So that’s why there were barely any zombies in last week’s episode – they were saving up all the latex and fake blood for this week’s bloodbath!
Written by comic creator Robert Kirkman, episode four finally upped the pace a little as both Rick and his crew and the survivors back at the camp both had their own outbreaks of ‘walkers’ to deal with (I’m not entirely sure about them referring to the dead as ‘walkers’ while I’m on the subject, it just makes me picture zimmer frames). That’s not to say that it wasn’t without its problems, but despite those there was still a lot of bloody fun to enjoy.
Following the trail left by Merle starting at his severed hand (which his brother Daryl found rather useful later on in the episode), Rick and his not-so-merry band of men retraced their steps through the building, learning along the way that Merle had managed to take out several zombies while bleeding profusely from his fresh stump, and then cauterised his wound (as Daryl said Merle’s tough as nails – ‘nobody could kill Merle but Merle’, unfortunately). The group then dropped the search for Merle oddly quickly, not that I blame them for doing so of course, and turned their attentions to the bag of guns. Glen, somehow finding hidden depths of courage and a definite flair for tactics, organised the dash for them, and then promptly got himself captured by a passing gang.
This is where my main problem with the episode came in – although it was more my fault than the episode’s for not having faith in where it was going – in addition to the bunch of wife beaters and awful racists who survived the epidemic, so did a load of gang members (according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, the episode title ‘vatos’ is Mexican slang for ‘guys’). Of course they weren’t at all what they seemed, and it would in a way make sense that the members of society who were more quick to violence would outlive the more polite ones, but still I was having difficulties going along with Kurtzman’s bleak vision of post-apocalyptic morality (if there can be such a thing as ‘morality’ after an apocalypse).
This lead to a lot of hostage negotiations, one-upmanship and threats of a shoot-out that didn’t actually happen – interrupted as it was by one of the gang’s sweet old grandmother. And from this Rick discovered why the ‘gang’ were so desperate for the guns – a couple of members were staff at an old-people’s home (and others had relatives there) who were engaged in keeping the residents safe. Unsurprisingly Rick did the decent thing of dividing up the guns and after getting Glen back, the group were on their way back to camp, until they found out that someone (Merle, they presumed) had stolen their van, meaning the guys had to go the rest of the way on foot (I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t just turn back to the city to get another car – after all it’s not like they were that far away from finding one, and I got the impression that the camp wasn’t that close to the city).
Meanwhile at the camp, there was a lot of set-up for the episode’s grim finale, with abusive Ed being all pathetic and sulky (and really gross-looking – I don’t think skin should ever be quite that shade of lurid yellow), previously unnoticed camper Jim obsessively digging until he came down with sunstroke as he had dreamt about doing it, and Andrea making plans for her sister Amy’s birthday. If you ever find yourself in a horror film/tv series DO NOT make plans for any sort of special occasion – just let it pass unmentioned, otherwise you will inevitably get killed off just before or on the day, as unsurprisingly the episode ended with a load of zombies invading the camp and Amy meeting a sticky end.
On the plus side at least the zombies got Ed as well (please let them have gotten Ed – I’m half expecting him to prove to be as resistant as Merle and pop up again in a later episode). But seeing Andrea violently weeping over her sisters as yet un-re-animated corpse was a rather painful end to the episode. There wasn’t much of an explanation of how so many of the dead made it to the camp at once and pretty much unheard, did Merle drive them in the van to unleash them on the camp, as Rick did say that he’d be looking for vengeance. I’m not quite sure how the logistics of this would work – how do you safely trap and release a bunch of the undead?. I’m guessing it probably wasn’t him, but thought I’d speculate a bit on the subject in case we find out more next week.
So a pretty good episode this week – I still miss the eerie quietness of episode one, but the blood and gore was both fun and disturbing, just like it should be in all good zombie movies. And the only bits that I didn’t understand were Andrea and Amy’s fishing related chatter and whatever Daryl was going on about (fortunately he kept his mouth shut for most of the episode). I’m not sure if Jim’s ominous ‘now I remember what my dream was about’ was meant to be highlighting him as somesort of mildly psychic character – I’m guessing/hoping not as that would be a supernatural twist too far, plus I expect you’d be quite likely to dream about digging graves if you were surrounded by walking corpses all day, and had seen your family get ripped to shreds by them.
What did you all think of the episode, and the series so far?
