Rick's gravelly voice eulogizes Dale over images of Andrea, Shane, Daryl, and T-Dog pummeling the crap out of a few zombies. Dale was right and the group's broken, Rick admits, but he doesn't want it that way. Shane's Killer Gang doesn't look all that broken to me. They're working together like enraged, insane ballerinas. Maybe their brains are broken, but not their group. Is this the message we're supposed to get out of this?
Carl asks Shane to keep his secret(s), which are pretty small, only that HE STOLE DARYL'S GUN and MESSED WITH THE ZOMBIE THAT EVENTUALLY ATE DALE. We all know ahead of time that Shane's obviously going to tell Rick and Lori as soon as possible, but what we don't expect is that Shane, once again, hands young Carl a gun. "Shoot this gun like you'd shoot your mother, boy, and don't ever think twice about it." That's what he should've said, anyway.
Winter's a'comin', so Hershel invites everyone into the house and gives Lori the master bedroom. He, like me, and like my own grandfather, prefers the couch. I guess Lori winning the housing lottery solidifies her place as Lady MacFarm, because now she's running with it. She walks right up to Shane and apologizes to him in that special way where no matter what she says, she's telling him she's hopelessly in love with him. Suddenly she's not quite as sure whose baby she's growing in the belly. Also, she mentions "that night they went to Atlanta" as though that comes ANYWHERE NEAR MAKING UP FOR THE MISSING DARABONT ATLANTA FLASHBACK EPISODE. Just hedge your bets and 86 the blab, Lori. Don't make me feel cheap.
That afternoon Andrea and Glenn go on the most melodramatic Magic RV Adventure of all time. They'd like to start up Dale's old caravan, but you see, it's been parked too long. Sitting here at Hershel's farm for months, obsolescent, becoming quite an uninteresting character indeed. Glenn starts crying and Andrea's all "I let him down!!" Once they weep enough salty tears to do the trick, the RV starts up like magic. OH REALLY, GUYS. OH REALLY. LIKE IN LOST? What a leap I was willing to take that first time! Hurley's van was one of the Island's splendid miracles! Oh, how I have soured since then!
Modern storytelling generally trends towards the "if he dies, he's dead" camp of reality. In some stories, the long-thought-dead father comes back from war or the crushed sister climbs out of the rock-tumbled cave by sheer force of will. But these days, if you are presented as dead, you stay dead. The Hunger Games is that way, Harry Potter is that way, and for God's sake, Lost is that way. In the end, at least. Dale's RV died, so it's dead. Let's not play pretend. Let's not shy away.
Rick starts in with the Give Carl a Gun Foundation, and I guess it all adds up to Carl shooting someone at the end of the episode. They've given him a gun too many times for it not to happen. Classic zombicopter parenting!
Wrong things are happening in Randall's prison barn. First of all, his wrists are a mess from struggling to undo his ropes. He's crying and miserable and blindfolded, and Shane's nudging his gun all over the kid's face. What on earth kind of zombiepocalypse is this? I'm reading Colson Whitehead's Zone One right now, and his idea of intersecting groups works much better: in this situation, you travel around on foot picking up and dropping off group members here and there. If you're alone when you run into a friendly seeming group, you offer up your weapon for the night and promise to pack up and leave in the morning. Rick's gang is more like that crazy underground nightmare city from A Boy and His Dog. It took a lot of effort to get their camp like this, with prisoners and torture and everything. At least it's sort of like the comic books.
Not too much later, T-Dog opens the door to the empty prison barn and actually says, maybe for the first time, "Aw, hell no!" You did it, Dog!
Shane drags Randall through the forest and tricks him into thinking he wants to join his gang of rapscallions. He then snaps the poor kid's neck and slams himself into a tree for effect, much like Mark Wahlberg in Fear. Back at camp he pretends Randall got the jump on him, to which Daryl's like "No, that's not what happened, no way buster." But everyone else believes him, so they run into the woods, where zombies live, in the dark.
I can see from Rick and Shane walking together like this that something very similar to page 1 of the comic book will happen soon. It will be too much too late, and it will not have needed to happen. But I guess this way the writers can keep the comic book fans upset while also upsetting the first-time watchers. Shane gets a wild hair to KILL OFFICER RICHARD GRIMES.
Glenn and Daryl run the opposite way as the latter follows Randall's tracks with only a flashlight. Daryl, you are the best at everything there's ever been! It's no question! So stop askin!* Soon they run into Zombie Randall (!!) and have more than a little trouble exterminating him. Once they kill him, Daryl looks him over and finds no bitemarks. No bitemarks?! Another puzzle piece flips itself over, begging us to move it into place!
*Daryl is also a great small-whistler, I noticed. He sounds like the forest when he wants to get your attention. What an absolute dreamboat genius.
Back to Rick and Shane, the Rickashane Brothers. Rick's like "Shane, you and your crazy wobbly eyes are ogling me far too much not to be planning on shooting me." And Shane's like "I'm a better father than you! I'm a better man!" Then he calls Carl weak, even though I was pretty sure Shane was Carl's biggest fan. So Rick offers to put down his own gun, but he keeps creeping closer to Shane as he lowers it. Finally Rick's close enough to trick Shane and stab him in the gut with a hidden knife! Yowza!
Glen Mazzara, you old stinker. You had Rick kill those guys in the first midseason episode so that we'd be primed for this to happen. But if this is the way Shane dies, then why did everyone spend so much time giving guns to Carl?
Because Carl's there, witnessing all of it, and he sees Shane's corpse sit up and hop to its feet. Shane only gets up because loud bits of fiery, bloody carnage have blasted into his brain, and now we know "what it's like to be a zombie." Come. On. No.
Carl points the gun at Zombie Shane, but from Rick's perspective it looks like Carl wants to shoot him. This is the stupidest, least tense, fakest set up for tension there could be. Nobody wants Rick to be a big lumbering dum-dum who can't even get out of the way. Remember when Carl wouldn't get out of the way for Otis to shoot that deer? Dumb. And there's just one dumb other thing: ALL THIS NOISE JUST INVITED 100 FOREST ZOMBIES TO COME EAT YOU.
Hopefully, now that Carl has killed (sort of) Shane, mythology has been done and we can start a new chapter of crazy zombie adventures. Shane is gone, like he should be, and now Rick can slide into his morally ambiguous territory. So let it be written, so let it be done.
photos courtesy AMCtv.com
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