Walking Dead Season 2 - The Good, The Bad, and The Ridiculous
Oh boy. Just finished watching The Walking Dead season 2.
The Good:
-LOST style storytelling. Flashbacks, film-like cinematography all work really well.
-Glenn and Maggie storyline. An Asian male and a White woman in a romantic relationship? Is it the year 2190?
-Build up. Lots of great tension and anxiety causing build up.
-They didn’t intend for this to serve as a metaphor, but Shane/The Group is like America. They welcome themselves into various homes (countries) and then tell the people who live there how to run the place (see: America, Japan, Hawai’i, any country in the world, actually).
The Bad:
-I’m not sure if anything can beat how awful season one’s ending was. The whole CDC storyline was an absolute disaster. Why they strayed from the comic book’s storyline I will never understand. But the missing Sophia storyline was pretty rough. Until the last episode. It almost seems like they wrote it just for this one moment in the end.
-If they intended to make a joke out of racism with the T-Dog fever-induced rant, they accomplished that. This was completely unnecessary outside of planting the seed of “they mistreat Glenn.” This is what I call the “King of Queens” example of racism being brought up by a person of color and then it being shot down, criticized to exhaustion leaving the person of color as a wolf-crying idiot. Every sitcom in the history of television always has something like this under the guise of “talking about race.”
The Ridiculous:
-If they intended to make the world’s most infuriating asshole douchebag character in Shane, they met their goal. Hating a character is one thing but when you write a character so obnoxious that one comes close to turning off the TV, you’ve gone too far. It is a wonderful piece of storytelling to have the true enemy of the show be a human and not a zombie but Shane encapsulates so much of the turmoil that it’s just annoying at this point.
-The southern farm machismo from Rick and Shane (mostly Shane). I swear, in scenes where the tension is at its highest, their southern tough guy demeanor just gets so pronounced that it’s distracting. They don’t pull it off well. It’s almost to the point of caricature.
I think The Ridiculous things bother me to the point where I will watch season 3’s premiere to see if it gets better, but I wouldn’t invest in a season pass like I did this time.
