Heads Up Monologue

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Remember how last week I begged for The Walking Dead to get on with it? Well, this week I got my wish in an episode full of some much-anticipated answers, some great characters moments (amidst some shocking stupidity and assholery), and one hell of a cliffhanger for next week’s fall finale. “Heads Up” starts slow, which is weird when you consider it begins with the reveal of what everyone has already known for a while: Glenn is alive. As most of us figured out, all that guts-ripping was of Nicholas’ body, and Glenn manages to scoot underneath the dumpster he was previously standing on to relative safety, and then spends the night there until the zombies leave. When he crawls out, he’s thirsty, and he’s still partially covered in Nicholas juice, but that’s really the only consequences of his seeming death scene back in “Thank You.” I find this “twist” incredibly obnoxious, and not just because it seems completely implausible that none of the several hundred zombies surrounding him would fail to even just scratch him while they’re tearing Jolly Old Nick apart mere inches away from his flesh, or during his slow crawl underneath the dumpster.…show more content…
It’s one thing to present something and let an audience jump to the wrong conclusion on its own, but that’s not what the end of “Thank You” was. It told the audience that Glenn was dead—not just by the deceptive camera angle that made it look like the zombies were pulling out Glenn’s intestines, but the entire scene. The slow-motion, the swelling string music—this isn’t just Glenn appearing to die, but the show telling us by the language of visual media that Glenn is dead. The show lied on a meta-narrative level, and that’s bad storytelling. The Walking Dead has cried wolf, effectively, because now whenever someone does die, and the show wants its to be tragic and meaningful, we won’t be able to trust what we’re seeing, which is going to destroy the impact of these future
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