Amongst all the excitement surrounding New York Comic-Con, I almost forgot that The Walking Dead was premiering last night. I shouldn’t have. I know I shouldn’t have because right before starting this post I noticed that my Comic-Con badge consisted of 20% badge stuff and 80% Walking Dead advertisement. This fits in well enough with my opinion of The Walking Dead as a whole, as I really could not tell you what happened for most of the latter half of Season 3 (aside from the phenomenal episode that brought back Morgan.) That said, though I am somewhat forgetful on certain Walking Dead events, I am certain that half of “30 Days Without an Accident” had not been previously established. Characters sprang up, allegedly having a purpose, and a new system was set in place for Rick’s group and The Prison where they now had more members and a fairly comfortable lifestyle. That itself isn’t bad, not everything needs to be explained, but the sudden acceptance of the new status quo is kind of jarring. Not in terms of the actual content; just in terms of how much I could not care about the new direction of the show.
“30 Days” begins with Daryl walking around the new, populated with refugee Woodbury citizens, Prison and not getting used to all the people who admire him for contributing so much to the group. Carol introduces him to a guy who has to be twenty who nervously shakes his hand and thanks him for hunting a deer recently. He acts like a really sweaty fan at Comic-Con trying really hard not to cry on Kieron Gillen or something. I’m still sorry, Mr. Gillen.
Carol and Daryl then sort of hug and look out towards the group, which is when Carol calls Daryl “Pookie.” This brings up an important question: Did they frick already? The fans have been rooting for the phonetically disappointing Darol to frick for years and suggesting that it may have taken place off screen would be really disapointing. Calling someone Pookie, of course, isn’t enough to suspect two people of fricking. After all, I have called certain people “Pookie” completely platonically and in circumstances that did not necessitate Kieron Gillen calling security. But the context of the apparent montage this segment is a part of does place it into frick territory. Tyreese shacked up with a woman from the new group. We will call her “Woman.” Beth is similarly dating “Boy,” another character who will never justify a Wiki page. Apparently someone slipped something besides mutilated fat zombie into the water supply, as half the cast has been fricking new characters in-between seasons. A scene with Hershel and Rick takes place right after this sequence and boy was I disappointed when Rick didn’t kneel by Hershel to passionately whisper to him.
oh.
Anyway, Rick goes off into the woods for reasons and there finds a character we will call “Another Woman.” Rick immediately points a gun at her and does his usual passionate whispering shtick. Another Woman, apparently named Clara, says she needs help finding her husband and Rick agrees to help out because it ain’t like anything’s going on at the prison. Rick says he’ll need to ask her three questions, a line which is supposed to be significant because it was made a hashtag in between commercials. Rick and Clara eventually get to her camp, where it turns out the husband is a zombified decapitated head that Clara still kept around. “What a disgusting original twist,” he wrote while remembering the Telltale Walking Dead game. Clara then proceeds to deliver a monologue about how hard it is to survive in the world nowadays and threatens to kill herself. Rick acts like he wants her to live and then acts really surprised when she actually kills herself, after which he shrugs and walks away; leaving behind the still living husband head and going back to his compound where he was previously seen gardening while wearing headphones and listening to music in a post-apocalyptic world. Even though he looked sadly at a sleeping pig, similar to the dying one he saw when meeting Clara, dude did not give a care about Clara. I didn’t either so that kind of works out. Also, the “Three Questions” hashtag line they built up was just “How many walkers yew killed? How many people have yew killed? Why?” Really compelling stuff.
Continued belowMeanwhile, Only Reasons to Watch This Show Michonne and Daryl took off to the only store in the world that wasn’t looted for supplies. There, they share some witty back and forth with Boy, who may be a little rough around the edges, but golly does he try hard to do his best! And even your favorite characters like him too! Wow! Boy, is he a regular character or what?
If you’ve ever seen the first two minutes of the Ponce de Leon episode of Clone High, it’s the same exact scene.
Of course, Boy dies when Another Character I Don’t Care About crashes a booze shelf while grappling with his “Generic Character Trait Checklist” alcoholism. A group of Walkers (who are called that since TWD characters have no reference for zombies even though an actual zombie cardboard cutout shows up in the store as a joke) turn out to have been stranded on the ceiling along with the third helicopter to crash in this series. The stress from the shelf causes the zombies to crash through the ceiling (and a really obvious green screen) which is the exact moment when I was sure The Walking Dead was fucking with me. ACIDC gets trapped under the shelf but is saved by Glenn; but the same can’t be said for Boy who gets eaten by the one decomposed corpse able to survive falling two feet headfirst into a linoleum floor. To quote a grieving Daryl, “Let’s move along.”
Back at the prison, Carl attends a reading circle for kids that the twenty year old something Daryl fanboy attends to. Whatever. This actually provides the best moment in the episode where rising star Carol turns out to be teaching kids knife work. I don’t even have sassy commentary for that. Go Carol.
The group decides what the best way to tell Beth about the death of her boyfriend. Daryl begins to tell her when Beth nonchalantly gets up, goes to a “Days Without an Accident in the Workplace” calendar that she just keeps near her bed for such an occasion, and resets it to zero.
Here, I’d like to apologize for the friend I watched this episode with for all of my I cackling. Not only could I not care about these new characters, neither could their girlfriends. Really, that just fits how every death on this show feels. It’s another check on a list so Chris Hardwick will have something to shriek over during Talking Dead. Honestly, I have no idea how this show expects me to get invested in it when one character’s literal girlfriend got up and reset a workplace accident calendar she had for the casual occasion of his death. I get the purpose behind the scene: so many people are dying that it’s become harder for some characters to feel anything anymore. Still, holy moly did you need an actual workplace accident calendar near your bed?! That’s not just crass, that’s goddamn incredible. Why is this only happening now? If we had all come clean and admitted that we didn’t give a shit about any of the characters who died, we wouldn’t have spent three quarters of Season 2 mourning whatstheirface. Hopefully this means we’ll spend less time mourning and more time with some action. Plot twists do indeed come at the last minute in the form of that weird sweaty guy turning out to be sick and dying in the shower before turning into a walker right inside of the prison. Oh no. The comfortable life our favorite characters have been building for themselves will probably come to ruin. The same lifestyle we’ve experienced for forty minutes at this point.
I don’t know how you managed to make your own main plot a Red Shirt, The Walking Dead, but congratulations on finding new ways to astound me.
Final Verdict: 3.2 – Flimsy plot and characters, but the make-up and special effects are still great at parts.
