I have mixed feelings about this season—some very positive, some very negative—but on very different critical grounds. The show has often struck me as experimental, almost auteurist, in its preoccupations. At the very least it seems keenly self-aware of its position within the growing zombie-media ecosystem and interested in upturning many of its established conventions. This is borne out very generally I think in how the plotting and characterization and the setting are often radically stripped down to their basic forms: which—when effective—both lets the showrunners pack a lot of content into a handful of episodes and lets them focus a lot more on the cinematic viscerality—the intrinsic action or suspense—of whatever situation they’ve concocted. Almost every Ep in S1 is structured around a dominant theme or technical preoccupation, and most of the screen time is made up of people doing instead of people talking: the multiple perspectives in e1, the dynamics of ‘survival’ on the road in e2, the mystery of the school in e3, the plight of being alone and incompetent in e4, the in-group/out-group dynamics in e5, etc. This is all a deadly takedown, I think, of the staid conventionalism and comic book dramatic logic that suffuses so much of the Walking Dead.
S2, I think, carries forward this same overall stripped down quality, and technical-directorial disposition, but its thematic preoccupations have somewhat shifted. There is the same playing around with multiple perspectives and temporalities from S1—the by now established technical trick of ‘hiding the plot.’ But more significant is the elaboration of the show’s thematic preoccupation with the Hobbesian state of nature, the absolute dog-eat-dog world it thinks that the apocalypse would quickly come down to. At a high level, the staging of the plot around the airstrip is deviously clever: there is a very dark irony to how hope—supplies and escape—lead to complete mayhem and suffering as people climb over each other for safety. At a lower level, the absolute precarity of the situation, the utter transience of social bonds, is manifested in the ceaseless betrayal, slaughter, turnabout of the people, gangs, leaders, that populate so much of the season. This is again where I think the series is experimental/auteurist in a kind of daring way: It refuses to spend time with most of these people; it provides only the barest of characterizations; loyalties are picked up and dropped almost instantly; it isn’t even always clear why people are or aren’t fighting each other. It’s deeply alienating—but that’s also kind of the point? This living hell is punctuated by fragile moments of more deeply wrought humanity that I think the actors behind Rose and Spears and Sun very much live up to. I found the contrast—the danger of their situation(s), and their (very different) traumatized responses—very fraught and effective.
The season is looser for sure. Fewer episodes work on their own terms. Some episodes seem to be full of non-events, or fake-outs, or plot-sequences that go nowhere. The most charitable defense is that this is a stripped down depiction of the totality of human experience within the Hobbesian state of nature, which each episode now provides in fragments: chance, random violence, constant paranoia, occasional tedium, which are occasionally broken up by moments of great positive significance. The least charitable defense is that the showrunners now have fewer ideas for what each specific episode should be about.
Some of the looseness—longer sequences of relatively minor events; more attention to the smallness of people on the landscape—I actually liked. It gave more naturalistic weight to the world; lessened the feeling of moment to moment plot artifice; and I could never find it truly tedious because of how the characters have been generally less protected.
BIG FLAWS: The continual resort to stupid contrivances to move the plot forward! So infuriating when there is so much around these contrivances that is justifiably very good. People going out alone—against all sense—to be picked off. Convergences too coincidental and double crosses too spontaneous to be believed. Cruelty—murdering strangers—in keeping with the high level theme of the state of nature but often terribly stupid and senseless in the moment. The first half of the season is organized around the ‘puzzle’ of reconstructing the mayhem of the manor-house; but a lot of the conflict is too contrived—esp E3—for me to entirely buy into. The last Ep had two or three very bad plot contrivances—in the turnaround between different groups—that especially spoiled my overall impression of the season. I’m not sure how I would restructure the finale but I think it was fundamentally a missed opportunity: a failure to bring a lot of the season’s preoccupations to a head.