by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

4×06:  “Live Bait”

After what, in retrospect, turned out to be an exhausting series of season-opening episodes based around the comparatively invisible threat of a virus, “Live Bait” turned out to be a pretty big relief.  The show may have come back in a big way with last week’s “Internment”, a surprisingly action-packed installment, but a break away from our normal setting turned out to be a welcome respite from the normal doom and gloom of a dreary prison and an even drearier people.

“Internment” concluded with this season’s debut of the Governor, menacingly staring at the prison just outside the forestry surrounding it.  We’ll have to wait at least another week to see how that reunion goes, as this week (and next) we have the continuing adventures of the Governor, aka Philip Blake, aka Brian Heriot, aka Snake Plissken on the road.  Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

4×05:  “Internment”

There was a moment of sheer terror as I watched Hershel, Glenn and Sasha help yet another heretofore unidentified virus-stricken person stay alive for a few more hours, and I thought to myself, “… is this going to be a bottle episode?”  It was starting to feel like the kind of episode that would rely heavily on introspection as we faced even more (boring) realities of fighting a virus and not much action.  For those not blessed enough to have lived significant parts of their lives watching Community, a bottle episode is an episode designed to be produced cheaply, relying on sets already built, main characters, and as little preparation and outside work as possible.  But holy sh*t, this was not a bottle episode.

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of AMC and Fox International Channels

4×04:  “Indifference”

Mirroring its title, “Indifference” is a boring, downer of an episode.  It’s also an important one.

I’ve always maintained that if I were caught in some sort of post-apocalyptic world with clear and present dangers, where everything is worse, and there’s no chance of going back to the way things were, that I would give up pretty quickly.  What’s the point of survival if surviving is so bad, in continuing in a world where the living would envy the (non-walking) dead?  Right now, that seems to be the point where most of our characters are.  They’ve gotten past the point of base survival in the relative security of the prison, they’ve overcome the great human threat that was (and still is) the Governor, and now they’re facing down the fact that this life will probably just keep getting worse.  If it’s not the virus, it’ll just be something else.

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