The Walking Dead S04E02 Review: Nooo the Piggies

The Walking Dead, Season 4, Episode 2: Infected

It's like every episode is trying to put a new spin on the zombie formula. Season one was all about the huge hordes of zombies in a city. Season two had wandering zombie hordes in forests and around a farm. Season three generally had variations of the season two formula, what with the focus shifting to a human antagonist. Last episode we've got zombies dropping down from the ceiling in a mall. This episode we've got a small determined zombie army pushing a fence together. It's pretty much inevitable considering the foreshadowing from last episode with how the zombies apparently now just tend to congregate around the fences where it's noisy, and it's almost like a daily ritual for the prison group to stab these zombies in the head every day.

Overall, though, it's a pretty solid episode and a neat way to introduce and display the threat of the main antagonist of the fourth season, the disease. Whether it was the pigs, or the rats, or simple airborne disease from all the rotting flesh walking around, it's caused Patrick the glasses boy to become a zombie at the end of the last episode, and he unleashes a bit of hell in the prison as he goes on a one-man rampage, displaying one of the classic horrors of the zombie horror genre -- a single infected patient quickly spreads into many, many more infection-spreading zombies. Like a real disease, in a way.

There are a lot more characters around now and we're trying our best to balance all of these named characters while introducing new ones. Obviously a lot of the Woodsbury people are going to be cannon fodder, like Patrick the glasses boy, or the balding father who Carol had to mercy-kill in front of his daughters, or, well, a bunch of other nameless people who die. I don't really care for these people, not even the father -- with the prisoners from season three, they at least got names and one-line personalities before they get picked off one by one -- but hey, it at least shows that there are a lot higher stakes here. 

There were some nice moments of relationship between the characters, too. Carol's trying to teach the young girls to be strong (maybe she sees her own daughter -- dead because of her helplessness -- in them?), though honestly no one's ever going to be ready to kill their own parent, zombie plague or not. One in particular is a creepy kid called Lizzie, who's been giving zombies names in the previous episode. Like her sister points out, she's "messed up". There's also the culmination of the drama between Carol telling Carl not to rat her self-defense lesson to Rick, something that Carl does at the end of the episode.... culminating in Farmer Rick burning the remnants of the pig farm and giving both himself and Carl guns again at last. Farmer Rick is weird. He does get to be the hero in this episode, and honestly I'd rather last episode not have his random adventure with creepy forest hobo girl, but rather just have him be a farmer, and deal with all the domestic problems of the prison community, to make this episode a bigger dramatic moment.

I also find it nice that Carol's "you're weak" scene could easily be translated to Farmer Rick, with him getting complacent now that there's a lot more people around, and he's happy tending to pigs and cucumbers and trying to shy away from, y'know, the whole living in an apocalyptic world thing. Not a big fan of Hallucinating Rick from last season, but at least he's fun to groan at. Farmer Rick is just boring. Not that I don't sympathize with the dude wanting just time to just stay away from all this madness and just be a good daddy to Carl and Judith -- hell, you could argue that Rick's coping mechanism is a lot healthier than Carol, who uses two scared little girl's dying father as a teaching moment... but you could easily make the argument that Carol is not letting naivety and some hurt feelings get in the way of preparing these children for the world of zombies and diseases.

Tyreese and Karen are all lovey-dovey, and neither of them are well-developed characters, so one of them's going to die. I clean forgot Karen was a character from season three, and I watched that season last week. Tyreese has a lot more buildup to him and he's a comic-book main character, so of course it's Karen that dies. Surprisingly, though, not during the zombie outbreak, neither is it due to losing her to the disease (which the final scene seems to initially hedge towards), but someone particularly judicious has pulled the two sick people in quarantine and burned them alive, leaving Karen's charred corpse for Tyreese to find. Yep, that's a lot more horrifying and mysterious and better storytelling than just 'durr hurr what is this disease'. 

Adding someone apparently attracting the zombies at the fence by feeding them rats (is it Lizzie, that crazy bastard kid?) and we have a nice mystery on our hands. Of course, the only way this is going to get a proper impact is that if it was done by someone we know well, but honestly none of the pre-Woodsbury cast is going to be responsible for something so dumb, so I'm just resigned to noting anyone from the Woodsbury group to get some characterization and be revealed as the zombie feeder. 

There's also a nice bit with Michonne, showing emotion as she cries into cute little baby Judith. She doesn't really get much beyond the action scene with Carl and Maggie around midway through the episode, before a brief talk to Beth, but that moment with Li'l Ass-Kicker is pretty powerful. Michonne has been one of the more problematic characters throughout season three, and having her slowly grow more beyond a glowering "we must save Angela" crazy samurai lady is definitely an improvement. 

It's still a pretty slow episode, though, with multiple parts of the episode feeling uneven -- did we really need all the singing scenes? And going through 'Rick slits a pig' three times? Granted the show's still trying to show off its newest villain while still trying to build up a mystery and give each member of the now-sizable cast something to do, so at least they get points for trying.