Many of us spent last season desperately waiting for
something, anything to happen on AMC’s “The Walking Dead”. With the exception
of last week’s episode, season three has done a fine job rectifying this
situation. The mid-season finale, “Made to Suffer”, delivers more of the same.
Spoilers are waiting to tear into flesh, so tread lightly,
lest you have your little mind blown.
The wall-to-wall action of “Made to Suffer” is both a
blessing and a curse. It makes the episode a blast to watch, but there’s also
so much going on that after a while it’s all a blur, and everything winds up a
jumble. You get a bunch of little threads, a bunch of bits and pieces, but you
never go into any depth with any of them. The result is a fractured, though
damn entertaining, slice of the world of “The Walking Dead”.
There are some badass moments, like when Glenn (Steven Yeun)
and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) fashion shanks out of zombie bone. The running shootout
in the streets of Woodbury is also pretty damn sweet. As much as I love the
zombie action, the people-on-people conflict has always been the most
interesting and exciting part of “The Walking Dead”.
“Made to Suffer” tries to do two main things: bring story
lines together, while introducing new elements to the narrative. The two groups
of survivors—those led by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), and the Governor’s
(David Morrissey) posse at Woodbury—finally come together in a big, violent
spectacle. We also got our first glimpse at a new addition to the show, comic
book favorite Tyreese (Chad Coleman, Cutty from “The Wire”).
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: for all of the
shows faults, “The Walking Dead” certainly knows how to end an episode.
Cliffhangers are nothing new, and moving forward, there are a ton of questions
left hanging. How will Tryeese and his crew fit in at the prison? What will
become of the brother’s Dixon, Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Merle (Michael
Rooker)? Now that the Governor is super pissed about what happened to him at
the hands of Michonne (Danai Gurira), how brutal will his thirst for revenge
get? Hopefully this pushes his character more towards what he’s like in Robert
Kirkman’s comics. Thus far in the season, he’s been a watered-down version of
his funny book namesake, and I want to see him get nasty.
Because “Made to Suffer” is a finale, of sorts (not a fan of
this mid-season finale nonsense that’s so prevalent these days), it’s a good
time to look back on season three of “The Walking Dead” and see where we’re at.
There are still problems, but by and large, this season has fixed many of the
large-scale structural issues that plagued the first two years. Week-to-week it
is much more consistent, and is finally becoming the adaptation that fans of
the comics hoped for.
Here are some of the things that have struck me so far:
I’m definitely digging how grim and grizzled Carl (Chandler
Riggs) is becoming. From having to shoot his mom in the head to prevent her
from becoming a zombie, to basically being abandoned by his father for extended
periods, the kid’s had a rough go so far. Just the fact that he steps up and
rescues Tyreese and company, shows how far he’s come from the whiney, obnoxious
brat he used to be. Now he’s becoming a man, willing to do what needs to be
done.
Similarly, Glenn is also coming along as tough-as-shit
apocalypse survivor. Gone are his previous passive ways, and, especially over
the last two episodes, he’s shown that he’s tough, resourceful, and brave.
My biggest gripe about season three is how they’ve screwed
up two great characters from the comics. On the show neither Andrea (Laurie
Holden) nor Michonne hold a candle to who they are in the source material.
Instead of becoming a badass sniper who uses her skills to pick of enemies and
keep the group safe, she’s an idiot, blinded by her desire to hump the
Governor’s brains out. Seriously, an aquarium wall full of severed heads and a
zombie daughter chained up in a closet don’t raise a single red flag? What the
hell is wrong with her?
And then there’s Michonne. The way the story for season
three is set up has been like a mix-and-match bag from the comics. They’ve
taken pieces that occur at drastically different times and stuck them together
in ways that don’t always fit. For the most part, this collage approach works
okay, and you can see why it was employed. Setting up Woodbury and the Prison
simultaneously allows “The Walking Dead” to save time, and create a great deal
of tension by positioning these two groups for an inevitable collision.
The primary casualty of this approach is the character of
Michonne. I really want to like her, because having read the comics, I know how
awesome she could be. But she sucks in this incarnation, and
exists solely to be bullheaded and contrary in all situations. There’s nothing
more to her personality than that. In the show she’s just thrown into the mix,
and winds up at Woodbury, glossing over the parts of the narrative that provide
all of her characterization. In the comic, by the time she encounters the
Governor, you’ve already been through a couple of story arcs with the character,
and you know her personality. There’s none of that in the show.
In the comics when she sits down to wait for the Governor,
there’s a reason. She’s been repeatedly tortured, raped, and brutalized by him,
and she has a score to settle. The way this scenario plays out in the show, there’s
no deeper motivation for her ambush than she thinks he’s creepy and doesn’t
like him. Other than a few minor transgressions and suspicions, she doesn’t
know anything about him; she doesn’t know he’s a mass-murdering psychopath.
Watching that scene, a friend who hasn’t read the comics was confused until I
explained how what went down in the source material. Then it made much more
sense. As it is, it makes Michonne the crazy one.
Like with Andrea, Michonne has been one of the major
disappointments of the season. They’re both models of strong, badass survivors,
willing to do whatever necessary to survive, but so far, that hasn’t translated
to the show. That’s one of my main hopes for the second half of season three,
that those two become even a shadow of what they can be.
So that’s enough ranting from me for today. What about you
guys? What did you think of “Made to Suffer”? What are your thoughts and
opinions on season three of “The Walking Dead” so far? Let’s hear your voice in
the comments section.
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