WALKING DEAD Alone, But Still Smilin'

This week was a bit of a middling ep of THE WALKING DEAD. "Alone" is a big step down from last week and had several problems but still enough noteworthy moments to keep them from entirely overwhelming the proceedings.

The ep threw me a curveball with its opening, a series of events I read as a great little joke aimed at Mazzara-era TWD. The cold opening is excellent, a music-video flashback showing how Bob, his previous companions having been wiped out in some conflagration, wandered aimlessly through a world gone dead before being found by the prison group. It's a terrific, bleak little minimalist essay on a fellow who has been through hell and seems to have lost everything, including any understanding of why he's bothering to continue walking around breathing. Bob has, to date, been a bit of a background character, and whenever such a character was given a prominent spotlight on Mazzara-era TWD it meant he'd be toast before the ep ended. After this flashback, focus shifts back to the present, and Bob, Maggie, and Sasha are huddled in a bank of fog fighting off zombies as they appear. It's a pretty good sequence. For a moment, it seems as if our heroes will be overwhelmed, and almost immediately Bob is bitten, which, of course, is certain death. When the fighting is over and he inspects himself, though, it turns out the zombie got only a mouthful of the bandage covering a gunshot wound he received at the prison. Bob makes it through this evening's episode, smiling most of the way. And yes, that was worth the laugh I offered it.

I was pleased to see that, after being given a bit of a spotlight in the last ep, Beth didn't die this week. Score another for the Gimple gang. She even had a few more good moments with Daryl, with whom she's growing closer.[1] There was a great horror-movie sequence wherein an unseen assailant apparently brings a gaggle of zombies to the door of the funeral home where the two are staying. With the creatures virtually piling over one another to get at him, Daryl leads them to the basement and has to fight them off with only a pair of embalming tables separating him from the horde. He manages to escape, but someone--probably whoever brought the dead there--has kidnapped Beth and driven away. Beth may not make it yet!

As all of this indicates, this was yet another episode featuring various groups of characters wandering the countryside in the wake of the fall of the prison, the fifth such ep so far. It featured an unnecessary amount of filler. Nowhere near as bad as usual, but the pace could have used some real tightening, particularly in the sequences featuring Bob, Maggie, and Sasha, which have been overly repetitive (and not only in this ep).

While the wanderings of the characters give viewers a look at more of the world in which the series is set--something TWD has needed for a long time--it's also the case that the longer they wander, the more rankling is the Idiot Plot issue. On Mazzara's TWD, every bit of plot progression was made entirely dependent upon every character being a complete idiot at all times, and this is yet another example of it. "Too Far Gone" established that the prison group did, in fact, have a rendezvous point in case anything went wrong--it's impossible to imagine people in that situation wouldn't. But there's been no mention of it since. Tonight, Maggie and co. were looking for Glenn, not by trekking to any planned rendezvous but by making ever-widening circles away from the prison. Worse, the last several eps have set most of the major characters to following a series of signs along the railroad promising safe haven at the end of the line. They're doing this instead of looking for one another. Tyreese, who is with Carol and the children, is following the tracks instead of looking for his sister. Sasha, traveling with Maggie and Bob, hasn't done anything to try to find her brother,[2] and has wagged in disapproval of Maggie's efforts to find Glenn. While Maggie has searched for Glenn, she's shown no interest at all in finding her own sister, and, tonight, gave up the search for Glenn too, choosing to follow the tracks and mark the signs with messages to him. Beth hasn't looked for her sister. Daryl, who is with her and for whom the group was the closest thing he'd ever had to a real family, hasn't looked for anyone either--he just assumes they're dead. He and Michonne would be the most capable in tracking down the others; she, with Rick and Carl, is, instead, just following the railroad. The characters walking the tracks instead of looking for one another have expressed the belief that they'll probably find any of the others who are still alive at the promised sanctuary, a completely ridiculous assumption with no in-story rationale that has been inserted solely because the writers want the characters to follow that railroad to whatever awaits them at the end.

The other weakness in "Alone" is the silly melodrama that accompanied the Bob/Sasha/Maggie plot. Sasha, for no real reason than to provide a plot, suddenly wants to stop and find a new place to live rather than following the tracks to their terminus. Maggie, hearing Sasha's plans, abandons her companions in the night, intent on following the railroad herself, a completely ridiculous and unnecessarily dangerous decision--traveling together is obviously safer, and if the other two want to stop somewhere, Maggie could continue from there alone if she liked. But the Theme of the evening, reflected in the ep's title, is that Maggie just can't do it alone, so she leaves only to be reunited with Sasha later, to whom she offers up some of TWD's trademark cliché-ridden anti-naturalistic speechifying about how she just can't do this on her own. The trio are reunited. Everyone smiles. Isn't that sweet?

So tonight is, like so many eps this season, somewhat a mixed bag. Not a bad show by TWD's ridiculously low standards, and with some worthy moments, but still indicative of a series mired in some unfortunate habits and still falling well short of its potential.

--j.

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[1] They find an embalming room where zombies who have died have been stretched out and professionally prepared for burial, a sign that someone, whoever managed the funeral home, still thought they were worthy of that respect. It's a small touch, but of the kind TWD needs, and I liked it. The moments spent with Beth and Daryl have taken on a vague atmosphere of wandering souls trying to find, in a world of horrors, some semblance of a good life, one worth the living. I like this very much.

[2] Tonight, the writers inserted a hint of an explanation, that Sasha is afraid to know if Tyreese is alive or dead--the sort of "explanation" that only flies on bad soap melodramas.

From the Past, the Future

"To me, the great hope is that, now, these little 8mm. video recorders and stuff are coming out, some, just, people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. Suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna' be the new Mozart, y'know, and make a beautiful film with her little father's camera-corder, and for once the so-called 'professionalism' about movies will be destroyed forever, y'know, and it will really become an artform. That's my opinion."
--Francis Ford Coppola, from the documentary "Hearts of Darkness," 1991

Q - What changes do you foresee in the moviemaking of the future?
A - It will be so changed you can't imagine how different it will be. The satellite communications, where the whole world can watch something at the same time--this is just the little baby of what there will be. There will be audiences linked together in space, other planets... And movies will be available to each person's exact emotions and needs, whatever he wants available at that moment, instantly created--stories, biographies, pornography. There will be five hundred billion movies available. It will be just great for movie-makers!
--Sam Fuller, interviewed by Lee Server in "Film is a Battleground," 1994

WALKING DEAD Still Kicking

Last week, the only thing some of you fear more than a new episode of THE WALKING DEAD came to pass: an episode of THE WALKING DEAD without an accompanying article by me! My email and private messages veritably overfloweth with concern. I appreciate the response, and the many kind words do wonders for my ego--I thank you all. I'm sort of a captive audience for TWD, and the weekly articles when it's in season have, at various times, become very much a discipline for me, something I do to prove I can do it, but test of iron will or no, I don't write about something when I don't feel I have anything interesting to say about it.

That's what happened last week. I watched the episode ("Claimed"). It featured a very good suspense sequence wherein a battered, unarmed Rick was trying to escape detection by a gang of faceless marauders who decided to hole up in the same house in which he was resting. There were a few other noteworthy moments, mostly small. By TWD standards, it was, if for the suspense sequence alone, a pretty good ep. I just found, at the end of it, that I didn't have anything to say about it. Response to my last three TWD articles has been way down, I've been working toward a much more interesting series of articles on the recent BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series, and I just took a break. And yes, it was with an eye toward maybe leaving the TWD subject for good.

Just when I thought I was out...

Given the amount of grief I've given TWD over the years, there's simply no way I can forgo some remarks on tonight's offering. The writer of record for "Still" is Angela Kang. Prior to this season, she'd been one of the weakest links in a whole string of weak links that made up the TWD writing staff--some of the worst of the worst of the inanity that was TWD season 2 and 3 went out under her name. Seeing it affixed to an upcoming ep, one expected less than nothing from it, and no matter how low one set one's expectations, the ep still managed to be utterly underwhelming. From her output this season, one can only conclude she was either being totally smothered by then-showrunner Glen Mazzara, is presently under the heavy influence of current showrunner Scott Gimple, has seriously come into her own as a writer, and/or just started winning a string of bets she's previously lost. Whatever the case may be, she authored, earlier this season, "Infected," easily one of the best episodes of TWD since the 1st season, and tonight, she's done it again. "Still" is an excellent ep, perhaps the single best ep of this uneven season, which makes it one of the best TWD has ever done.

Kang brought her A-game again, all the strengths of Gimple's "reform" TWD, very few of its weaknesses, and even less of the Mazzara-era detritus that has so frustratingly clung to the series this season. Daryl and Beth are still on the run in the aftermath of the fall of the prison. The ep begins with an excellent suspense piece in which, pursued by the dead through the night, they have to hide in the trunk of the remains of a car until the herd passes. The next day, Beth decides she needs a drink. Not just any drink. Her father, the ex-drunk, disapproved of liquor and she's never touched the stuff. Now he's dead, the world looks bleak, and she's after her first taste.

And that's the story, Beth and Daryl crossing the zombie-infested countryside in search of some booze. It's a character-piece, something TWD, lost in soap melodrama-ism, virtually never attempts and at which it even more rarely succeeds. Beth has been a virtual non-entity for most of TWD's run, the girl in the background who watches the baby and sometimes sings a song. Her only real moment in the sun came in a season 2 ep in which she attempted suicide--a tale, like most of season 2, that is best forgotten. Tonight put a little flesh on her bones, both good and bad, and finally gave Daryl something to do--for perhaps the single most popular character on the show, he's surprisingly been quite sparsely featured this season. The ending of the evening's proceedings was nothing short of epic--for the first time since TWD began, it made me want to stand and applaud. This is what TWD should be.[*]

My one serious reservation about the ep may not turn out to be a reservation at all. While she chattered away at a frequently unresponsive Daryl, Beth seemed to be speaking in metatextual fashion to the viewing audience, repeatedly trying to justify her presence in the series. As I've so often complained here, TWD, under Mazzara, made a terrible cliché of telegraphing character deaths. It seems like the only time a TWD redshirt can get any camera-time is on the verge of their death. If this showcase on Beth turns out to be merely a set-up for her death, it will cheapen and ruin the impression left by "Still." Like the other good eps of this season, it should chart the future of TWD, not be reduced to a cheap stunt reflective only of previous bad habits.

Time will tell which it will be.

--j.

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[*] I've repeatedly argued TWD's creative team should learn to go with what works and not worry about servicing the big, pretentious Theme around which they've crafted much of their season. Tonight's ep was a good example both of doing so and of the benefits of the approach.

WALKING DEAD: Context, Content, Comics & a Melodrama Problem Briefly Revisited

This morning, I was perusing the IMDb's Walking Dead board and came across an exchange in which a poster had objected to a scene in the recent episode "After" and was met with the objection that the scene in question had been taken directly from the comics. This led me to chime in with some remarks on the exchange that ended up running a bit long. A little later, reader JerryK. wrote me and suggested they'd be worth reproducing here. They cover some familiar ground for readers of this blog, but I don't have anything to do at the moment, and what I'd written is sort of an extension of my piece on TWD's melodrama problem, as well as some other thoughts I've offered here over time, so I thought I'd go ahead and adapt it into an article as Jerry suggested. One that may seem a bit less focused than usual for me, but it wasn't conceived as a blog article, so I'll apologize for any such lack of focus in advance:

The television version of THE WALKING DEAD sometimes replicates scenes from the vastly superior TWD comic. One of the big problems with how it goes about doing so is that, typically, the scenes are entirely stripped of the context that, in the comic, gave them their meaning and their power. The comic features consistent, conceptually strong characters who drive the plot, whereas the show is approached by its writers as a soap melodrama, a species wherein plot dictates characterization. As I've written here in the past,

"Soap melodrama takes all of the potentially problematic elements of the [standard] melodrama and cranks them up to 11. It eschews reason, subtlety, nuance, understatement and intelligent, adult behavior, and aims, instead, at provoking emotional reactions through simplistic and sensationalistic narratives centered around highly emotional themes, played out via exaggerated, non-naturalistic, emotion-laden behavior. This is the level on which it tries to engage its viewers."

It's a lowest-common-denominator genre that wallows in the overly familiar and in which everything is constructed around trying to involve the viewer solely via that trite emotionalism. "Characters," in the genre, are, like everything else, made subordinate to this goal, and characterizations are arbitrarily changed, often radically, to serve this end.

Here's how this works in practice: When, back in "Sick," Hershel lost his leg, the group was almost entirely out of medical supplies. They immediately recognized the need to find the prison infirmary, which would have those crucial supplies, if Hershel is to have any chance of surviving, then no one did anything toward that end. Instead, half the group went off to pursue the terribly pressing task of finding the former prisoners a place to sleep while the women hovered around Hershel making long faces and creating an "isn't this a sad, tragic thing?" atmosphere. No one asks the prisoners about the infirmary. Hershel's own daughters didn't go in search of it nor do they demand any action toward finding it. Instead, Maggie does a weepy, soap opera scene wherein she tearfully tells Hershel it's o.k. to die. Only Carl even bothers to look for the supplies, off camera on on his own initiative, and his reward is that he's berated for his actions by his mother. This is soap melodrama. It's aimed at servicing a particular viewer demographic, those who want to weep along with Maggie, but its absolutely brainless and insulting to anyone who gives it any thought at all. And when the writers decide they want to invoke another familiar emotion, the characterizations completely change. Compare Maggie's weepy, totally resigned attitude in "Sick"--she's was content to just sit there and cry and let her father die rather than do anything to help him live--to her steely, rock-solid determination, in this week's ep, to find Glenn, whatever it takes, even if she had to do it alone and fight her way through every zombie on Earth. Both of the characters in these episodes are played by Lauren Cohan, both are named Maggie and both are supposed to be the same person but in soap melodrama, two different episodes looking to involve the viewers via two different emotional responses = two entirely different characters.

It has long been my contention that this approach is fundamentally incompatible with TWD, which is, in comic form, an open-ended zombie movie that has always had as a central feature a character-study of the long-term effects of a zombified world on a group of people and the society they form. Obviously, you can't have a character study if you don't have characters.

The tv series doesn't adapt the comic--it pillages it like a group of Vandal raiders. When they drop in moments from the comic, the context that, in the comic, gave those scenes their meaning and power, is usually gone because everything leading up to them has been changed. When, in the comic, Michonne took the extraordinary step of leaving the larger group making its escape from Woodbury and returning to the Governor's apartment, she had a very good reason for it; he had sexually tortured her on repeated occasions and she was out for revenge. When she does the same on tv, it's essentially a random act--it's insanely dangerous and there's no motive for it at all. The series was just pillaging a moment from the comic, absent the context that gave it meaning. A little later, the series writers give her a motive--she tells Andrea she want back in order to expose GINO as a means of hurting Andrea for choosing to stay in Woodbury! Michonne as insanely petty soap opera Angry Black Woman.

In a big melodramatic moment in last week's ep, Carl berates Rick for his ineffectiveness as a leader. It's a mirror of a similar scene in the comic but in the comic, Rick is a good leader and Carl is a child--much younger than on tv. His judgment that Rick can't protect anyone is patently unfair, a product of a child's hurt and frustration, and he realizes it almost immediately and backs away from it. On tv, Rick is a comically incompetent clown whose weakness and idiocy routinely get people killed and Carl, much older, is offering up a much more thoughtful and dead-on critique of his father's abilities. When tv Carl does the same flip-flop as comic Carl, there is, hidden in the melodrama, some unfortunate metatextual content; the writers presenting a legitimate critique of their work--their awful representation of Rick--then playing at "refuting" it. Or, more to the point, juvenilely shooting spitballs at it. Suggesting it isn't valid and refusing to address it. This isn't the first time TWD's writers have done this and it can be seen as a side issue but as one who has strongly criticized the writers' handling of Rick, knows that criticism to be valid and considers prideful idiocy to be much worse than plain idiocy, I'll concede it rankles.

This season of TWD is, for the first time in ages, divided on the soap melodrama approach. Even if he doesn't always follow through, current showrunner Scott Gimple seems to understand the value of strong characterization, the kind that approach renders impossible. That creates a pole that at least draws the series away, to some degree, from that unfortunate genre. It would nice to see this become an even more prominent feature of the series. His TWD has, unfortunately, displayed plenty of the other sins of the genre; even this week's ep, which, overall, wasn't bad by TWD standards, was plagued by soap-ist sloppiness and inanities. I've been accused of going far too easy on the season in my own reviews, even as I've outlined its many problems. Maybe I have. I want TWD to be good; I always have. I don't think I've allowed this to cloud my judgment of what it is.

--j.

Inmates Running THE WALKING DEAD

And, in what's becoming the pattern for this season, THE WALKING DEAD bounces back from yet another lackluster episode last week to offer up a much more solid entry tonight. "Inmates" picks up the pace and the trail of most of TWD's other major characters in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the prison.

The ep kicks off with Daryl and Beth running for their lives through a forest filled with zombies. A voiceover accompanies the events, Beth reading an entry from her diary from the time the group first moved into the prison. Through this juxtaposition, the hope for a new life once represented by the prison is contrasted with the present horror of being once again forced out into the zombified world. TWD has a bad habit of killing off a redshirt then having the other characters rhapsodize, after the fact, over what a great guy the deceased had been and how much he'd meant to everyone, and I've certainly criticized this for the lazy hackwork it is; if, while those characters were still alive, the writers had spent a few minutes making them interesting and making us care about them, there would be no need to come in, after the fact, and try to convince us in this way. Beth's voiceover about the prison could be seen as another variation on this phenomenon; the prison, throughout season 3 (the timeframe when Beth would have been writing those words) had been presented as a dark, filthy, claustrophobic shit-hole, not--as should have been the case--something that would engender a sense of hope. Still, even if it contradicts what we were shown (yet another example of showrunner Scott Gimple trying to overwrite his unfortunate predecessor), the voiceover isn't a bad idea. Far from perfect in its execution, admittedly; it isn't particularly well-written, and, worse, there's no follow-through--it's entirely abandoned after the ep moves away from Beth and Daryl and on to the other characters. It's worth a half-credit, in my book, though. Beth is shown, at one point, using the pages of that diary for kindling for a camp fire, which I thought was a nice touch.

In the midseason finale, it was established that the characters had a rendezvous point in the event of an emergency that forced them from the prison. It was a relatively minor factoid, but it was such a fundamental break with Mazzara-era TWD's refusal to deal with any reasonable survival matters that I highlighted it in my review of the ep, and gave it a minor thumbs up. Unfortunately, everyone in the last two episodes seems to have forgotten all about it. No one heads toward any rendezvous point, no one mentions it, no one has any idea where anyone else might be; they all just sort of wander around looking for one another, trying to pick up one another's respective trails. A pretty serious--and disappointing--continuity error.

Not the only one featured in tonight's ep. When, in the battle over the prison, Mika and her creepy sister Lizzie saved Tyreese and fled, they were toting firearms and ammo. Tonight, for the sake of plot convenience, these were made to disappear, downgraded merely to knives. Something else that pretty much falls into this category is what happened with Glenn. In the midseason finale, most of the prison population was evacuated on a bus. Glenn, still recovering from a serious illness and barely even able to stand, was on it. When Maggie went to look for her sister, he wanted to get off the bus and follow her but was too weak. Moments later, the bus pulled away. Tonight, he inexplicably wakes up deep inside the ruins of the now-zombie-overrun prison. Not necessarily impossible and so perhaps not technically a continuity error, but a big enough leap that it isn't unfairly tagged as such.

It's a bit of a crime that the "next week on the Walking Dead" preview at the end of the previous ep gave away the fact that Glenn had survived. Tonight, Maggie, dragging Sasha and Bob along, went off in a desperate search for him. With the established rendezvous point having apparently departed their minds entirely, they merely follow the direction the bus left the prison, and very shortly come across it, stopped in the middle of the road. It didn't get very far, and somehow, in a very short drive, everyone in it--it's still sealed--ended up either zombified or zombie-chow. Setting aside the obvious impossibility of this (it was done solely to get rid of the peripheral characters in as quick a way as possible), the sequence wherein Maggie and co. clean out the bus in an effort to discover if Glenn is among the dead is one of the best directed and best edited sequences in the entire history of TWD. It's as taut as a zip-line right to the last second, and it ends in a commercial break without resolving the question for the viewer! Only when the break ends do we see that Glenn is alive and back at the prison. Without the knowledge that Glenn had survived, it would have been an even more powerful sequence, but it works remarkably well in any case.

In a welcome development, Carol is back in the picture tonight, coming to the rescue of Lizzie and Mika while Tyreese was away helping another band of survivors fight off a zombie attack. Tyreese, who doesn't yet know it was Carol who killed Karen,[1] is delighted to see her. She's less than forthcoming about where she's been and how she came to be on their trail. The last dying member of the group Tyreese had tried to save gives them a tip--a promised safe-haven to be found along a railroad line. Following it a short distance, they find a makeshift sign promising the same, and, with no more apparent memory of any rendezvous point than anyone else, they begin to follow the line.[2]

Glenn, having awakened in the prison, grabs a big bag worth of supplies, dons his riot gear and, in the process of fighting his way through the zombie hordes outside, runs across Tara, sitting alone in a fenced-in area, sick with regret over having helped destroy the place.[3] She reluctantly teams up with him and they make their way out of the compound and to the open road. They have a bit of a brawl with some zombies, which proves too much of an exertion for Glenn--he collapses while Tara fusses over him, repeatedly calling him by name, even though they were total strangers and he hadn't told her what it was. The ep ends with the arrival of a character who will be very familiar to fans of the TWD comic.

When it comes to my seemingly endless criticism of TWD, I'm often wrongly accused by its apologists of "nitpicking," of unfairly focusing on its shortcomings. Looking over what I've written here, I've spent a lot of time on this ep's problems. That doesn't really do it a disservice; the problems are present and they shouldn't be. The ep isn't bad, though. Not a classic, by any means (though that sequence with the bus earns that label), but by TWD's usual standards, it's quite good. Unlike all those other eps, the ones that so persistently drew the charge of "nitpicking" but were, in reality, little more than the sum of their errors and idiocies, this ep's merits definitely outweigh its shortcomings. I'd like a lot better from TWD, but after the property has been so terribly abused, it's hard not to laud any measurable improvement, and "Inmates" definitely qualifies. If the series follows the pattern of this season, the next ep will probably be another godawful Mazzara-esque waste of space. Oh well. I guess we'll see.

--j.

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[1] The series has dropped several heavy-handed hints that twisted little Lizzie, rather than Carol, committed those murders, and that Carol merely took the rap for it, but that seems almost as implausible as Carol committing them.

[2] Baby Judith is, unsurprisingly, still alive and in Tyreese's care. On tv TWD, no one is dead unless you see the body, and babies aren't eaten by zombies. They aren't smothered by psychos looking to save themselves, either, and crazy Lizzie's devilish efforts in this vein were cut short.

[3] Tara is the sister of Lilly, who was GINO's love interest.

WALKING DEAD Crappily Filler After

THE WALKING DEAD ended the first half of its fourth season with an unfortunate bout of prick-waving by showrunner Scott Gimple; rather than break any new ground, Gimple decided to spend some episodes trying to prove he could do the end of TWD season 3 better than season 3 showrunner Glen Mazzara had done it. No real task, that, and even so, the results were, to put it as kindly as possible, significantly less than spectacular. That's over, though, the prison is gone, our heroes are scattered, and TWD returned tonight from its midseason break to pick up the story. I was curious to see what direction Gimple would take the show. Would it reflect the reformist TWD he launched earlier this season or would it fall back into the unfortunate habits of the Mazzara era, also in evidence in recent episodes? Alas, the first ep out of the gate, "After," is a frustratingly mixed bag, one I'm beginning to suspect may be the new normal for TWD.

The first thing that must be said of it is that virtually nothing happens. It's yet another TWD ep that features perhaps 15 minutes worth of plot that has been padded to the gills in order to fill a full hour. Gimple's strong distaste for Rick is, depressingly, still in evidence; the first act features Rick behaving like a clueless idiot toward his son, who, to his consternation, has adapted rather well to their zombified world. While Rick sleeps off his injuries, Carl rehashes a monologue he originally delivered at the end of season 3, noting Rick's serious failings as a leader and venting his anger over it. He concludes by noting that, if Rick died, he could take care of himself just fine. All things that needed to be said, just as they needed to be said the first time around. And, just as the first time around, the episode then sets out to refute Carl's view, showing him as less uber-competent than he believes himself to be.

Need I even note how very tiresome this particular pattern has become?

Much of the ep is nothing but filler. We follow Michonne around as she surgically alters a pair of zombies into neutered, zombie-repelling escorts on leashes, allowing her to once again walk among the dead. She has dreams and does a lot of walking, pointlessly kills some zombies, and adds essentially nothing but running-time to the ep. That's mostly what happens with Carl as well. There are some nice little Gimple-esque character bits tucked away in his plotline, but they're small and virtually lost in it, as his "story" amounts to little more than his doing a lot of walking, foraging for food, dealing with zombies, and proving not to be as capable as he thinks he is, all stretched over far more time than it should take. The ep's last line is a good one. I'm not sure that matters very much.

--j.

Mike Vraney (1957-2014)

Mike Vraney, the founder of Something Weird Video, has died, claimed by lung cancer at only 56 years old. Off the top of your head you may not know the name, but if you're a film buff, you owe Vraney. I've long argued the company he built has earned a significant place in history. With Something Weird, Vraney revived an entire world of wonderfully insane, eccentric, marginal and underground films, creating the first market for them in decades and, in the process, saving a great deal of them from oblivion. It's hard to overstate that: without Vraney's efforts, that big chunk of American culture with which Something Weird Video deals would have simply died and disappeared forever.

Upon the passing of Joe Sarno, one of the filmmakers whose early flicks Something Weird helped save and revive, I wrote an article on the company and its work that summed up my feelings about it. I'll not be able to improve upon it here. I concluded, among other things, that "SWV belongs alongside the Criterion Collection and Mondo Macabro as the most important DVD labels we have." Vraney was the fellow behind it all, and someone I very much wanted to meet. I never had the chance. I was sad to hear of his passing.

-j.