This episode the writers decided they’d much rather be
writing The Walking Dead so decided
to put Jenna, friend Suzy, Teresa, Xander, Teresa’s mother, Jake (who arrived
to give the encrypted drive Jenna just in time to helpfully soot Teresa’s
mother’s kidnapper) and three extras (one of whom dies) in the top of the
secure clean room tower to have lots of tense moments where they kill zombies
trying to reach them
Sorry, did I say zombies? I mean drug addicts. And this is troublesome. Because you could have replaced these drug addicts with zombies and quite literally not have appreciably changed the plot in any real fashion. This is disturbing because this is so often how we regard drug addicts. Not as people struggling with an illness. Not people who are hurting. Not people who, all too often, have underlying mental illnesses (not that people with mental illnesses are much better treated!). Even killing these zombie-addicts, battering in their brains, burning them, blowing them up, without even the slightest hesitation or moral quandaries. People generally feel worse about killing savage dogs than these people.
It got so extreme that when one of the drug addicts bites
Teresa’s mother (yes, he bites her. Bites her, really? Drug addicts bite now?
Are they also hungry for BRAAAAAAINS?), I actually thought she was going to
turn. In fact, that’s pretty much how everyone treats her – she has to leave
the tower for fear of her turning into a zombie and eating everyone
infecting everyone
We’ve already established that this disease isn’t airborne.
They couldn’t tuck her in a corner? It also meant she, Teresa and Xander,
having just reconciled, have to be so sad.
I’m sorry you appear to be having a tragic goodbye scene
with characters I don’t give a shit about. Moving on.
I do like the moment Xander turns to Teresa’s mother and tells her to give it a rest with her constant attacks because damn she is not helping.
Jenna and Jake talk relationships. I care about this only
slightly more than the zombie bite.
Teresa has pregnancy issues. Suzy is also claustrophobic.
I am bored.
Ok outside the wall do we have a better plot?
Nope, we have a more foolish one though.
Lex continues to snipe at the authorities, in this case
the National Guard who are now enforcing a huge empty zone around the Cordon
because they haven’t pissed off enough people. This also displaces Lex’s father
with whom he is somewhat estranged. In between the tension, his dad does have
some life lessons to pass on. It seems dad once lost his temper with a
not-labelled-as-such-but-pretty-obviously a racist bigot, gave him a good
punching and ended up being fired because of it. His lesson is, yes you
definitely should be angry, but you have to use your anger carefully (and slit
throats while people sleep) because the system isn’t fair and arseholes will
use it against you
Interesting advice. Except Jana manages to get a call through on the satellite phone during the zombie attack, so Lex runs off half cocked and ends up being arrested trying to cross into the cordon. Oopsie.
All in all, a pretty underwhelming episode, I have to
say.
