Monday, February 10, 2014

Home Alone - Walking Dead - Season 4, Episode 9

Tip:  In the zombiepocalypse, avoid traveling with a teenager.

Michonne briefly returns to the prison, both to get two new decoy zombies for traveling, and to put Hershel down.  Hershel's head is a grim reminder to Michonne of all that she just lost. She has trouble putting him down, taking her time to stab him in the head and messily drawing the katana back out.  Her two new pets are easy to catch, and she starts wandering right out among the dead, who are completely oblivious to her now.

  

Rick, badly wounded to the point where he actually looks like a fresh zombie, hobbles along a dirt track leading who knows where, nagging Carl along the way to wait for him.

Here's a story... bout a man named Ricky, busy with a snot nosed brat of his own...

The boy's in a mood, probably because they've left his comic books behind at the prison, as well as his sister's bloody and empty baby carrier. If there was a phone, Rick would hear it ringing.  They stop along the way at a roadside bar/bbq joint and grab some food, and argue about a zombie they had to kill together.  Carl wants his dad to just let him handle them- Rick wants to save bullets above all else.  Rick gets more angry as Carl repeatedly disobeys him while they clean out a neighboring home in a tree-lined, pretty, empty development.  Carl even points out that he tied the front door closed with a knot the long-dead Shane taught him.  He's down, Carl, you can stop kicking. It's all forgotten the second Rick hits the couch and immediately falls asleep.  After this, the episode goes to Carl, who is determined to not need adult supervision.

Michonne dreams of her old life, calling an art show she's just attended with her lover and his buddy "pedestrian" and "overplayed", and comparing it to showing a gorilla driving a car.  She's making a fruit and cheese plate, and the first clue something is amiss comes when you see she's been slicing with her katana, which magically fits back into her cutlery holder.  A cute toddler wanders into the kitchen, to be carried with the food to the table, where Michael and Terry have changed into dirty, ragged clothes, with Michael complaining that Michonne's katana skills are useless unless she's living for something.  Michonne, realizing something's wrong, puts the food on the table and hugs her kid closer.  We cut to Michael and Terry, armless with bloody armpits, and a bloodstain where her kid used to be.  It's a cleverly done montage in the space of one minute, showing the mental transition that would have left Michonne completely bereft, willing to walk among the dead, until the dusk when she met Andrea.  She wakes in a car, her new pets just outside, emotionally right back where she was two-and-a-half seasons ago.  She finds Rick and Carl's trail along the original dirt road, but ignores it and continues on, deeper into the woods.

Carl spends the next day trying to read, and is interrupted to lure zombies away from their front door, where the rope trick he used may not have held, but the sofa Rick hauled to the door did.

Just handle it, Carl

Carl's doing pretty good, but any time a character walks backward leads to mayhem, and Carl ends up under three put-down zombies, with about five bullets used.  He's going to run out, but probably doesn't realize.  In a rush from his victory, he strides back to Rick, fast asleep and unable to even wake up at this point.  So Carl goes into a long speech about how useless he thinks his Dad is.  All I can say is, he's not wrong.  He gets confident, and tries to knock down a door with his shoulder, and it's hilarious when he bounces right back on the wood floor of the porch.

Latch-key kids in the zombiepocalypse

So he just breaks in with the spike of the yard light, which he carries around the house like a knife, putting it down only to get pudding.  He's pretty proud of himself by now, and scopes out the upstairs.  A zombie surprises him but not the viewer, and Carl is just to small to overpower the thing like his Dad does.  There are a couple shots of the zombie almost chomping down on his ankle, and Carl has to hurriedly close a bedroom door after trying to escape through window doesn't work.  He records his daring victory, noting that he lost only his shoe.  But not his pluck, which we see on full display while he eats pudding on the roof, his new zombie friend in the bedroom inside, sticking its hand out of the window Carl couldn't open fully, rasping as it will never get him while he enjoys a little pudding.  When he gets home this time, he's not so proud of himself, just glad to be alive and no doubt sick as fuck from all that pudding.

Michonne wanders the woods among the dead, pausing to look at a few only briefly, as eye contact makes them suspicious.  Her new pets in front of her make her invisible to them, but she spies a zombie that looks similar to her, with braids instead of dreads.  Michonne gets the point.  She's not dead, which she proves by slicing every zombie around her.  The collapse in a circle around her, and she pauses for a moment in the center of her kills, which include her new pets.  No more hiding among the dead.  She goes right back to Rick and Carl's trail, hoping to find some of the family she still has left.

Oh, yeah, that's right - I kick ass!

Carl falls asleep in the little ball he rolled into, waking in the middle of the night to Rick rasping like a zombie, so Carl scrambles away from Rick, picking up a gun to supposedly shoot him, but just collapsing, unable to put down his own dad, as Rick's hand in the blue moonlight reaches out like the undead for him.  But then, just as in the series premiere, Rick calls for his son, warning him not to go outside.  He's still alive!  Damn.  Would this Carl have been able to put down his mom?

The next day, Rick and Carl make up on the couch together, with Carl confessing his pudding binge, but Rick doesn't seem interested in why his shoe is missing.  Michonne is close, she's gotten to the bbq joint, where she realizes she's close to whoever came this way.  She collapses at the door, telling Michael, long dead and put down, that he could have survived too, that she has a new family now, that she has a reason to keep living.  And she proceeds to find Rick and Carl, chilling on the couch.  Like a good neighbor, she knocks on the door to borrow a cup of sugar.

Don't worry, an adult who actually deserves your respect is almost here

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