a few thoughts on ‘The Walking Dead’: “TS-19”

It also seems a bit of a stretch that the sheriff and his gang arrive at the CDC almost at the precise moment when the power is about to run out. It’s a little bit mean of the writers -- and not in any particularly interesting way -- to torture the characters with hot water and cold beer and jammies and comfy beds only to pull it all away again. If I cared more about these characters, perhaps this would have been more poignant -- Jeffrey DeMunn has been teh awesome here, and Laurie Holden, but they haven’t had anywhere near enough to do -- but it seems as if all the really interesting stuff is happening offscreen. The CDC doc with his TS-19 experiment? How much more powerful would that all have been if we’d gotten a fully dramatized flashback of those events, instead of him merely relating them, with some MRI illustrations? The flashback we did get, for instance, of the deputy trying to rescue the sheriff from the hospital, was indeed intense, what with the soldiers shooting patients and the deputy all upset about not being able to get his boss out and all.

Wait: Dr. Edwin Jenner? Like the smallpox guy? *snort*

Will I keep watching when this comes back? I dunno: Will the gang be traveling to France to check in on the scientists there? If there’s supposed to be any hint of where the show is going apart from France -- which I don’t seriously believe is going to happen -- I’m not seeing it. Are they just going to wander the lonely backroads of America forever? That doesn’t sound all that exciting. If the soap opera surrounding the characters was intriguing, that could be enough. But it isn’t.

Still: I have almost a year to decide. The Walking Dead isn’t scheduled to return till next October. That’s one good way to kill off whatever momentum the show might have built up...