Shaving your head won't save your soul

Shane gives himself a haircut in "Save the Last One."

Last night's episode of The Walking Dead exhibited all the show's usual problems. There were way too many boring conversations, the women were painfully useless, and the script decided to bang the viewer over the head with symbolism. As EW.com's Darren Franich pointed out, Rick and Lori's conversation about the deer and the beauty of life was the equivalent of Hamlet constantly explaining that his fascination with actors and plays is representative of the absurd falsity of his surroundings. It's painful.

However, the episode was absolutely redeemed by the final scene. After coming back from the overrun high school carrying the medical supplies that could save Carl and telling a sad story about how Otis had sacrificed himself in order to save the Grimes boy, Shane escaped to the bathroom. While Shane shaved his hair in order to hide a missing patch of hair, a flashback showed that Shane, down to his last bullet, had shot Otis in the leg, escaping while a horde of walkers feasted on the poor EMT.

I'm a huge fan of this development. I hate Shane. He is just the worst. Watching the show trying to make him into a sympathetic character was painful because it just didn't work; there was nothing relatable about him. However, the turn into full-on darkness suits Shane well, because it seems like a completely logical move for his character. The man tried to rape Laurie at the CDC, after all; it's too late to make him into anything less than a villain. I also think this could be a good development for Rick, who has been awfully passive as of late. Pitting him against Shane could give Rick the kind of concrete goal that he hasn't had since the disastrous ending of the CDC mission, something the character sorely needs.

As far as the rest of the episode was concerned, there were ups and there were downs. I enjoyed the Daryl and Andrea storyline, largely because Daryl's tough, no-nonsense demeanor kept the worst aspects of Andrea's selfish whining in check. That hanging zombie was pretty cool too. Carol was, as usual, a useless pile of hysteria, and I am way past the point of caring about Dale and Andrea's fractured relationships. On the other hand, the scene between Glenn and Lauren Cohen (who may be named Maggie on the show, but who will always be The Vampire Diaries' Rose to me) was beautifully underplayed, and was also the most that Glenn has gotten to do this season.

The Walking Dead continues to be a frustratingly uneven show; when it's good, as it was during the Shane and Otis scenes, there are few other shows that are better, but it frequently grinds to a halt so that the characters can have a painfully obvious conversation that saps the story of any suspense. If things keep going like they did tonight the show could finally start living up to the potential of the pilot. Of course, this being The Walking Dead, there's every possibility that next week will return to the deadly dull status quo, but I'm hoping that the newly villainous Shane will breathe some re-animated life back into the proceedings.

The real threat on 'The Walking Dead' isn't the zombies; it's the women

Sarah Wayne Callies and Melissa Suzanne McBride in The Walking Dead. Photo courtesy of hollywood.com.

The tense, terrifying highway attack scene that opens "What Lies Ahead," the second-season premiere of The Walking Dead, was brilliant in the way that this show can be when everything goes right. The scene was excruciatingly long in the best possible way, ratcheting up the tension as the survivors crouched under abandoned cars on the freeway, staying silent and hoping against hope that the zombie horde shuffling past won't notice them. There is never a large-scale fight with the zombies in this scene, just unbearably increasing tension as IronE Singleton's (yes, that's how you spell it) T-Dog cuts his arm open, Laurie Holden's Andrea desperately tries to put her gun back together, and Norman Reedus' fantastic Daryl saves the day with his crossbow. It was a fantastic scene, and a great way to kick off the season. If only the rest of the episode had managed to keep it up.

I'm not going to go into the deadly dull scenes between Andrea and Dale or Shane and Lori - scenes that did nothing to move the story forward, and instead just rehashed the problems I didn't care about last season - the painful church interlude, or Rick's stilted opening monologue. Those aspects of the premiere have already been critiqued endlessly. Instead, I want to talk about one of the most worrisome aspects of the episode: the women of The Walking Dead.

Every problem in the episode was the result of female incompetence. The initial zombie stampede (that's not the right word... what's a really slow kind of stampede?) may not have been anyone's fault in particular, but it led to various situations in which the women were always to blame. Andrea's complete incompetence with a gun led to her near-death at the hands of a zombie; not only couldn't she reassemble her gun in order to shoot the thing, but her panicked squealing alerted the zombie that was already leaving to her presence, necessitating her rescue by Dale. Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) spent the entire highway scene with her hand over Carol's mouth, because apparently the woman couldn't keep quiet on her own, even though the two young children in the group - not to mention the guy who sliced his arm open and was bleeding everywhere - had no problem shutting up. And then Lori's complete incompetence as a parent led to her son, Carl, getting shot while on a zombie hunt with Rick and Shane. (I'm barely forgiving Sophia for running from the zombies here because she is a child. Just barely.)

Even when the women weren't actively causing problems, they were conforming to every terrible stereotype imaginable. Andrea was being a pouty, spoiled princess who was angry because her gun was taken away after she proved herself completely incapable of using it; Carol dissolved into a pathetic mess as soon as anything bad happened; and Lori was, as usual, a shrieking harpy. The men, meanwhile, got to kill zombies, cut the zombies open, fix cars and generally be tough and manly. Look at the scene where our plucky band of survivors finds the church, and a few zombies within. Rick, Daryl and Shane burst in and take out the zombies with little-to-no fuss, while the women (and Carl, who is on a zombie-hunting expedition due to his mother's bizarre conception of what it means to be a good parent) huddle in the back, completely useless.

I do understand that Rick, Shane and Daryl are the only characters whose pre-apocalypse skill sets are applicable to their current situation. However, that hasn't stopped Glenn (Steven Yeun) or Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn) from picking up a few tricks. Andrea, Laurie and Carol all made it through the zombie apocalypse somehow - for a while, Laurie must have been on her own with her sister Amy - but apparently none of them learned anything during that time. It seems completely implausible that these three women made it this far, given their complete lack of skills that don't involve crying, whining and yelling. No wonder Sophia ran screaming away from that zombie; she must have just assumed it's the way her gender deals with these situations.

If The Walking Dead wants to become the show that the opening scene showed it could be, a few things need to happen. The story needs to stop grinding to a halt for boring conversations, Shane needs to either get a serious personality makeover or just die, and the writing needs to get better. The biggest problem, however, is that of the show's women. I know that the target demographic for a zombie show is largely male, but there are a whole group of women out here who love zombie movies, and who really want to like this show. We just need a female character we can relate to who isn't a complete basket case. I'm hoping that Lauren Cohan's upcoming appearance will help, but I'm a little afraid of what might happen. If the show's writers manage to turn Chuck's Vivian Volkoff and The Vampire Diaries' Rose into just another useless damsel-in-distress, I'm done.

The Trailer For Season 2 of The Walking Dead is Here!

Photo courtesy of buyzombie.com.

The trailer for the second season of AMC's The Walking Dead premiered today at Comic-Con, and holy shit is it awesome! I, like most people, had my problems with the first season of the show - after starting out with the best TV pilot I have ever seen, it rapidly devolved into many, many scenes that inexplicably involved no zombies whatsoever, instead focusing on internal drama courtesy of the insufferable Shane and the incredibly boring Andrea. But then the finale ending with the CDC blowing up, which was fantastic, and the group again on the run from a horde of the undead, and I got excited again.

The trailer that debuted today has only increased my excitement for the show's October return. Check out the trailer below, and then read on for comments and concerns over the content.

The trailer starts with Shane (Jon Bernthal). I initially disapproved of this, because I really dislike Shane. However, we then cut to a shot of Shane running from a whole lot of zombies, which I love, partly because this show needs more zombies, but mostly because I really hope one of those zombies bites Shane. He would be a much more interesting character as a zombie than he is as a human.

To me, the most promising part of the trailer is the news that Shane and Andrea (Laurie Holden) are planning to leave the group and strike out on their own. I really hope this means that their characters are going to disappear from the show (although it probably doesn't), since they were the worst parts of the first season. Nothing against the actors, because this is really the result of the writing, but Shane is a quick-tempered jerk who tends to just make things worse, and Andrea is... boring. Astoundingly boring. After all, she was one-half (with her sister, Amy) of the single dullest scene that appeared on this show last season. You know, the one where they sat in a boat on a lake and talked about their family for what seemed like half an hour. The one that featured absolutely no zombies. Note to the writers for this season: this is a zombie show, not a sitting-in-a-boat, talking-about-feelings show. More undead corpses, please.

The second most promising part of the trailer happens three minutes in, as Rick (Andrew Lincoln), who is about to shoot some zombies in the head, looks through the scope of his rifle and sees not one, not two, but a whole lot of zombies approaching through a maze of stopped cars. Rick then instructs everyone to hide under the cars, and we are treated to a series of shots of the cast hiding under the cars, trying to keep silent as the undead shuffle past them. This is an amazing premise for a scene, and the show can certainly do edge-of-your-seat suspense like no other - remember that scene from the pilot, where Rick lights his way down a pitch-black staircase with a box of matches - so I'm hoping for excellent suspense and pee-your-pants terror.

Another excellent feature of the trailer is that it is Full. Of. Zombies. Last season often suffered from a lack of walking corpses, but based on this trailer that is going to turn around this season. More zombies are always a good thing, and these do not disappoint. Especially if they dismember Shane and Andrea, which becomes more likely the longer they stay away from the group and strike out on their own.

We also see some new faces at the end of the trailer, in the forms of Lauren Cohan (Rose of The Vampire Diaries!) and Scott Wilson. According to this article, Wilson will be playing Hershel Greene, a farm owner, and Cohan will be playing his daughter Maggie, who is a possible love interest for my favorite character, Glenn (Steven Yuen). I'm really pleased about this for three reasons: I absolutely loved Cohan on TVD, it promises more of a storyline for the amazing Yuen, and the fact that there has to be a reason that Hershel and Maggie survived by themselves for this long. Hopefully a twisted, disturbing, wonderful reason. (If you've read Justin Cronin's fantastic post-apocalyptic novel The Passage, I'm thinking of the Haven. If you haven't read The Passage, go out and buy it right this second.)

While the trailer is extremely promising, it does one worrisome element. One of those is the marked absence of Norman Reedus' Daryl, my second favorite character after Glenn. For the four-minute duration of a trailer, all that Daryl does is state that hoping and praying is a waste of time (which is probably true) and ride a motorcycle through a post-apocalyptic wasteland like a badass. Let's hope that the season is heavier on Daryl than the trailer is, and decidedly lighter on Shane and Andrea.

Stray Thoughts:

• Rick saying "To hell with the noise" and pulling out his gun is just fabulous.
• There's not much Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) in the trailer either. Let's hope it stays that way.
• The trailer is framed by Rick talking into a walkie-talkie. Let's hope this means that the return of Morgan (Lennie James) is imminent.
• I don't know what the zombie at 3:59 is eating, but it is disgusting.
• One reason Daryl is a thousand times more badass than either Rick or Shane is his weapon of choice - a crossbow.
• It appears that one of the kids is injured, which is why Rick is running for the farmhouse. If that kid was bitten by a zombie, there could be a really great, Night of the Living Dead storyline happening. (If you haven't seen Romero's film, why are you reading this? Go watch it, now.)
• I really want to have a party for the Walking Dead premiere at which I serve this cake.