The Walking Dead Write - Up ''Killer Within''

 

On last night's episode of The Walking Dead, to say what happened shocked me would be an understatement. Never in a millions years would I have expected things to turn out the way they did. Of course as mind blowing as it was, its also disturbing thinking back to it.

 Okay. Now, let’s begin and allow the tears to flow if necessary, because Sunday night involved the most emotionally upsetting development we’ve ever witnessed in AMC’s version of zombie land. First of all, let’s talk T-Dog who has arguably been the most famously underdeveloped character on “The Walking Dead.” His trajectory on the show can succinctly be described like this: Fight with Merle so that Merle ends up chained to a roof (Season 1); after becoming light-headed due to an injury, deliver monologue that implies everyone around him may also be as racist as Merle (Season 2); kill a lot of zombies (all seasons); argue in favor of letting Axel and Oscar the prisoners join the group (Season 3). I was so excited when T-Dog expressed his opinions about the inmates. “Yeah!” I thought. Now that Dale’s gone, maybe T-Dog can become the new Conscience-in-Chief of Grimes Central, which means the guy will finally get to say actual lines of dialogue in multiple episodes. Roughly 30 minutes later, the dude was dead. After getting bitten on the shoulder by a walker a place that, unlike Hershel’s leg is tough to isolate and remove from the rest of the body he sacrificed himself to additional zombies so that Carol could run away and survive. “Go!” he shouted. “I’m dead!” What he was really saying was: “Go! They are never going to adequately develop my character, so I may as well turn myself into an all-you-can-eat buffet for the undead! T-Dog, we hardly knew you. No. Really we hardly did. And that makes your death a real shame. As for Carol, Daryl and Rick assumed she had died, too. But I am not so sure. I think she’s still upright and breathing somewhere in that prison.

 Sadly, no longer upright or breathing is again, SPOILER ALERT, and last time I’m going to say it Lori Grimes, a wife and mother who has often been the subject of intense Internet criticism but whose demise during childbirth was a wrenching gut punch. The struggle to keep composure when she said goodbye to her son Carl “Don’t let the world spoil you. You’re so good,” she said through her agony was one that many “Walking Dead” fans undoubtedly lost last night, even the ones who only watch to track the number of eyeball stabbings per week. Sarah Wayne Callies, who has thanklessly played Lori for 2 1/2 seasons, played her final scene in such a heart wrenching way.

Like I mentioned before, her character was always criticized for being an unfit mother for rarely watching little Carl. But Lori Grimes was living in desperate, zombie times. You try being pregnant and bunking with strangers while your son recovers from a gunshot wound, and you try to process how, exactly, your husband woke up from his coma. It’s not easy. Lori Grimes didn’t make it look easy, either. She wasn’t going to win any “mother of the year awards,” as she herself noted. But she was a woman who loved deeply, tried her best and, when it really counted put her children first so they could have something resembling a future. So salute her today. Don’t hate. And say a prayer for the two Grimes men: Rick, who looked completely shattered by the horrible news, and Carl, a kid who was forced to shoot his own mother in the head so she wouldn’t revive and turn into a walker. I don’t think there’s a term on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that covers what that does to a boy. But I have to think that it will psychologically mess him up and that we’ll have to keep a close eye on him in coming episodes. That’s right, Lori Grimes. We’re watching Carl for you. Rest in peace.