It’s October. Time to talk horror. I’ll focus on horror-related posts until Halloween comes and goes.
*SPOILERS FOLLOW*
Even though I’ve had a few days to think it over, I’m still wondering what the hell I just saw on Sunday.
When The Walking Dead’s fourth season concluded, I was psyched. (This stands in sharp contrast to the previous season finale which spent too much time building up to one of the most anti-climatic “battles” I’ve ever seen.) Here were the Season 4 highlights for me:
- The blonde finally went missing (she’ll be back, of course, but in the meantime we don’t have to hear her stupid singing).
- Carol didn’t hesitate to shoot a little girl who totally had to go. This is much cooler when you think about all the whining Rick would have done for 3+ episodes before finally arriving at the same decision.
- The Governor was in danger of becoming sympathetic, which I thought was unnecessary, but then he was all like, “Nah, lol, fuck you” and killed a bunch of people, further rising in the annals of TV villainy.
- The people at Terminus turned out to be cannibals.
- And the high point of the entire series: the introduction of Eugene Porter, a redneck scientist with a mullet and an affinity for video games. I don’t know why, but I like the three new characters more than any of the existing ones. I really don’t give a shit who they kill as long as they don’t kill Eugene and friends.
So here’s what we knew up until last Sunday: we had zombies outside Terminus. We had cannibals inside. Nearly all the surviving heroes of the series were more or less fucked. It was shaping up to be a great big mind-fuck of a suspenseful season. But that’s not what we got. What we got, instead, was pure action. Don’t get me wrong. It was very satisfying action (that ridiculous bit with the pathetically aimed bottle rocket notwithstanding), but I can’t help but feel some potential horror was wasted here.
First of all it’s a horror show, not an action movie. While I appreciate the writers’ attempt to give it some urgency (let’s face it, the series drags sometimes), I had blown up what I thought was going to happen in my head. I certainly didn’t want to see them spend an entire season in Terminus, but I thought that, at the very least, we were going to spend a few episodes wondering, “Who are the cannibals going to eat next?” Think about the potential for terror there! I kind of figured what we got Sunday wouldn’t come along until the mid-season finale.
This is all to say that my expectations fucked me. The more I think about it, the more I realize the writers probably made the right decision. If they had done what I was expecting, I probably would have been complaining it was predictable.
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