The Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 4: Vatos

Vatos

Original Airdate: November 21, 2010

Writer: Robert Kirkman
Director: Johan Renck

In a series that’s gotten a lot of buzz, this episode may have been the most anticipated since the pilot.  Written by comics creator Robert Kirkman, it’s another piece of the never ending debate over how much fidelity an adaptation should have to its source material.  While the series to date has captured the tone of the comics and many of its key themes, plot wise they’ve taken liberties for better or worse.  In fact, almost everything save for this episode’s ending is wildly divergent.  It’s an important piece of the show creating its identity separate from the comics, but what happens after the man responsible for the source dips his toes into the new waters?  The result is an episode that respects the idea that the show going its way and by doing so endorses the show runners to make the show they want to make.

After finding Merle’s severed hand, the rescue team goes about figuring out what he did next.  Finding another (conveniently never mentioned before) stairway, they surmise that he was able to cauterize the wound and escape.  Merle’s status in the episode sets him up to be one of the wild cards of the final two episodes, with him being the likeliest culprit in the van’s theft.  He’s not with the vatos and he could’ve easily gotten back to the camp, but isn’t there when the zombies arrive.  So where did he go?

With Merle’s location unknown, they head to the street to retrieve the guns.  The mission goes off without a hitch until a teenager sneaks up on Daryl.  In the resulting panic Glenn is taken by the kid’s friends while the rescue team takes the kid, Miguel, as their hostage.  The AV Club questioned whether this hostage standoff and the vatos storyline were entirely necessary for the episode.  While it probably will have little impact on the series as a whole, for the episode it was a nice break from the grim situation, something we’ll likely see less of as the series continues.

Considering the shallow at best characterization of Merle and Ed, I went into the vatos storyline not expecting much.: they’re thugs, the end.  However, this subplot thankfully surprised me as it revealed the vatos, run by former janitor Guillermo and nurse Felipe, have taken refuge in an elderly care facility.  As time passed they’ve assembled a crew of the patients’ loved ones and created a nice sanctuary for themselves, but are still tough to those who threaten it.  Though I don’t expect to see them again, I wonder how this camp will change in even a few months as the medicine supplies continue their inevitable decline.  What about their plan to evacuate with the vehicles they’re working on?  What’s going to happen when the reality sets in that moving the old people out of Atlanta will be nearly impossible?  It’s a good idea to have a story like this so near the opening, as it can serve as a good contrast for later seasons.  Maybe this is something Kirkman had wanted to do in the comics, but couldn’t or didn’t think of it until later.

At the camp things are tense with Jim digging several graves on a nearby hilltop.  He gets some good characterization in this episode, as a man watched zombies eat his family, sorrowfully explaining that the only reason he got away was because they were busy eating them.  All the survivors have some major loss like that, like Andrea and Amy worrying about their parents and Andrea later mourning the death of her sister, but it has taken a particularly hard toll on him.  It helps to humanize him.  As much as we’d like to think that we’d be the dashing hero laying zombies to waste, really most of us would be in shock after losing people we loved in the most horrific way.

The episode ends with a major set piece for both this season and the first trade it’s based on: the zombies invade the main camp and lay all the redshirts to waste.  They do the audience a big favor by dispatching the one note Ed, whose presence was so brief it’s puzzling as to why they even bothered putting him on the show aside from the “I’m glad he died first” guy.  Maybe this was another result of condensing storylines for a shorter season.

Besides that being part of the comic’s story, they had to kill someone we were sympathetic to and that was Amy.  It was telegraphed from the episode’s opening, as she and Andrea pondered their parents’ fate in Florida and Andrea preparing to surprise Amy with the mermaid, not to mention that despite the fact that conventional employment is obsolete and Amy’s age, she was just two days away from retirement.

Amy’s death is the first, and certainly far from last, death of a major character this series will see.  The comic is like the series 24, which was similarly ruthless in offing characters regardless of how long they were around or how much fans loved them.  Both series’ willingness to kill characters serves a purpose to the narrative: no one is safe and that the stakes are almost unbearably high.  In The Walking Dead world where consequences and responsibility are of the utmost importance, death has to be omnipresent to justify it.

The one part of the end that didn’t work for me was Jim’s line about why he dug the graves.  Maybe it’s just from watching other supernatural shows and movies, but that line came off as if they want us to believe Jim is psychic.  There was a better way to convey the idea that Jim’s PTSD mindset manifesting the idea that he thinks they’re all dead anyway.  That’s one of the appeals to Walking Dead: it’s set in a world not far removed from ours.

The gore of the first four episodes proved this is not one for the squeamish, but the first slaughter of actual characters shows how dangerous this world can be.  It’s a show all about high stakes and grave consequences, so the body count will need to be high.  With that comes the risk of alienating viewers, but shows like 24 and Lost have been able to dispatch characters without hurting the show’s momentum (well, less so for the former).  When the show gets to season two and doesn’t have to condense the story to accommodate a shorter order, it’ll be interesting to see how far it goes.

Overall Score: 9/10 Abuelas

DON’T READ, SPOILERS BELOW:

(Spoilers for the comics are below, do not read if you plan on reading them or want to go through the TV series with an unspoiled perspective.  Highlight to read.)

In my “Guts” review, I wondered if they were going to try to make Andrea a piece of a potential love quadrangle between her, Rick, Lori and Shane.  Instead here we get a hint that they will be going ahead with their original plan of the Andrea/Dale coupling.  This relationship I’m interesting in seeing if they can pull it off more than the more gruesome moments.  They shrunk the age gap by about ten years (to see if they could pull it off with Emma Bell or someone her age would be even more impressive).  So far so good: it’s not much, but Jeffrey DeMunn and Laurie Holden have some good chemistry.