Photo: Gene Page/AMC
In superhero comics, there’s a certain type of fan who — regardless of how much they complain about or start to dislike a certain comic book–– simply will not stop buying it. No matter how much shit they talk about how incredibly bad it is, the comic will end up in their buy pile on Wednesday anyway. Perhaps out of a sense of loyalty, perhaps out of a sense of completism (they’ve already bought the first 60 issues, after all) or perhaps because they “have to” – because stopping simply doesn’t seem like an option.
The survivors in The Walking Dead have a similar attitude towards staying alive, which is a big part of why they’re survivors at all. But even then it is a tenuous thing, something that they must talk themselves into over and over, a refrain of obligation and duty.
As a viewer, lately, I often feel the same way. The Walking Dead has always been the story of what happens after the horror movie, about learning to live on in a post-zombie outbreak world. It’s a show about endurance, about finding out how long people can go on after they lose everything – again, and again, and again. But after four years of watching the survivors shamble around in a near-constant state of trauma, it’s starting to feel like an exercise in endurance for me too. About how long I can continue to absorb this level of human misery. And about why I’m doing it: Because it’s cathartic? Because I want to see if the characters I care about survive? Or because I have to?
This episode picks up roughly where the last one left off, and Tyreese is still rather upset about his lady-friend getting murdered for having the sniffles. This somehow turns into several minutes of Rick and Tyreese punching their feelings at each other’s face, which is a bit ironic given that Rick understands how Tyreese feels better than anyone. This is the man, after all, who locked himself in the prison to fight zombies for an entire episode after Lori died and then spent several weeks talking to his dead wife on an imaginary telephone.
Rick’s doing better now, though, so he’s getting a lot of pressure to step up as leader again because of the flu crisis. Since this would really cut into the time he spends sadsacking it around the prison and growing beets, Rick isn’t into it. “I think I’ve done enough damage,” he says. What he really means is, I think I’ve suffered enough. All he wants to do is put down his burden and rest, but on this show, you don’t get to rest until you’re dead. Maybe not even then.
Michonne, Daryl, Tyreese and Bob head out to find antibiotics for the sick people, who now include Glenn and Tyreese’s sister, Sasha. Back at the prison, Hershel – who couldn’t go on the medicine outing because of his whole one-leg, can’t-run situation — gets antsy because he doesn’t have anything to do (read: purpose in life), so he decides to take a walk outside in the woods. En route he runs into Carl, who insists on going with him. It’s worth noting that the moment they walk into the woods, Carl immediately starts scanning the environment around him for threats like a trained soldier, while Hershel ambles about blithely talking about everything so peaceful and safe is. “These last couple days, we might be safer outside those walls than in!” Hershel exclaims. “No. No we’re not,” says Carl. Guess which one of them is more in touch with the actual situation? Carl. Obviously Carl, forever.
Seconds later, they see a decrepit zombie stir at the base of a tree, while another ambles towards them from the distance. When a melancholy Hershel says again that it had seemed so peaceful, Carl replies, “It can’t be like that all the time.” That’s the difference between Carl and Hershel: Carl understands that there might be moments when they rest, but peace is never going to be reality – only a temporary escape from it.
That’s at the heart of a big generational divide between many of the adults and the younger survivors, like Carl and Beth. To the adults, this world is always going to seem wrong, unreal – something that happened to the real world. For kids – at least, the ones who have grown up fighting zombies rather than trick-o-treating at Woodbury – this is the real world, the one they’re living in now. Their formative years are taking place in a context where the zombie threat isn’t some sudden tragedy – it’s simply the background radiation of their lives. And when they’re able to survive, that’s also why they’re better adapted to it.
Carl makes often ruthless decisions, like shooting the armed teenager from Woodsbury who was trying to surrender. But as Carl very logically pointed out at the time, Rick has often let potential threats live, like Andrew and the Governor, who later caused numerous deaths. Killing people has a price, certainly, but so does mercy.
Rick didn’t want Carl to have a gun because he still believes a young boy shouldn’t have to defend himself with firearms from constant deadly attacks by monsters, or need to make difficult calls about who lives and who dies. And yet, Carl does. Where Rick and some of the other survivors see nascent sociopathy, I see adaptation. The problem isn’t really Carl; it’s his ability to see the world around him in unemotional clarity, while many of the adults around him often can’t.
Rick took Carl’s gun away because he didn’t want him to be right. He gave it back because he was.
But if Rick doesn’t always understand Carl’s pragmatism, then at least Carol does. After all, as we discover at the end of the episode, she’s the one who murdered Karen and David and burned their bodies in the yard, hoping to end the outbreak before it could spread and potentially infect them all. “You sacrifice a lot. Is there anything you wouldn’t do for the people here?” Rick asks her. “No,” she answers, and it’s true. She would absolutely burn the village to save the village, even if the village still has people inside it.
A lot is made in this episode about obligation, about the sense of duty that both requires and allows people to survive. Earlier, when Carol asked Daryl if he was all right after the flu-inspired massacre, he answered, “Gotta be.” When Hershel decides to break quarantine and tend to the the growing numbers of the sick, Beth and Maggie discuss their father’s decision in the same terms. “Dr S. is sick and we all got jobs to do. We’ll deal with it, right?” says Beth. “We don’t get to get upset.” And when Hershel treats the ill Glenn, he suggests another job for his young son-in-law, who seems to be losing hope. “We got this far somehow. You can believe somehow. We all have jobs here. That one’s yours.”
More and more, it feels like the job of the audience as well — to somehow find a way hold on till the next episode no matter how unrelentingly bleak things feel. Since I get paid to recap episodes of this show, that is literally true for me. But lately — like many of the survivors — I often wonder if I would simply give up, if I could. If like Rick, I would rather lay down my burden and go water the plants instead. It doesn’t really matter, of course. I’ll watch the next episode anyway. After all, I have to.
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