Last week I posited that only Dany was beginning to emerge as a character with arc, propulsive plot development, and any kind sympathy or interest for me. This week made a go at trying to give me some other character to hold on to, and the effects were fair to middling, with yet more weight added to Dany’s side of the scales. We had some very good moments to hold onto with Game of Thrones this week, and I can say with a fair degree of certainty that my enthusiasm for this season has been kindled a bit more.
I don’t think it would come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who read my review of last week’s episode to hear that my opinion on Game of Thrones has taken a recent downward trajectory. Because when you don’t care about any characters in a show, and when their actions cease to have any impact because of your newfound ambivalence, what reasons do you have to really keep watching anymore? It’s a question I struggled with in the run-up to this newest episode, “And Now His Watch Is Ended,” and one which I hoped would be answered by the end.
Whereas with last week's episode Game of Thrones concerned itself primarily with setting the table, this week we find all of our characters ready to chew the scenery. This was without a doubt one of the most actor-heavy episodes of Game of Thrones in quite some time, and given the languorous and decidedly academic tone of the last episode, the shift was most welcome.
What did a season finale of The Walking Dead have to do in order to be successful? For one thing, it had to resolve the conflict between The Governor and the prison group. It had to wrap up the dangling thread of what is to become of Andrea now that she was in the Governor's clutches. It had to deliver some kind of catharsis and leave the characters in a place where we are assured of their situation for the moment but invested in seeing where they go from here.
For the viewers at home, it's been a long, cold wait between the paradigm-changing season finale of Game of Thrones' second season and the first scene of the new season. For the characters who inhabit the world of Game of Thrones, however, it seems as though very little has changed and very little time has elapsed. Given the scope of the show, it seems like an almpost impossible task to move through the various strands of plot in any real or understandable manner, so I'll begin by talking about the characters who experience the most to move the plot forward before trickling down to the lesser elements of the story at hand.
The worst thing about zombies, and the thing that has been exploited most in just about every zombie narrative ever, is that they are not a truly faceless enemy. They are a corruption of the real world, the reawakening of a loved one or friend as something mindlessly malevolent. Vampires or werewolves have the capacity to recall their old lives, perhaps feeling remorse for their killings, while zombies simply consume, leaving just the physical husk of your former acquaintance as a lurching reminder of your loss. It must be terrifying to see someone you care about laid so low, so horribly altered, subjected to the ignominy of a restless death, turned into something no more human than an ant or a shark.
Another week out from the season (and possible series) high-point of Clear, The Walking Dead seems to be falling back hard into the old habits I had hoped would be long forgotten by now. Unfortunately, with Prey, we get what could be one of the most pointless, needlessly drawn-out episodes in the whole of season 3. In a strange way, however, this episode both betrays and enforces the final scenes of the last episode, and proves how flawed the storytelling of The Walking Dead really is.
Last week I said that The Walking Dead had finally struck upon the formula for a good episode. It was probably too much to hope that the humanity and deftness of Clear would carry over into the next episode, but all the same it is hard to have imagined a week ago that we would have fallen so fast so soon.
For almost three seasons of The Walking Dead we have been watching our dwindling cast of survivors stuck in a quagmire, both emotionally and narratively. Episodes have begun and ended with seeming aimlessness, creating a situation out of thin air and watching as the characters blindly grope through it, terminating with either another escalation of the over-arching plot, or with a muted resolution. This plodding, ethereally-contained episodic system created a kind of entropy for the characters, never allowing a proper arc to be executed within the episode, making each survivor feel more and more like a one-note mouth piece, devoid of evolution or growth.
