust that he is in now so has not yet shaken his coping mechanism of retreating into world-dimming fantasy, makes clear that Rick will be a bad influence on Carl thus one way bad ideas get passed around etc. etc.
He hits the ground running and it's easy to miss 95 percent of it. The Glenn thing suggests he had his whole arc figured out back then. The patting down of the woman and how he sets Carl straight about naming pigs make it clear that Rick's bad ideas are his culture's, and that the sorts of bad logic buried in received ideas are not harmless because those are the very ideas we rely on when afraid, thus what we reconstruct our thoughts out of since the rest has been thrown out - meaning the values implies in them are extended and made explicit. His sherriffness becomes closely tied to all the worst things he does, in the Gimple run - e.g. the Bob 2 killing, the execution in 5.16, his callousness in 6.1. Authoritarianism versus sharing one's thoughts and freely extending initial trust in anothers' ability to decide, this becomes big.
Those flowers get to me most. You can tell flowers are going to be a crucial element the very last episode of the series, or anyway in Gimple's last if he's replaced at some point. There's been just one moment where someone even looks straight at them, I think, though Morgan comes close.
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Date: 2017-01-15 02:20 pm (UTC)