DrDel
4141
Kill 2 kids in cold blood and the q23 audience calls it the best episode of the season…
corsair
4142
It’s a tragedy, Del. One can admire well-done tragedy without vicariously getting a sexual thrill out of it, unlike some people who want women beaten and then rejected as soiled sexual toys in their TV series. ;-)
hepcat
4144
You wanted at least 3?
I’ll never understand why people do such a thing. If you hate something, why continue to watch it?
You’re drunk, stop trolling.
You know very well that it wasn’t the “cold blood” deaths of the girls that made the episode so fantastic, it was the writing and acting that brought the entire horrifying situation slowly to light. Mika’s death was tragic, and possibly preventable if anyone had had a clue how far gone Lizzie’s mind was. Lizzie’s death was a foregone conclusion after she killed Mika. She would have done the same thing again, possibly to Judith, or she would have seriously endangered any group she was with by letting walkers come right into the camp/house/whatever. There is no Obamacare in the apocalypse, no mental health treatment for the insane. What happened to Lizzie was tragic, and I think the show did a nice job of illustrating that some people, especially children, would deal with the stress of a zombie apocalypse by completely breaking with reality and their minds would construct ways to deal with the horror that could end up being dangerous not only to the person, but to those around them. The alternative to Lizzie’s Old Yeller moment was to turn her out into the world alone, which would be even more cruel.
hepcat
4146
He apparently enjoyed True Detective and the main topic of that show was the rape and murder of children. My guess is he was joking but forgot the smiley.
hepcat
4147
He apparently enjoyed True Detective and the main topic of that show was the rape and murder of children. My guess is he was joking but forgot the smiley.
Great episode - so happy that previous showrunner Glen Mazzara didn’t kill off Carol when he intended, as she has been so much more interesting a character this season under a different showrunner (and Melissa Mcbride has been wonderful). Makes me wonder if other characters weren’t wasted, like Andrea, due to poor writing/handling - they made the audience hate that character, despite her being one of the most popular in the comics. Great episode for Tyreese too, another character who has much to offer and is only belatedly arriving, really.
Also props to the Walking Dead show for, once again, handling a story from the comics in a far more interesting manner (although the surprise resolution in the comics was at least as interesting, the story just seemed abrupt and sensationalistic, unlike the way the TV show really allowed it time to develop and become more powerful).
It also deals with a topic that should be more frequently explored in post-apocalyptic worlds - some people would be driven insane by that experience, some already insane people would no longer be manageable, and the ability of normal people to adapt appropriately to almost unfathomable circumstances. Mika’s inability to really accept the new reality sort of reminded me how well that phenomenon was explored in the Day of the the Triffids too.
I love this show, much more under this showrunner than any previously, and a pox on naysayers. I think he’s done a fantastic job with the Governor/Prison arc and now the resulting chaos.
hepcat
4149
I don’t think Lizzie was driven insane by the zombie apocalypse. I think she was just a victim of mental illness. In our world, she would be treated with drugs and therapy and might have had a productive (or at least less turbulent) life. In the Walking Dead world though, there are no such options. She was simply (and tragically) too broken to survive.
And yeah, McBride and the actor playing Tyreese just knocked it out of the park. Such great acting.
Great episode!
I was still taken aback when Lizzie did what she did, and the outcome was a foregone conclusion, but I thought the actors did a tremendous job on portraying the emotion of the final scenes.
I did not realise there was a new showrunner, but my comment to a friend regarding this season was that “I was quite disappointed the Governor was brought back so soon after season 3, until I realised his arc was done and he was just going to be the short-term macguffin to get them out of the prison and on the road again.”
If there was evidence that the girl was mental before the ZA happened, I must have missed it. What I haven’t missed is all the characters who have been made crazy after the ZA, some moreso than others. So I’d see anyone acting nutty as being broken by the experience as the default.
I think a character like Carol prefers to believe people who flake out were messed up all along because it minimizes the horror of their situation. If you’re enduring something that has broken other people, what does that say about the future of your mental health? On the other hand, if they didn’t go crazy, they were crazy, then it lets you off the hook doesn’t it?
GregB
4152
Well, there was that point when she was freaking out and her little sister said something like, “Ok, look at the flowers and count to three.” And I think she also said something like “Remember?” To me this indicates this was an ongoing issue that she’s had to deal with and her little sister knew the “cool down” method.
I’d also point that to many of you rightfully praising this episode, that you can’t have this kind of payoff without laying the groundwork and building things up over the course of a season or seasons. Slow episodes are a part of the rhythm of any decent episodic TV show. It was nice to see things like the zombie feeding at the prison, and some Lizzie’s odd dialogue about zombies, and her growing attachment to Carol all lead to this horrifying conclusion.
Yeah not just in this episode but back when they were at the prison they showed Lizzie having the “count to three” coping mechanism that suggested her issues were not new. They never state for sure they existed before the ZA (since the prison was well after the ZA started), but it seems likely to me she had previous mental health issues; some form of childhood delusionary schizophrenia.
So I did miss something then, since I don’t remember that exchange. I agree that, in the context of when she said it, “remember?” would be referring to something from before the ZA happened. I don’t think the younger girl would say it that way if it was some new thing they had worked out. That makes it creepier in a way, because that implies she was potentially murderous even in the good days. A bomb just waiting, for just the right set of circumstances, to go off.
The “look at the flowers” bit was also a very direct reference to “look at the rabbits, George” from Of Mice and Men. The implication is that it’s part of Micah and Lizzie’s ritual for coping with panic attacks, but it’s mainly a thing for Carol to say so she can shoot Lizzie in the back of the head. It was a pretty weak bit of derivative writing in an otherwise well written episode.
-Tom
Wasn’t it a reference to the phrase used some time back? In the Talking Dead, someone mentioned they re-watched the season after seeing the episode and it came up earlier. So derivitive, but at least not out of the blue.
hepcat
4157
Telling her to “look at the bullet, Lizzie” probably didn’t test well.
This. I suspect it was just showing us how close the various groups really are to each other, yet each is isolated by danger and small strips of land.
Yeah, Of Mice and Men was cribbed from pretty heavily - a bit surprising how directly, which was a bit distracting. Or the Yearling, but mainly Of Mice and Men. But it still worked and made sense in the context. In the comic the kid was just suddenly blown away, by someone who took the initiative, which would have been more shocking on the show
I don’t know, I kind of appreciate shout-outs to literary classics, myself, so the Of Mice and Men allusion didn’t bother me.
