In which Kim and Shawn try to make sense of the episode.
Kim: We’re only on the second episode of the second season and I am seriously not even sure I can continue supporting this show with my viewing. I was happy to see a Preacher commercial, even though it wasn’t an intriguing one. Just the fact that it’s coming in just over a month is more entertaining to me than this show. This episode made zero sense and I mean “zero.”
So, your boat driver tells you that as soon as it’s clear, you’re heading out again. What a perfect time to spend exploring a mostly abandoned resort island with irresponsible teenagers! At night! Why do you do this? Zero sense.
You find this family and you spend an inordinate amount of time with them, drinking wine and beer while your teenage junkie is buddying up with a little boy, your daughter’s getting drunk, and your other boy is creeping around the house, seemingly less well-adjusted than the junkie. Then you all go back to the boat to sleep before getting up and separating again? Is that what happened here? Zero sense.
I do need to talk about this family. I’m unsure of the timeline (as usual for both this and The Walking Dead). I don’t know how long they’ve been holed up on this island. I mean, they’ve built a fence and planted a garden and shot most, if not all, of their friends and family in the head, so they’ve been here for quite some time. It’s not just that they live there, it’s that they are overly prepared for the end of the world as we know it. Zero sense.
In the midst of a zombie apocalypse, you’ve got Alicia with her iPod, wandering around an island alone. You’ve got emo boy ramming a pick axe into walkers’ eye sockets. Dad gets in the truck with the crazy “man of the house” to drive to an undisclosed location, while blondie picks vegetables with the mom who just wants strangers to take her children. All the while, the junkie is in the house, roaming around, and rifling through medicine cabinets? Was he looking to score some oxy? Then he’s in that office, after being disappointed with the medicine-cabinet offerings. He looks around in a place filled with maps and books. He sees a globe and that is exactly where he looks? In something that is not out of place in that room? Zero sense.
Back at the boat Daniel’s searching for evidence of whatever Old Spice has going on. Why is he so damn nosey? At some point, aren’t you just happy that, relatively speaking, you’re “safe” for the time being? I mean, he could have left your ass at the beach house. But no, he let you on his boat and this is how you repay the man? I’ve had jealous boyfriends before and if I ever found one snooping through my things, it’d be all over. Between junkie and Daniel, I’ve never seen a group of nosier assholes in my entire life. But hey, at least his daughter took her antibiotics. Why is she even there? Zero sense.
Where did Old Spice get a phone or radio, why does it still work, and why does he look like he’s sitting in a diner waiting on coffee and pie? What is he up to? Who is he meeting? What’s he dragging everyone along for? Who really cares at this point? Zero sense.
I don’t know about you, but I’m out of patience with this show. My kid is going to have to do some fancy talking if he wants me to watch another episode with him. Also, I heard it was picked up for a third season? Zero sense.
Shawn: You nailed the Zero Sense elements of this show. So what did you leave for me??
1.) NO WHALE’S VAGINA. I’m a little sad that we aren’t headed to San Diego. It’s one of my favorite cities and I was looking forward to a zombie-filled run through the Gaslamp District and by the Convention Center and over to PetCo, maybe stopping at the Stone Brewery just in case. What really got me early on in The Walking Dead was the shots of Atlanta and the trips into the city. It made the whole thing feel more “real”. This show had a decent run into Los Angeles last season but I thought that the ability to show a run through post-bombed San Diego would be an interesting development. And it makes zero sense that every city West of Denver has been nuked but that Atlanta wasn’t? I am having some continuity problems.
2.) EMO ANATOMY. Every episode are we going to get the filler scene of our teen girl walking around and listening to some emotional and vaguely applicable song? Like any good hospital drama, this should happen at exactly 38 minutes into the episode. And then just when I’ve almost been lulled to sleep, we can get our only zombie killing of the episode. It makes zero sense that she still has a charge in anything when I can’t keep a cell phone going until Noon without a battery level panic.
3.) DOUBLE STRAND. So I finally know his name is Strand. I kept forgetting until this episode. For a bit I was just going to revert to calling him Mr. Paranoid Boat Driver. I know he’s worried about lots of things happening out there. I thought he had some ulterior motives from the start but now I’m thinking that’s a red herring. We know the boat isn’t his, right? It’s not even the same freaking boat we saw from the shore. That aside, he’s just being very conservative. That’s perfect if I’m on the boat and we’re being followed. On a TV show it’s just annoying. There is zero sense in stopping the boat now while being pursued.
4.) GEORGE AND MELISSA STEPFORD. Once again I need to know how long this has been going on. Because it seems like this family has gone batshit crazy in a very short time. We’re talking our pills, mending fences, killing the zombies that wade onto shore (in a very manipulative opening scene), and painting our dolls to reflect how we kill people now. From the very start, this felt like a throwaway episode. There was no way that the whole family was leaving here intact. Is that drama? Is that tension? Not really. It’s just talking and waiting. And talking. And talking. And ohhh, the kid’s a zombie. Wheeee. It makes zero sense to keep taking kids along. Sorry. If it’s been as long as it appears to have been you have to have thought through these issues. This is a “Day One” discussion on the Lido Deck of our boat – how do we eat, how do we handle others who want on the boat, do we mercy-kill mothers who have been turned by their zombie children…You don’t talk about it when it happens a couple months into it.
I have two concerns going forward. One is the very real Love Boat style of meeting new people on our boat each week and then figuring out which of them end up dead and which of them will sleep with the bartender. Two is that we are already getting our Morgan and our Rick and our Carl and do we just end up with a West Coast version of all the characters we already know from The Walking Dead. And that’s the real thing that would make zero sense.
