A Devil of a DAREDEVIL (Season 1)

As Netflix has just released the second season of Marvel's DAREDEVIL series; it's probably about time I got around to delivering on my long-promised review of the first. I'd watched most of it in a fairly rapid burst shortly after its release but then, as so often happens, life intruded. I only just got around to seeing the final episode last week.

My pokiness in finishing it certainly shouldn't be taken as any indication of my estimation of its merits. DAREDEVIL was released last spring to almost-universal praise and it earns it. This is a very good piece of television, one of the best Marvel or Marvel-based productions to date. It works as an adaptation and stands up as a very good series in its own right. That isn't to say it's flawless. One of the pitfalls of seeing this particular series through the eyes of a very longtime Daredevil fan is that one is acutely aware of the potential of such a project and of where it fails to live up to it. On that score, the series sometimes hits and sometimes misses.

DAREDEVIL is the story of Matt Murdock, who, as a child, is involved in an accident wherein he's struck by some radioactive gunk that takes his sight but amps up his other senses to superhuman levels. His father, a broken-down boxer, is later killed by gangsters after refusing to take a dive during a fight; Matt grows up, becomes a lawyer as his father wanted but he assumes another identity by night, that of a costumed crimefighter. Daredevil.

This story was adapted to the screen once before, a creative abortion of a feature film from 2003 that certainly did the property no favors. Marvel reacquired the screen rights from 20th Century Fox and produced this series in-house. It was good to see carried over here a heaping helping of the "pulp noir" aesthetic of the book during all of its finer moments and this and the overall quality of the series marked a bit of a comeback for a Marvel Daredevil. At the time it appeared, the comic of the same name had been a mess for years; Mark Waid, its contracted scribe, seemed determined to upend, undo and defecate upon everything that made DD great and unique and had, for nearly four years, been grinding out an overbearingly lighthearted stew of silly, jokey, faux-Silver Agey trash--a "Daredevil" that was still called Daredevil but was otherwise thoroughly unrecognizable. The series wisely steers clear of anything reeking of that particular run. For longtime DD fans, it was good to finally get the character back in a recognizable form and being done well.

This DD is set in a recognizable place as well. When Marvel first announced DAREDEVIL and its other Netflix series were going to be shooting in New York itself, I was pretty skeptical of the decision. Shooting Marvel stuff in New York, where so much of it is set, seems, on the one hand, a dream--something one wishes could always be done--but New York is an extremely expensive place to shoot, needlessly expensive, and my filmmaker bone felt it would probably be better to spend a television budget on recreating the city somewhere much cheaper. It's impossible to argue with these results though. From the waterfront to the rooftops to the view of it all from fancy apartments and expensive restaurants, the city just looks awesome. DAREDEVIL needed even more of it--more broad vistas, more stuff from the street, traffic, people to-ing-and-fro-ing, local color, atmosphere. It isn't enough just to have the characters talk about the city and what they think of it (and there's plenty of that); the series needs to show it, and while DAREDEVIL uses the city well, it doesn't use it enough. Hopefully something future seasons will remedy.

Matt has only just started his nocturnal activities here and his crimefighter persona is still a bit of a work in progress. He's privy to a lot of the ugly things people do to one another, carrying around a lot of anger and at the same time seems afraid of that part of himself, the "devil" in him that makes him want to do very bad things to very bad people. A Catholic, he goes to confession as the series opens and soon strikes up relationship with the priest, Father Lantom, who proves to be an interesting character and counsel as the series moves along.

The entire supporting cast is excellent, not a miss in the batch. When it comes to writing them, the series uses the comic to great advantage. Instead of looking down upon the book and approaching it with the idea of "fixing" it, the series' creators are very respectful and closely port over a lot of what has made the original work for so many years. The characters are strong, their relationships mostly well-played, a terribly watchable tableaux of very human and very likable characters. Some of the more colorful personalities in the Daredevil universe are brought to life with great gusto. Scott Glenn as Matt's ninja-master mentor Stick, Rob Morgan as Turk, low-level hod and Daredevil's frequent informant, Vincent D'Onofrio as archvillain Wilson Fisk, Bob Gunton as his chief money-man Leland Owlsley,[1] Toby Leonard Moore as his well-spoken right-hand man James Wesley. The comic version of Karen Page was a young innocent who worked as secretary for Matt and his law partner Foggy Nelson then, in later years, saw her life take a dark turn into drugs and prostitution. The series version, essayed by the breathtaking Deborah Ann Woll, has her history reversed, her shady future becoming instead a shady past she's trying to escape. In the comic, Ben Urich was a reporter for the New York Daily Bugle who figures out Matt's secret identity then becomes a frequent Daredevil ally; the series reimagines him as a sort of hybrid of the comic Urich and Spider-Man newsman Joe Robertson, giving him a promotion, making him older and changing his race. Vondie Curtis-Hall is rock-solid in the part but near the end of the run, in what's probably the single biggest misstep of the entire series, the writers opt to bump him off. Urich features, often centrally, in a lot of the best stories in the comic--a lot of potential adaptations of great Daredevil lore died with him.

The writing breaks down in a few places. Some sharp dialogue is often made to rub elbows with some significantly less-than-sharp lines. Some arbitrary drama plays out near the end of the season when Matt's law partner Foggy learns of his powers and vigilante activities. Up to this, Matt and Foggy are best pals, thick as thieves going back years, and Foggy becomes way, way too angry upon learning of the DD business. It doesn't really affect him in any meaningful way and he should be as fascinated as he is upset but he treats the matter as if Matt had sex with his wife--absolutely furious and doesn't even want to know the guy anymore.[2] Throughout the series, Wilson Fisk's criminal empire is shown to be massive, pervasive and he's a master of covering his own tracks but toward the end, when Matt manages to find a key witness and get the guy talking, this empire unravels far too easily. What should have been a gradual process taking months or even years and maybe never touching the man at the top at all is relegated to a brief montage in the final episode and ends with Fisk being marched away in cuffs. Should have been done better.

One thing that probably couldn't have been done any better is the appropriately visceral way DAREDEVIL handles its violence. Villain Fisk is a real sadist--nearly beats one of his own men to death in a pointless rage, kills a Russian gangster by slamming the fellow's head in a car door until it comes off, doesn't mind having old ladies killed. DD lacks super strength or speed and doesn't carry around a lot of anti-personnel gadgets; he puts down his opponents the old fashioned way, by beating them until they don't get up anymore. In one spectacular sequence, he shows up to rescue a kidnapped child from a building full of hoods. In a single shot, he goes down a hallway the thugs have staked out, passing from room to room, bashing every one of them to a pulp until he gets to the door at the end, the room in which the child had been stashed. The fight scenes in this first season are excellent, some of the best I've seen in a television production.

The series adopts the noir aesthetic so central to the best Daredevil work. Its darkness is ever-present but not indulged in a silly, juvenile, aren't-we-kewl-to-be-so-"dark" way like MAN OF STEEL (and, by most reports, the just-released BATMAN V. SUPERMAN). A few relatively minor items do, at times, bring it close to that territory. Matt, in the early episodes, walks around looking unkempt and with unshaved beard stubble, the way comic Matt sometimes looks when he's at the depths of a downer. But tv Matt isn't at the depths of a downer at that point and this definitely smacks of a production trying a bit too hard to sell the idea of Dark Character. Thankfully, that bushy look disappears as the series continues. It's also the case that the characters are way too quick to turn to massive amounts of alcohol to deal with their troubles, to a point that it becomes rather silly and feels more like lazy writing. Something to fix in the future. On the other hand, I would have liked to have seen some of the darker thematic elements taken much further, with, among other things, much more Expressionistic cinematography[3] and a more ambiguous wrap-up (as evil that pervasive is never entirely defeated).

There's a lot to like about DAREDEVIL and despite the fact I would do some things quite differently if I was behind it, there isn't a lot to dislike. In an era that so often produces safe, mediocre screen translations of popular comics, it's definitely a keeper and I'm looking forward to taking in season 2.

--j.

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[1]  The comic version of Leland Owlsley is also known as the Owl, a mutant crime-lord. The series mostly ditches the character's comic persona, carrying over only Owlsley's past as a bigshot Wall Street money man. Gunton's ever-acerbic Owlsley is--forgive me--a hoot.

[2] In the comic, Foggy learns Matt is Daredevil only after they've been law partners--and Daredevil had been active and often involved in their lives--for many years. Karen had known of Matt's dual identity for years as well and Foggy is initially angry with her, thinking she must have known Matt was alive when he'd faked his death (a long story). His anger, which was much more justified, doesn't last beyond that initial outburst.

[3] And better-managed cinematography as well. At one point, there's a classic noir moment, two people in an office at night with light coming through the window blinds, but the characters (Karen and Foggy) are having a warm, friendly discussion. This set-up would have been better employed for some of the darker moments that came later but which, paradoxically, often aren't photographed to reflect the mood.

THE WALKING DEAD Takes Twice As Long To Get Half As Far 2.0

If one was writing a TV Guide blurb for "Twice As Far," tonight's installment of THE WALKING DEAD, it could read something like "Idiots randomly crashing into one another." For that matter, that description would be entirely adequate for more eps of TWD than not. I think I'm more forgiving of it at some times than at others. This evening, I didn't feel inclined to grant its perpetual shortcomings much mercy. The filler, the Idiot Plot Syndrome, the random characterizations--this one had it all in spades. Whatever else one may say about it, this was a damn sorry excuse for dramatic television. An aggressive insult to every viewer.

The one feature of TWD against which I've probably raged more than any other is the random characterizations. I'm a firm believer in strong characters who are conceptualized as real, three-dimensional human beings and plots that go where they go because of who those strong characters are. When, as with TWD, characterizations are dictated solely by the plot of the moment, have no internal consistency and are radically changed on a dime then changed again then changed again, one doesn't have characters, just a random mess--stand-ins for the real thing that have no continuity beyond having the same faces and the same names. There's no point in even trying to develop any affinity for such "characters"; if you find something you like, it will be gone when the next storyline comes around, whenever the plot dictates they become someone else entirely.

Daryl is a rare example of a character who was actually developed during the course of TWD, rather than just subjected to this process. In the series' first season, he was just a unidimensional hot-headed asshole caricature. In response to the godawful Sophia storyline, he actually grew and matured into the noble, uber-capable redneck with a heart of gold that quickly made him the most popular character on the show. Whereas there have been many entirely different versions of every other major character, he's pretty much stayed the same since. While every other character on the show has had entirely new personalities grafted on to them over and over again, he's been the rock, the one they haven't touched. When Rick 5.0 appeared and wanted to turn Michonne over to GINO, Daryl was the one who said this was wrong. When Rick 8.0 appeared and was casually plotting against the Alexandrians, Daryl was the one who recognized it was the wrong path to take. That's his role in the show; he's the hero. I like Norman Reedus and I like this aspect of Daryl a lot.

In the current storyline though, he's suddenly getting the same treatment as the rest. It started when Jesus first appeared; Rick had undergone the latest of his random transformations and had suddenly decided it was a good idea to recruit new people to the safe zone while out of the blue, Daryl was suddenly the fellow very skeptical of this, the one who, after Jesus was injured, just wanted to leave the guy laying. This has continued since. Near the beginning of tonight's ep, he's talking to Carol about the people who, earlier in the season, stole his motorcycle. Carol notes that he had saved them. "It's who you are. We're still stuck with that."

"No, we ain't." Daryl replies. "I shoulda' killed 'em."

But no viewer of that ep would have considered that an appropriate response. These were people who had just escaped a dangerous cult and, for understandable reasons, didn't trust anyone. One of them was afflicted with diabetes, a real curse in a post-apocalyptic world and a reason for the others to be particularly defensive. They caused Daryl some inconvenience and at the end, they stole his bike, which wasn't very neighborly, particularly after he'd saved them, but it's hardly a hanging offense. This callous, murderous Daryl who comes to the dumb and inappropriate conclusion that he should have simply killed them is Daryl 2.0--entirely at odds with the Daryl we've known since season 2. His new outlook isn't a consequence of anything he's experienced.

Carol is another who, when the storyline changed, became a different character. To date, I've sort of looked at the new characterization that has been imposed upon her as making her a bit of a throwback to some of the earlier, less appealing Carols but tonight made clear she's definitely Carol 4.0--an all-new version. I really liked Carol 3.0, the sly wisecracker who is always on top of the situation, always with a twinkle in her eye and always ready to do what needs to be done. I'll freely concede this version of Carol had practically no connection to any of her previous incarnations--this was another arbitrary characterization created in the shadow of Z NATION--but it worked. Even when she was wrong, such as when she was plotting with Rick against the Alexandrians, she was a delight to watch.

In the current storyline, that personality has been entirely abandoned.

When, last week, the Saviors captured the new 4.0 model, her apparent panic, which looked at first like a typical Carol 3.0 ruse, turned out to be real. She spent tonight's ep smoking and looking droopy-faced then at the end wrote Tobin a "Dear John" letter. Says she's sorry, she never meant to hurt him, didn't want it to have to end this way--every cliche to which TWD is heir.[1] The big reason she says she's leaving not only Tobin but the safe zone as well is that she just can't kill people on behalf of those she loves anymore. This is entirely inconsistent with every previous version of Carol. Carol 2.0 is the one who, in order to protect everyone else, mercilessly killed two people merely because they got sick. The one who taught children to kill and insisted even the weak ones learn it. Even the much wimpier 1.0 model told Andrea to screw GINO silly then pike him in his sleep. And of course, 3.0 took on the whole army of Wolves and even executed the one Morgan tried to capture. Immediately before the current storyline began, she was willing to try to take down Morgan in order to eliminate even the perceived threat of that last Wolf he'd imprisoned. That's Carol. She does what has to be done because she understand the consequences of not doing it. Now, the new 4.0 appears and writes Tobin to say that if she stays, she'll have to kill on behalf of the others and she just can't bring herself to do that anymore. Meaning she knows there will be trouble but she, one of the few capable ones, is going to leave the others to the mercy of whatever it may be.

Nothing--nothing--has happened to lead Carol to such a radical change of personality. Like Morgan earlier in the season, she's caught the "all life is precious" bug as if it was some airborne disease. As usual, the writers want the story to go a certain way and they just change their "characters" in whatever way is necessary to get it there. To put the matter bluntly, their character assassinations of both Carol and Daryl suck.

When it comes to redshirt characters who have been targeted for death, TWD's usual formula is to suddenly thrust the mark into the spotlight, giving them lots of time and trying, in their final hour, to make the audience care about them before they're put to rest. Tonight, Daryl, Rosita and Denise go off in search of a pharmacy. Denise has never been out in the zombified world and being the closest thing they have to a medical professional--should be a blue shirt instead of a red, btw-- never should be allowed out in it but while the other two don't want to bring her along, they do finally acquiesce, for no other reason than that the writers want them to do so.[2] In the field, Denise proves to be one stupid, potentially fatal screw-up after another. While in the pharmacy, our heroes hear a zombie but it's behind a closed door so no need to worry over it. Denise, who has never fought or killed a zombie in her life, opts to break away from the others without alerting them and go check out the noise. And she opens that door. That time around, she gets lucky enough not to get eaten or to unleash a zombie herd on the others but later, as they're walking home, she comes across a derelict vehicle with a zombie in it. There's a cooler on the car-seat and for no reason at all, she decides there could be something useful in it, a cooler that has obviously been sitting there for years. Daryl and Rosita tell her to forget it and walk on, the experienced hands paying no attention to their amateur charge solely because the writers want things to go that way. Heedless of her experienced comrades, Denise opens the car door, unleashing the zombie and nearly getting herself killed. When it's over, Rosita and Daryl are very disapproving of this course of action and Denise goes into one of TWD's trademark speeches to try to justify it but her random diatribe, which isn't going anywhere anyway, is interrupted with an arrow from the forest mercifully pierces her brain.

The arrow came from Daryl's old crossbow and the fellow wielding it turns out to be the guy who stole his motorcycle. He's now suddenly an utter villain and leading a group of armed, like-minded thugs. He demands Daryl take them back to the safe zone so they can loot it. Daryl 2.0 really, really wishes he'd killed that guy. The thugs have captured Eugene, who had earlier been in the field with Abraham looking for a machine-shop at which Eugene intends to manufacture bullets. Eugene manages to distract them then bites the dick of the bike-stealer, allowing the others to get to their weapons and put the thugs to flight.

Yes, that actually happened. And for a moment on which TWD's writers had imposed some gravity, it was actually pretty funny. Humor is nearly non-existent in the world of TWD but Eugene and Abraham are sometimes given amusing dialogue. This week, they were allowed to go at one another in some brief verbal jiu-jitsu. At one point, Eugene set out to prove his new manliness by piking a zombie and it turned out to be one on which molten metal had, at some point, been poured, encasing its head in an impenetrable coating! Though it looked as if this material was edited in from some entirely different program--*cough* Z NATION *cough*--it was genuinely amusing.

A lot more of this and a lot less of everything else that happened in this ep would have been most welcome. I've been analyzing recent TWD as having entered the "stuck around way too long" seasons. Its bad habits have gotten much worse, it openly mocks its viewers and it has now taken to eating itself, a process that is presently chewing up two of its only good characters, who happen to be two of the only good things left about it. Too bad.

--j.

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[1] This choice is, in itself, an utterly bizarre and arbitrary plot imposition. Carol has no relationship with Tobin to end with a "Dear John" letter. The two have only ever shared maybe 3 or 4 scenes. There were two very awkward attempts at kisses, but no larger relationship has been shown or even hinted. They're essentially strangers but when Carol decides to leave, she writes him and not any of the people with whom she has lived for years.

[2] She argues she knows what meds to choose; when they get to the drug store, they simply opt to take everything, which is obviously what they would have done all along.

Captive in the Same Boat as THE WALKING DEAD

Alicia Witt has done tons of television the last few years but it's television I haven't seen and it was a pleasant surprise to see her on THE WALKING DEAD tonight. "The Same Boat," the ep, was a bottle episode--a few characters on a modest set. We start with an event that happened off camera last week--Carol and Maggie are apprehended by some of the Saviors who weren't at the compound Rick and co. hit. Their captors talk with Rick over walkie-talkie then hole up with their captives, who, after a lot of everyone talking to one another about things that don't matter, eventually escape and kill them all. Basically 15 or 20 minutes of plot needlessly stretched to an hour.

Earlier in the season, uber-confident, wisecracking ass-kicker Carol v. 3.0 was suddenly and arbitrarily devolved to her 2.0 version, a model that was a humorless, depressed fret. Throughout much of this episode, we're even getting glimpses of Carol 1.0. She acts as though she's terrified of the Saviors. Tells them Maggie is pregnant and seems horribly concerned when talking to them that some harm will come to the baby. Even hyperventilates! Throughout the ep, one expects this to eventually be revealed as a clever ruse, psychological manipulation, an effort to make her captors drop their guard. But that moment never really comes. Even when Carol escapes and manages to get her hands on a gun, she's still shaking as if she can barely hold it. Pleads with Alicia Witt's character, tells her to run away so she won't be killed. Nervously grasps a rosary until her hand bleeds.

After our heroines are free, Carol randomly blames herself for their getting captured, even though we see their capture and there was neither anything she could have done about it nor anything for which she could possibly blame herself either. As their capture had played out in the cold opening, Carol shot one of the Saviors who had come out of nowhere and was charging Maggie but she only wounded the guy rather than killing him. The wounded man's companions, who had obviously been creeping up on them, appeared all around them almost instantly. Killing the fellow wouldn't have made any difference at all but Carol insists that if she'd done so, none of this would have happened. It's TWD; angst, even if it's utterly random and nonsensical, is always the order of the day.[1] Carol's recent depression about killing people, something on significant display here as well, is also entirely random, something that was never a problem before.

Maggie, for her part, behaves like an imbecile throughout the ep, needlessly throwing her pregnant self into dangerous situations, even, toward the end, with an armed Carol on hand who could have handled the rough stuff. If one were to examine this rationally, rather than with the soap expectations built into TWD, one would get the distinct impression she really doesn't want to have a child.

By the end, the villains are destroyed and the escaped captives reunited with the larger group. By TWD standards, this wasn't really a bad ep, but considering how rigidly mediocre, needlessly padded and packed with randomness it is, I'm not sure that accounts for much. The brief preview for next week's installment, which makes it look like another slam-on-the-brakes-and-throw-out-the-drag-weights filler ep, makes me ache. Maybe it will defy expectations.

--j.

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[1] The version of Carol I most liked appears to have been sacrificed to the writers' compulsive habit of making the show a dreary slog. It looks like a going-away-miserable party. There aren't enough good things about TWD to so casually eliminate something that actually worked.

For THE WALKING DEAD, It's Not Tomorrow Yet; Looks More Like Yesterday [Updated Below]

I'm fairly certain no one watched tonight's installment of THE WALKING DEAD--I'm sure everyone was watching the Democratic presidential debate over on CNN instead. "Not Tomorrow Yet," the unwatched TWD ep, does have a bit of a parallel with the Democratic National Committee's efforts to minimize voters' exposure to any candidate not named Clinton--both are tales of unmerited hubris on the part of very bad leaders leading to a fall. Beyond that, it becomes less distinct; unlike with the DNC, TWD's characters don't really have a better option.

That isn't to say the latter go about what they do in a wiser manner. Rick has to convince the Alexandrians they have to fight Negan's group of "Saviors," which means he has to make another of TWD's patented speeches. The Saviors are brutal, merciless killers and pirates who try to rule the area with an iron fist but Morgan, that countdown clock still ticking away on his head, wants to negotiate with them instead of attack. Give away the element of surprise and warn them off. That idea doesn't get very far. When Morgan asks Rick if he's sure they can beat the Saviors, Rick inadvertently gets at the dramatic problem at the center of this storyline: "What this group has done, what we've learned, what we've become, all of us, yes, I'm sure."

Rick's group, of course, hasn't proven itself capable of handling much of anything. They tend to be their own worst enemies, people who screw up even the most basic tasks so badly that people die. They do it over and over again and it's impossible to ignore that when the series keeps throwing it in viewers' faces in storyline after storyline. Here, the writers persist in trying to craft a story around the characters having this very high opinion of their own abilities after having crafted a long-running series that refutes this at every turn. Rick and co. don't just hold to this uber-confidence in a vacuum; they do so in spite of everything they've experienced.

The writers are clearly aware of this problem. Tonight, in an effort to buttress the badass-ness of Rick's group, they have one of the Alexandrians tell Carol she does things that scare him. Later, they have one of the Hilltop residents offer the same sentiment to Rick. "The Saviors, they're scary but those pricks got nothing on you." But Rick hadn't done anything to earn that. And the writers then further underscore our heroes' incompetence by having them attack a Savior compound without even a single reconnaissance run. They just go in blind against an enemy of entirely unknown strength, stabbing then shooting and hoping for the best. While blundering around like this, they manage to kill nearly everyone but the ep ends with the tables being turned. Yep, our heroes have underestimated their enemy. Shocking for such a group of pros, right?

It wouldn't be TWD without TWD speeches, so Glenn delivers one to Heath about killing. Tobin, the Alexandrian who finds Carol scary, makes a speech in which he outlines his belief that Carol is the mom of the safe zone.[1] In a scene that appears present only to burn screen-time, Tara talks to Father Gabriel about telling her girlfriend she loved her as a means of covering up something else; Jesus gives it a punchline about her knowing what she's fighting for. Hallelujah!

It's the habit of TWD to cut the pace down to a crawl in the second half of a season, perhaps because the budget runs out, but these last three eps have bucked that trend. Though a big improvement over the rest of this season, they haven't really been any great shakes and this, though the most action-packed, was definitely the least of the three. Fortunately, no one will ever know--they all watched that Democratic debate instead.

--j.

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[1] It's good to see the series remember Carol exists and the pre-title sequence, in which Carol is making and distributing beet-and-acorn cookies, is actually very well done. Carol 4.0 is unfortunately looking more and more like Carol 1.0 here, slipping back into that disposable--and, more troublingly, expendable--non-character she was before.


UPDATE (8 March, 2016) - Something I forgot to mention is that this ep featured one of TWD's magical time-jumps, this one from night to day. This sort of thing is so common on TWD that I've come to ignore it unless it has some impact on the story. This one did though. Rick's plan was to attack the Savior compound in the wee hours of the morning when most would be asleep. There's absolutely no reason to assume there aren't shifts--another reason to conduct a proper recon before attacking--but Rick does and, this being TWD, just gets lucky. His team enters, kills the Saviors in a lightning-fast strike then when they make their way out the back, it's broad daylight, hours of time having passed. They mull around a bit, Heath takes a Savior vehicle and leaves and the rest soon learn the enemy has captured Carol and Maggie. The preview for next week's ep showed the capture itself--the Saviors were able to creep up on them because it was still blackest night. This means the Saviors had Carol and Maggie for hours and no one even knew. In all that time, no one in the main team had communicated with their own checkpoints or vice-versa--checkpoints that presumably had orders for what to do if they don't hear from the main team (come get us us, alert the others, etc.).

WALKING DEAD Unties Some Knots, Ties Others

Sitting here immediately after finishing "Knots Untie," tonight's installment of THE WALKING DEAD, I'm not quite sure if it was good or if it only seems that way by being, in the context of this otherwise spectacularly poor season, something better than godawful. This was definitely an ep that worked better than anything we've seen so far. The rest of the season still haunts it though.

Last week, Rick and Daryl, in some of that standard arbitrary TWD plotting, were suddenly written as entirely different characters in order to allow them to take ninja Jesus back to the safe zone. This week, having again easily escaped their efforts to confine him, he tells our heroes of other human settlements. As he tells it, he's a recruiter sent out by one such group of survivors to find others with which to trade. He offers to take them to his group, show them around, set up diplomatic relations.

The shadow of the rest of the season begins to fall over the ep at this point. Rick and co. know there are at least two other groups of armed and murderous hostiles in the area, one led by someone named Negan. They never ask Jesus about this and when they prepare their diplomatic mission to accompany him home, not only does most of the major characters go along--a very bad idea--but they all pile into a single vehicle, a very bad idea that most recently caused problems only last week.

The writers may have been able to get away with this if they didn't immediately insist on calling attention to the unsoundness of it. Right away, our heroes come across a vehicle that appears to have just crashed. Jesus says it came from his group. Rick immediately suspects a possible ambush and puts Jesus in the same cuffs from which Jesus has already escaped while they check it out. There's no ambush, just some folks who need saving.

Our heroes make their way to Jesus's settlement,[1] which turns out to be fairly substantial but out of ammo. "This is Gregory," Jesus says as he introduces their leader. "He's the one who keeps the trains running on time around here." But as Mussolinis go, Gregory is strictly a dilettante. Bursting with base douchebaggery and sporting an elevator that can't quite make it to the penthouse, he starts by propositioning the married-and-pregnant Maggie. When that doesn't work out, he pretty much loses any further interest in diplomatic relations.

This deadlock is ended by the fortuitous return of a group of couriers. They'd been dispatched by Gregory to pay a mordida to--you guessed it--Negan. Negan had decided he was shorted and had nabbed the brother of one of the couriers, saying he would only release the hostage if the courier killed Gregory. The fellow does manage to stab Gregory in a non-vital area but Rick's group intervenes and after some ass-whuppin', restores order.

Negan, it seems, has been plaguing this community since shortly after it formed. Rick decides Negan is no big threat and, seeing an opportunity, offers to take out the pesky thug in exchange for food. Gregory is made amenable to this. Rick asks one of the couriers if he'll take them to Negan's compound. The guy seems quite reluctant but then agrees and if Rick suspects the fellow may be working for Negan on the side--something he really should suspect--he shows no sign of it.

Hubris is about to get the best of our heroes and this is the part of the story over which the rest of this season and, indeed, the entire series to date, hangs most heavily. The current storyline is adapted from the comic on which the series is based. By the time it rolled around in the book, our heroes were a smart, lean, mean battle-hardened group of professional survivors--real badasses who had good reason to believe they could handle whatever was thrown at them. Their television counterparts have, since they arrived at the safe zone, spent an inordinate amount of time talking about what badasses they are but whenever it comes time to put that to the test, they're written as complete idiots whose absurdly ill-conceived plans inevitably lead to death and disaster. Ten of the twelve eps of this season were consumed by dealing with the bloody consequences of Rick's insanely cretinous decision to release that quarry full of zombies in spitting distance of home instead of simply reinforcing the quarry--something that could have been done in literally minutes--and/or destroying the creatures on the site--something that could have been accomplished by merely setting a few fires. Tonight, Daryl made it sound as if reducing Negan's tough-talking bikers to a greasy spot on the highway had been child's play, whereas the way the scene had actually played out, Daryl, Sasha and Abraham had been caught because they'd stupidly stopped for a gang of armed thugs on motorcycles while, themselves, driving a truck that could have ground said gang to powder and they only made it out of that encounter alive because the leader of the bikers made a stupid mistake. Tonight, none of the characters express any real doubt about their ability to handle whatever Negan can throw at them. This uber-confidence is an  utterly arbitrary contrivance of the writers. It isn't derived from any of the characters' experience and, in fact, stands in bold contradiction to all of that experience. If they'd ever been shown as being remotely capable of handling much of anything, TWD may have been able to get away with grafting this attitude on to them. When the hubris leading to a fall is so entirely unearned, it doesn't allow for much of a story. It's just ends up being the 10,000th time a bunch of dumbasses yet again do something stupid that yet again leads to disaster.

That aside--and that's really the concern of future eps[2]--"Knots Untie" moves well, it has an amusing, if somewhat heavy-handed, subplot about Abraham's romantic confusion (keep Rosita or go for Sasha?), and Maggie finally gets something to do besides cry over Glenn. Overall, its easily the best ep of this season. It doesn't have to do very much to earn that distinction though, and it certainly can't stand up to any of this series' best.

--j.

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[1] Upon arriving, Rick drives their RV into a rather nasty mud-bog and gets stuck. There's no way he could miss it and it's easily avoidable but he drives right into it.

[2] TWD tends to slam on the brakes and throw out the drag-weights in the second half of the season. This wasn't at all a slow ep but given the record, I'm wondering if we'll even see Negan before the season ender.

THE WALKING DEAD's New World Order Feels Pretty Old [Updated Below]

"The New World," tonight's installment of THE WALKING DEAD, featured a pair of parallel stories that, in more sensitive hands, could have been outright great. In the hands of TWD's creators, they proved to be dull, dumb, uninteresting and sappy.

Weeks have passed since the previous ep and the Alexandrian safe zone has been cleaned up, repaired and looks just as it did before the chaos of this season had occurred (including being largely devoid of any Alexandrians). Rick and Daryl are going on a supply run. The inclusion of Rick in this adventure seems very arbitrary--while Daryl has made regular treks into the outside world since arriving in town, we've never seen Rick do so. Rick is feeling optimistic and--wouldn't you know it?--at the first place they stop, they find a big truck loaded with food and supplies. And then at their next stop, they immediately lose it. Trying to retrieve a Coke from a machine, our heroes encounter a guy who looks like a popular artistic depiction of Jesus and even goes by the name. Jesus, it turns out, has ninja skills and confounding our heroes with a Bugs Bunny gag, easily jacks the truck. This starts a cat-and-mouse chase that runs for most of the rest of the ep.

If TWD wasn't so uncomfortable with full-bodied humor, this could have been an amusing tale. The ep makes a few stabs at jokes but it mostly just ends up looking like the usual overbearing TWD. Jesus proves quite the adversary. He can boost one's keys right out of one's pocket, fights like a human hurricane and when he's trussed up and left by the side of the road, he frees himself with the speed of thought. When, ultimately, Jesus is injured, the writers decide to have Rick act as though he's learned absolutely nothing and opt to tie up the slippery ninja and cart the fellow back to the safe zone for medical attention. Rick had previously denied to Jesus that he and Daryl had any camp--a wise safety measure--but as he's driving home with Jesus apparently unconscious in the back seat, he's blabbering on and on about the safe zone, all the people in it, etc. Good job, Rick. In context, our heroes are aware of the existence of at least two groups of armed hostiles somewhere in the area. Earlier in the season, the Wolves infiltrated the town and killed large numbers of people. The bikers from last week's ep announced they were going to take everything Daryl and co. had then force Daryl to drive them back to his camp where it, too, would be theirs. Straight pirates who make a joke of killing. Rick notes that Jesus is clean and has a well-trimmed beard, evidence that he's been living somewhere, not just roaming the bush. So Rick has a persistent, thieving ninja they can't contain who obviously comes from some other camp, he knows two group of hostiles are out there somewhere and in this context, he decides to take Jesus back to town.[1]

The other story of the evening involves Spencer hiking around in the forest outside the walls of the town on some mysterious mission. Michonne sees him and follows him. He's carrying a shovel but won't tell her why he out there. After much running-time is eaten up (following both Spencer/Michonne and Carl and Enid who are also in the forest), it's revealed that Spencer is hunting for the zombie of his mother Deanna. He thought he'd caught a glimpse of her in the melee from the previous episode. Deanna really shouldn't be a zombie or wandering around like this; when last seen, a large number of the creatures were closing in on her inside a house. That many would have torn her to pieces and if she'd manage to close the door and keep them out, she would have been trapped inside. The creators knew, when they put together that earlier scene that they were going to do this story two eps later. Mark down their handling of it to poor staging. Carl finds zombie Deanna and covertly leads her to Spencer, who kills the critter and buries it.

Again, a basic story that, handled with some sensitivity, could have probably been whipped into a haunting little subplot. Here, it's just flat and entirely uninteresting. The series writers had done nothing to give it any emotional impact. Offered as it is, it just sits there, cold, lifeless, uninteresting and played out via TWD's usual godawful soap dialogue. One watches it wishing the focus would move to something more interesting.

By the end of the ep, Rick and Michonne have a romantic interlude. Their snoozing in its aftermath is interrupted by ninja Jesus, who again easily escapes being tied up and locked up and seems to have something to tell them. Readers of the comic know where that's going. Everyone else will just have to stay turned.

"The New World" comes after a run of absolutely godawful eps this season and while its wasted potential runs through its every frame, it's a marginal step up from what we've been getting simply by virtue of it's being far less an active insult to viewers. It's more a run-of-the-mill mediocrity. If the past is any precedent, the next six eps are going to be very slow-going.

--j.

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[1] I've frequently written about how the soap melodrama format of TWD means you don't really have "characters," just figures who are arbitrarily changed at every turn to suit temporary plot needs. This makes any assertion that the "characters" are acting out-of-character a tricky charge but this was Rick acting as out-of-character as anyone on TWD can be said to be out-of-character. I doubt this is the beginning of a new Rick; I think it's probably just another arbitrary alteration made in the service of a poorly constructed plot.


UPDATE (23 Feb.) - Lebeau, over at Le Blog, has offered a more extensive deconstruction of this ep than I did above and his piece is a good compliment to my own. He goes into more detail about the contrived nature of the ep, how Daryl and Rick abandon their car for an entirely untested truck, how this was done solely so that Jesus could later swipe their truck and they'd be forced to pursue on foot, how Jesus ends up back at the safe zone merely because the writers want him there and fundamentally alter Rick's character in order to accomplish this. Worth a read.

On an unrelated matter, I'll also note that Michonne's hook-up with Rick at the end of the ep doesn't look good for her future. But if the writers are planning her demise, it will be apparent long before it happens.

THE WALKING DEAD Bites, Chews, Swallows, Repeats

If one is feeling overly charitable, one could suggest that "No Way Out," tonight's midseason opener for THE WALKING DEAD, should have been November's midseason ender but TWD hasn't really done much to earn any charity, "No Way Out" didn't either and the truth is that this season has been so watered down that this, its 9th episode, could, in more competent hands, have been its 3rd or 4th with no loss of substance. The Mazzara era of TWD was notorious for this sort of terminal underwriting but this present season is, with regard to this, probably the worst TWD has ever been.

The ep began with a ludicrously implausible scene in which Daryl, Sasha and Abraham encounter a small group of armed thugs on motorcycles. Daryl is driving a gas tanker that could utterly grind to powder any motorcycle-mounted thugs looking to block his path but solely because the writers want to convey some information to us, he instead stops. The leader of the thugs does some screentime-consuming tough-guy posturing. After announcing his intention to take from our heroes everything they have, he disarms them by stepping, unarmed, between them and his own men. Daryl or any of the others could have simply trained their guns on him at that point and walked away with him as a hostage but the writers have something else in mind, so we get more talk, talk, talking, posturing and then a pretty funny, if somewhat expected, end to the scene.[1]

Next, we're back in the Alexandrian safe zone which isn't safe anymore. It's been overrun by zombies and Rick and his group, employing the zombie-gut camouflage trick the writers sometimes allow them to remember, are walking among them. We get, in fact, an uninterrupted two minutes of just shots of Rick and co. walking among them. "It's going to be one of those," I thought with a sigh. And it was; we gets lots and lots more of those shots before the ep is through. Rick stops everyone for an impromptu strategy session right in the middle of a street filled with the walking dead. Many clichés are exchanged. The zombies, perhaps regular TWD viewers, are obviously used to it and pay it no mind. The mighty zombie-gut camouflage trick is impenetrable and watching this, one can't help but think of all the times our heroes could have used it but instead developed amnesia because the writers wanted the plot to go a different way.

And just when one is thinking such thoughts, the writers pull a switcheroo. Before the end of the first half of this season, Sam, Jessie's worthless younger brat, had been absolutely terrified of the zombies. He spent the previous ep hiding in his bedroom listening to Tiny Tim over and over again. Then when he had to be covered in stinking zombie goo and rub elbows with a few hundred of the creatures, he didn't seem to have much of a problem with it at all. During Rick's strategy session, he refuses to go with Father Gabriel and take refuge in the church. "I'm not leaving you," he says to his mother with as much steely-eyed determination as one can manage for such an awful, worn-out line. But as he continues to wander among the dead, fear randomly overtakes him and the dead suddenly and just as randomly develop the ability to see through that camouflage, jump him and eat him, starting a chain reaction that ends with Jessie and both her sons--all covered in zombie guts--being similarly eaten.

If one ignores the fact that, to accomplish this, the writers blatantly violated a rule that has run the entire length of the series and that they had reinforced only minutes earlier, these deaths occur without prior ceremony and given how unusual that is for TWD, I suppose that's worthy of some little bit of praise but the deaths also mean that all the running-time spent establishing these characters throughout this season joins almost everything else this season in the filler column. The death of the whole family feels like the writers just got tired of writing about them and, hey, TWD needs shocking deaths--why else would anyone watch?

The ep is full of the standard TWD speeches in place of dialogue. Glenn and Enid trade speeches. Carol and Morgan, whose conflict goes nowhere, trade speeches. Even Father Gabriel gets in on it at one point. We can do this. God will give us courage. Those you loved and lost live on through you. Blah, blah, blah--it's just garbage from every other soap or bad movie you've ever seen and it all just runs together.

Toward the end, Rick goes on a zombie-killing rampage and the other Alexandrians, inspired by his example, take to the streets to battle the dead, at which point the endless shots of zombies wandering around are replaced by endless shots of everyone killing zombies, folding, eventually, into an embarrassingly bad montage of zombie-killing--poorly-lit people in a studio in front of a bad green screen in close up quick cuts making silly, grunty battle faces as they whack away at the camera and are splattered with fake blood.

In the midst of this, Daryl, Sasha and Abraham show up with the gas tanker. At that point, all that is necessary to rid the safe zone of its zombie problem is for one of them to lay down on the horn for a moment then slowly drive away with the dead following along but Daryl comes up with a more visual solution. He pours the rare and precious gasoline in the truck into a storm drain and sets it ablaze. Worse, he's apparently short of matches or the lighter he has always carried and opts to ignite it with a rocket launcher. Daryl had just encountered a contingent of armed hostiles from a larger group of same. That rocket may have come in handy if that group of hostiles had shown up at the safe zone gates the way GINO turned up at the prison in season 4 but no one on TWD ever learns anything and the writers have survivalist Daryle judge it more important to have a blazing explosion to cap off the midseason opener. And in another violation of the series' rules, the writers have the dead walk right into the blaze and be consumed by it. Though it doesn't make a lick of sense, fire has always attracted the zombies of TWD but they've never walked into it. If they'll do that, imagine how simple it would have been to resolve the zombies-in-the-quarry situation on which this season has been built. Or any situation in the entire run of the series involving large numbers of zombies. Or think on how in hell zombies who behave in this way would have ever overrun the world in the first place. Or, if you're a TWD fan, don't.

The ending sees Rick making another speech over the fallen Carl, who was earlier shot in the eye. Coral, you just gotta' live through this and see this peachy new world we're a' gonna' build, as his voice cracks and he tears up. Connoisseurs of bad melodrama know what's coming next; we get the slow camera pan down to Coral's limp hand as it slowly but surely begins to move and grip his father's hand. Cue the violin music.

Isn't that sweet?

No, it's just THE WALKING DEAD. Give it a shot of insulin.

--j.

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[1] An end that, except for the "somewhat expected" part, is a brand of humor straight out of Z NATION and heretofore entirely unknown to TWD.