I’m hoping people have noticed that my Zombie Reports have been a lot about The Walking Dead, lately. If you have noticed and you are annoyed, give me a break. Season 3 of The Walking Dead is the biggest zombie news since Florida immersed itself in zombie-making bath salts. So, here’s my Official Unofficial Recap of Episode 2, Season 3 of The Walking Dead!
SPOILER ALERT!
(Those of you who both have DISH TV and don’t understand the word “recap,” you’ve been warned.)
The show picked up right where Episode 1 ended. Rick and his people are trying to save the life of One-Legged Hershel, formerly known as Two-Legged Hersel before Rick cut off his zombie spit infected leg with an ax.
The surviving prisoners we met at the tail end of Episode 1 are duly impressed by Rick’s act of savage ax necessity for all of three seconds. These prisoners are under the impression that they are Bad Asses, in spite of the fact that they’ve waited ten months for the guard who locked them into the cafeteria at the beginning of the walker apocalypse to return for them, something that even a lone, terrified four year old wouldn’t wait for after about a day. The prisoners continue to show us their stupids by ignoring zombie killing instructions, which results in a comically gory scene where they shank zombies in the guts instead of bashing in their skulls. I will not be surprised if prisoners in prisons all over the country start boycotting the show, since The Walking Dead has even less use for prisoner characters than it has for black characters. Although two new black prisoner characters ARE dead before we reach the thirty minute mark.
More about Hershel’s bloody stump. Blah blah, they don’t want him to die because they’ll miss him and because they’ll have to kill him when he rises from the dead and falls over because he only has one leg. Then Carl does something MIND BOGGLING. HE WANDERS OFF ON HIS OWN ADVENTURE. First he wouldn’t stay in the house, now he won’t stay in the cell. These people need to cut off one of Carl’s legs.
Carol suddenly has an emergency, and it’s a great time to have it, right in the middle of a real emergency (man with cut off leg maybe dying and becoming a zombie). Carol’s emergency is Lori is pregnant. Well, yes, yes she is. She has been for a while. We are worried about this right now because apparently Lori is overdue to have her Nerf Ball-sized baby, and Carol wants to practice cutting women open in case Hershel isn’t there to do it. Carol enlists Glenn to help her obtain a corpse to practice on. I’m surprised they even bothered killing their medical school specimen, frankly. If it’s practice Carol wants, what better practice could there be than performing the operation on a writhing, clawing, moaning female body? Lori isn’t likely to stay corpse-like still for a C-Section without anesthesia. While Carol practices, someone or someTHING watches her from the woods outside of the fence. I hope it’s a malpractice lawyer.
Back in the prison, Hershel stops breathing. This means he’s dead and this means he’s going to turn into a zombie. Lori performs CPR on him anyway. We are treated to a moment where we don’t know if zombie Hershel is ripping out Lori’s tongue or if confused, no-blood Hershel thinks Lori is his deceased wife. Turns out he was confused, and it’s a little anticlimactic. Lori is fine, nobody ripped out her tongue and nobody rips her a new one for endangering herself, her baby, and everybody else.
The last scene of the episode is Lori trying to get back with Rick because there are no lawyers left (except maybe the malpractice lawyer watching Carol from the woods). Rick’s zombie-like response leaves us to wonder if he has held onto his life but lost his soul. Because, my God, who WOULDN’T jump all over, “Let’s be a couple, again. What the heck, it’s not like we can’t get DIVORCED.”
If you watched The Talking Dead after the show, you saw the BIGGEST spoiler that has been ever been spoiled by a show connected with a show where people don’t want spoilers EVER. I’m not going to blow it here, because it was almost as big as showing us Sophia coming out of the barn the week before Sophia came out of the barn. Umm..AMC? Don’t spoil your popular show by trying to boost the ratings of your silly show. It’s about like leaving Hershel to die because you need to learn to cut people open in case Hershel dies.
Jaye's Love Affair With Genre Fiction 
ol@ cutting off carls legs!!!
I am ROTFLMAO! Thank god I chose to watch the San Francisco Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals. I did catch the last fifteen minutes of TWD, in time to see Lori perform her idiotic miracle. And yes, she did endanger herself and her baby and everyone else. Because there was no Shane to save her from herself.
I’m telling you, after watching Lori behave like a dunce, Carol behave like a dip shit – her cutting left me unmoved, Rick behave like a monster, Carl return to form, all I could think was – They killed off Shane for this? Rick is worse than Shane because he thinks of himself as one of the good guys. Shane knew darn tootin’ well he weren’t no good guy!
I’m left with two images, one haunting, one stupid – Shane, in one of this last scenes, watching a zombie roam aimlessly through waving grass, realizing this is their life now and all Rick’s nattering about a utopia at the farm was pointless. And in a way, related to the second image – Herschel when he still had both legs – sitting in the grass in the prison yard talking about growing tomatoes. Tomatoes? With what? Do you have the seeds? Do you have a way to get the seeds? Do you know how hard it is to grow tomatoes from seed? Why would you grow tomatoes? Do you know how long it takes tomatoes to ripen? Do you have a way to preserve tomatoes? Why not corn? Why not a staple? Why not find a goat or a milk cow? Or chickens?
Gaaaaaaa! At least T-Dog got in one of the last words. And did you notice Daryl’s apology? He’s a much nicer guy than Rick but Daryl being all nicey nice nice is just so wrong.
Please, Andrea and Michonne, ASAP! TWD gets one more chance and that’s it. Hubby’s already lost interest.
I’m through. I watched the second episode last night. I’m not watching any more.
The writers of this show have broken the two most important rules of any fiction: One) Do not bore the readers/watchers; Two) Victims are only interesting when they fight back.
Zombie movies with hopeless endings work because they are only 90 minutes long and they leave it up to the moviegoers to gather in coffee shops and Denny’s Restaurants after the show to endlessly hash out the question: “Well, what would you do when the zombies come?”
TWD is answering the question and apparently the answer is: Hide like rats. Oh, Jaye, they’re doing anything to survive! Yeah? So what? So they can cower in a prison and wait for the powdered eggs to run out? Survival isn’t living. It’s just breathing until you die. Go visit an old folks home and watch survivors drooling in wheelchairs. It would probably be more interesting than this bunch of losers.
These people have had ten months to figure out zombies. Oh wow–chain link fencing keeps them out? Why the hell didn’t they build a fence around Herschel’s farm? Not that I truly believe chain link will keep out zombies, because I’ve had two chow-mix dogs that were masters in the art of defeating chain link, including chewing their way through the fabric, but that’s nit-picky. Seems like the best these losers can do is scavenge. Only they don’t scavenge anything interesting. Why aren’t they plotting, scheming, inventing, experimenting? Why doesn’t this show have a MacGyver or even a Professor (from Gilligan’s Island). What a treat it would be to wonder each week what kind of crazy coconut contraption the Professor will come up with to kill zombies.
Stringing out a zombie movie into season after season of despair speaks of a horrendous lack of imagination on the writers’ part. “Run and hide” is NOT a story. Last season was interesting because of the in-fighting and character dramas. So the writers kill off or run off the only characters worth fighting with. Now it’s run and hide, hide and run. Come on! Writers of TWD, is this the best you came up with during the endless hours you spent drinking oily coffee at Denny’s after watching Dawn of the Dead? Give this bunch of sad sacks some dreams and aspirations. Give them some goals. Give them something to live for. Powdered eggs and prison walls just don’t cut it.
I agree with Jaye. Some long term plans please? Remember when Shane built a watch tower on Herschel’s farm while everyone ignored him and went about acting all stupid? And Lori approached him, thanked him, and he said, among other things, well somebody’s gotta do it. He had the right idea. Build a defensible perimeter and keep watch. Seems to me the writers may be leading us toward another group of survivors who have done exactly that, but… I think my patience is at an end.