The Walking Dead – 18 Miles Out
It’s about time!!
Rick continues his journey to true leadership by calling Shane out on his relationship with Lori. I won’t call it an affair, because they (well, Lori, at least) though Rick was dead.
Shane is still his cocky self when Rick stops the car and says they need to talk. He clearly does not want to talk to Rick about Lori. Rick asks him point-blank of he shot Otis, and Shane admits it. One quick shot to the leg, and Carl lives. Shane tells |Rick he can’t just expect to be the good guy and still live.
I almost fistpumped when Rick said he wasn’t the good guy anymore, that he would do anything to keep his family safe. Up until the last two episodes, this one included, I agreed – with Shane: I didn’t think Rick could do what it takes to keep the group safe either.
Rick alludes to knowing about it all long before Lori confessed it when he tells Shane that the only way for them to move past this is for Shane to accept the he doesn’t love Lori, and that Shane accept that Lori and Carl and the baby is Rick’s, not his. Is this humility, Shane? Or plotting secretly? I can’t decide. I like that he at least had the decency to look like he was being upbraided. I can’t quite accept that it’s not plotting, but there is something in the way that he can’t look at Rick that makes me think he may be coming around.
Another surprise – Shane actually looked crestfallen when Rick says that Shane doesn’t love Lori. Almost like he either wants to protest but knows he can’t or is actually listening to Rick. And when he promises Rick that he never looked at Lori like that before, I actually believe him
The Lori/Maggie/Little Woman/Man Up conversation. Do we bother? It took me back to my earlier thoughts about how she sees herself as the puppet master behind the scenes…and it also just kind of occurred to me that, as a woman, don’t we all at one point or another have that conversation with ourselves? That we can encourage and cajole and support while inwardly pushing the men in our lives in the direction we want? Maybe I’m just pissed off because she is saying it all out loud and I don’t really feel she is entitled to because she bugs me so much.
Shane and Rick are back in the car, taking Randall to his ’18 miles out’ drop-off point. Is it just me, or is a parent-child relationship developing here? Maybe it was always there, we just couldn’t see it through all of Shane’s crazy. Shane is literally slumped back in his seat like a petulant child who just got reprimanded, and Rick is the parent trying to placate him by engaging in conversation about plans for the future. Shane literally says three words in response to Rick’s plans for the coming winter.
I’m not going to talk too much about the fight, other than to say it was a long time coming. I am glad it finally happened, and I am even more invested now in finding out how in changes the dynamic of the group, and how it changes Shane’s and Rick’s relationship. I’m also really curious to see Lori’s face when Rick comes back with Shane.
The conversation between Lori and Andrea about laundry made me laugh. For Lori to bitch about how Andrea ‘sits on top of an RV working on her tan with a rifle across her lap’ sounds like a load of sour grapes to me. ‘The men can handle that fine on their own’? Didn’t Lori just take it upon herself to be the only one who could go and help Rick, Glenn, and Herschel? She comes across sounding pissed off that she didn’t think of it first.
Beth is suddenly awake (which threw me, because she was still catatonic during last week’s episode, no?), and has decided she wants to kill herself. On the one hand, I can see where Andrea is coming when it comes to Beth – no one can choose life for Beth, she has to choose it for herself. How anyone would go about assisting in that choice is up for debate; I don’t agree with how Andrea did it. And I can’t say that Beth doesn’t have a point either; do you sit back and wait to see all your friends and family be eaten by zombies or do you choose to go while your life is still peaceful? I am one of the people who believe that the last moments of your life can haunt you for eternity (and not in the least in a religious sense), so I can see where that is coming from. And so does Maggie, if we can tell from her hesitation and her willingness to hear her sister out.
I am sure I am not the only one who gasped when Rick took Randall and they left. When he paused when he saw those two zombie cops lying there dead, was that a reminder of who they once were to each other – partners, friends, who would die for each other? Is that what made him go back, or did he plan to go back for Shane all along?
There’s something going on with that walker (person?) in the field. I feel it in my bones, like I did about the red doorknob in The Sixth Sense..keep that walker/person in mind for the next (last) three episodes.
