The Walking Dead, S04E03 – Review

Original air date: October 27, 2013

Review (with SPOILERS): This was a pretty mixed episode.  It had strong elements, but also showed signs of being sucked into a rut with the prolonged Flu Story.

The bad stuff… Let’s just get it out of the way…

A little slow: Unfortunately, the main take-away from this episode is how slow things are.  Suddenly things feel very “Season 2” again.  They’re not stuck on Herschel’s farm anymore chopping vegetables; they’re stuck in the Prison doing things like collecting rain water and unclogging the mud from the hose that brings them water from the creek – the creek that zombies walk in… Yuck!  They’re not looking for Sophia anymore, they’re all worried about getting the flu.  It isn’t that a “slow burn” can’t be a good story, but neither the writing nor the acting on this show are good enough to slow down the action.  It’s almost like the talent behind TWD thinks that because the show gets excellent ratings that it can do the same things that the truly A-list shows can do.  TWD is at its best when the action hops along briskly and viewers don’t have time to fixate on boring plotlines or troublesome characters.

• Carol’s turn for the worse: Even though we’ve seen a new Carol this season – more capable and confident, this episode’s plot development with her didn’t quite turn out right.  The bad thing is that I see what the writers were trying to do. The writers KNEW in advance that Carol had killed Karen and the other sick guy, so they wanted to show in this episode how she was frustrated that her decision to murder two people still didn’t keep the group safe.  But, it didn’t totally come off.  The scene where Carol tries to comfort the little sick girl, but won’t tuck her into bed in the sick ward…THAT scene worked out pretty well.  At the time, we kinda think that she doesn’t want to tuck the little girl in because Carol doesn’t want to be infected herself.  But, in hindsight, she is probably upset that (a) her murdering Karen didn’t keep the little girl from getting sick and (b) she might have to kill the little girl to keep the REST of the group safe.  See, that bit of character development was good.  Now, what fell on its face was the part where Carol got angry and threw the water barrels over.  Either the director didn’t know how to shoot that scene properly or the actress didn’t know how to play angry.  Just leave that scene out and let us have the more subtle scene with Carol and the little girl.  The show’s creative talent has troublesome judgement…
• Dumb new characters: The episode wastes too much time on characters we don’t really know and care about.  When Karen died last week, it hit home a little bit because we at least remembered Karen as Andrea’s kinda-friend from Season 3 and the sole survivor of The Governor’s rampage.  But, this week, who cares about the new sick Doctor when Herschel gives him a pep talk?  I don’t even know the guy’s name.  Likewise, it’s hard to get too upset about the little girl that Carol is so worked up about because we only met her a few episodes ago.  Nobody cares about the little girl yet.  It’s amazing how this show has no patience for development of minor characters, yet Beth is still around and getting speaking lines.  “I know… it would be awesome if we have TWO scenes with Beth talking to someone through a closed door…”