Agreed Aces,
Much has been said about the Gov's slasher-villain-like powers of stealth, great physical strength and fortitude, and what seems to be immunity to serious physical harm not resulting from a moment of high drama. Not to mention his absolutely charmed sense of perfect timing.
One more recent example: Daryl, Michonne, Tyreese and the boozer-medic (I forget his name) enter a building one would expect to be LESS infested with Walkers by FAR when compared with a nursing home full of all-but-completely helpless seniors apparently abandoned wherever they happened to be when the proverbial feces struck the fan, PLUS the slain members of the staff who remained. yet Daryl and Co. only got about sixty seconds of breathing room before Walkers were coming at them from all sides, and from which they escape by a very narrow, very high-risk margin. (Having to bust open a door you KNOW there are a bunch of Walkers behind, with the intention of ploughing through them no less means your potential escape routes have been narrowed almost to the point of nonexistence.)
The Governor, on the other hand, encounters one wheelchair-bound Walker, and one he's able to trap in its room easily, and is setting about completing his oxygen-bottle retrieval errand when he encounters some undead staff members and a couple of old-folk zombies, all coming from one direction, and all easy enough to avoid that he reverses direction for a moment to grab the oxygen tank, and STILL manages to exit by the same means he entered.
Now you can call that nitpicking if you want, but there's a well-established pattern of what can only be described as remarkably good breaks on the Governor's part when it comes to him being forced by circumstance into relatively close quarters with numerous Walkers that at times are downright inexplicable. One of the only examples of someone else being so absolutely swarmed by Walkers, yet emerging bite-free was Tyreese's quasi-suicidal delay in leaving the stranded vehicle, followed by his going all Viking-Berserker with a HORDE closing in from all angles. That scene, where he's madly whacking Walkers with a plain old claw hammer and furious abandon, while COMPLETELY surrounded, and multiple rows of Walkers deep around him was the sort of foolish physical prelude that usually leads to the classic "Zombies bear the victim to the ground via the press of bodies, as the closest zombies in the circle start hauling out lengths of the victims intestines, while others pull the abdominal cavity wide open" scene. When Tyreese hit that Walker from behind that had been obscuring him from the current camera angle and trots on over all fine and dandy physically, with NO depiction of an utterly exhausted Tyreese that might've helped overcome the implausibility of the scene....combined with him wearing a TANK TOP and as previously mentioned armed primarily with an extremely short-range melee weapon...yea that bugged the hell outta me.
All that said, that was only ONE instance of utterly implausible bite-free escape from an encircling horde by Tyreese. I can, just BARELY, suspend my disbelief by justifying it as one-time absolutely freakish luck. The Governor seems to make it a habit, dramatically lowering our sense of Walker danger-levels by making individual Walkers seem so impotent as to merit only the slightest motion in response to it advancing upon him, and proving able to blithely ignore and maneuver among numerous Walkers without coming to harm. A perfect example of this was Andrea turning all those Warehouse-Walkers loose on him from only two or three steps away, yet not only did the Gov emerge victorious despite running out of ammo as the swarm closed in, he was feeling spry enough and cocky enough to beat Andrea to the prison and then somehow lie in wait for her while attracting no attention from any of the two to four dozen Walkers within twenty yards of where he grabbed her. Especially seeing as how he had to completely leave cover to do the grabbing and silencing, with no way of knowing if any of a number of reasons would cause Rick to turn around and thus instantly spot him.
Barbed comments about a Predator-like personal cloaking system are fairly justified. Especially the way he was intently watching the Prison until he turned to face the camera. The man is lacking half his field of vision, yet where's the head-on-a-tilted-swivel situational awareness required to survive all alone for however long it was after Martinez and the other guy bugged out. It frustrates me because David Morrissey is so very capable of effectively conveying complicated behavioral nuances in a host of ways beyond mere dialog. Posture, a dizzying array of tones of voice, subtle to pronounced facial expressions, even the sort of dramatic just-a-moment-longer delay in his responding to someone, that it absolutely goes without saying that it's a matter of writing or direction...which could be an honest enough oversight.
In a survival-horror-based drama however, especially one that's ascended high enough in quality (and therefore popularity) to suck in a large % of otherwise not zombie-fans, and which is given the consideration of any other well-done serious TV drama by critics and the like, those who are part of TWD's creative process on an episodic level are among the people you want and expect to keep surprising you by setting the bar for the show higher and higher.
Is it a minor thing? Unquestionably. Is it a very obvious thing to those giving their full attention to what's happening onscreen? I believe the answer to be an emphatic yes. The classic successful lone zombie attack is nearly always a stealth-grab/bite. The zombie lurches out from the opposite side of the tree along the trail just as you pass by, and smacks into you from behind. The legless/partially paralyzed zombie crawls out from beneath an old car wreck you stopped next to for a few moments. Etc, Etc, Etc. It therefore follows that a readily apparent degree of vigilance/situational awareness would be all but expected from those who've lasted this long.
Another plot-point revolving around situational awareness. The dropped fruitbasket, and then blood trail leading to the lame girl's tattooed severed leg. You watch Rick and Carol cross a wide-open area to reach the point they see the dropped basket, and you wonder how in the Hell a Walker even got close enough to make the kill since Helen Keller would've noticed a staggering corpse cross fifty yards of obstruction-free road/sidewalk/front lawns as it approached someone. In THIS case, however, they make an emphatic point of portraying the "hippie pair" as lacking zombie-apocalypse survival skills. So that sort of one-off you automatically give a pass.
The Governor is another matter entirely, and here's my underlying point about the Gov: If they focused a bit more on some of the behavioral details that Morrissey is undoubtedly capable of portraying, the writing wouldn't NEED to give him one series of implausible breaks after another to serve the needs of the story. Take the warehouse where Andrea turned the Walkers loose on him: If the Gov had done something like immediately (as in before he was all but in a clinch with several Walkers) bull-rush a Walker that momentarily didn't have another behind it, thus knocking it down...and then, say, jump through the glass of one of the windows, his catching up to Andrea down the line would've been much more plausible. Instead they leave an escape from a dire predicament offscreen and go with a Jason Vorhees-style "stealth blitz" attack.
The Walking Dead has, to be fair and after last season to my surprise continued to improve in many ways. It's a very good show, yet the difference between very good and absolutely great is a collection of small things done very well, or attention to detail if you prefer. Many times the actual structure even of an otherwise unpopular episode is quite sound, but the ball got dropped in one or two significant ways. Was it absolutely in-character for the Governor to tie Andrea to his torture chair after her perceived betrayal and demand Milton kill her? You bet. Was Milton's inexperienced attempt to stab the Governor very believable? Again yes. The Governor reversing and burying the knife in Milton's guts, then leaving him to die slowly and then reanimate to become the Gov's undead tool of execution? Does one need to ask?
Then Andrea gets all yappy despite the fact the clock is counting down to her being eaten alive, and completely stopping her efforts to escape every time she opened her mouth. ONE utterly implausible character action, and it becomes IRRELEVANT that much of the episode was great stuff. The overall effect of that ONE script-decision wrecked an episode and took away from the drama of Andrea's passing after the tragic farewells. Details. Ask yourself this: Out of the episodes you didn't like at all, how many times was it one key thing in the plot going wrong that dragged down and otherwise-viable plotline. From my perspective I've seen very few episodes that were simply garbage. On the contrary, 90% of the time when I don't care for an episode it's because of the proverbial single bad apple spoiling the barrel.
|
Posting Permissions
Originally Posted by JonOfTheShred
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks