The Walking Dead, Season 4, Episode 9: After
The previous episode was the mid-season finale of season four, and, well, instead of a two-day break audiences back in 2013 they probably waited for a couple of months. So we go from the huge, status-quo-destroying mid-season finale into this episode. Instead of a big action sequence, though, we instead get a far more personal episode on Carl. And a fair bit of Michonne, but mostly Carl. Only three members of the main cast really show up in this episode -- Michonne, Carl and Rick (who spends all of it half-dead on a couch), with the fates of what happened to the rest of the cast basically unknown to us. And the focus of the episode is definitely on Carl, who is a very... divisive character in the fanbase, as I get it. I personally don't have much of a problem with psycho-child trying-to-be-a-man Carl, it's Rick that I have a lot of problems with. And Carl voices a lot of my complaints about Rick in a very, very epic rant -- where everyone tries their best to survive all he's doing is play farmer and be mopey and hope things can get to normal (but continues to lord over people like Carol and Carl with the moral high ground) where Carl would've preferred Rick to not continue leaving in a dream world -- this isn't going to be a normal world anymore.
It's definitely a slow episode, one that takes its time showing some trippy flashbacks, long shots of the autumn-leaf-covered street that the group finds themselves in, showing the aftermath of the prison war (and Hershel's creepy zombie head), showing Carl doing very human things like vomiting, getting excited when he sees DVD's and tubs of pudding, showing him panting after surviving one zombie crisis after another... it's definitely the right choice to backpedal a bit after the breakneck action sequences we've got in the past few episodes, and showing off Carl -- who has a lot of screentime but not enough development -- and his mindset, acknowledging that while he's matured way faster than any child his age, he's also still a child. From his loud ranting at his unconscious father, to his begging for Rick to wake up, both sides of Carl's personality is shown very well.
Rick himself is just broken. He's juggling facing the possible death of his infant daughter (something I'm sure will end up to be a fake-out) with trying to survive and be a good father to Carl, but the injuries and tiredness he's accumulated over the past few episodes have kind of worn him down so much that the moment they find a house to take shelter in he just conks out and doesn't wake up until the last two minutes of the episode.
Michonne, meanwhile, is the most human she's ever been here. The only real emotion she's shown before is in response to Andrea's death, or during her 'funny serious' moments during her little duet adventure with Carl, but here we get a jarring transition from our usual Walking Dead fare into Michonne making dinner while joking around with two men -- one is clearly her boyfriend/husband, and the other is a close friend or a brother or something, and one is definitely her child. Seeing Michonne, miss mysterious badass samurai, be joking around just like any young woman, is a very, very jarring moment, and the flashbacks fall apart. The conversations take a sudden harsh tone -- talking about survival and living where they've previously been talking about movies and whatnot. The sudden appearance of Michonne's katana as she slides it into the knife rack (though if pre-zombie-apocalypse Michonne actually makes beef goulash with a katana I wouldn't be fully surprised) and the sudden flash of thunder as Michonne's child disappears, and her boyfriend and friend turns up as the handless, jawless zombie bodyguards that Michonne hangs out with during her earliest appearances. Perhaps it came a bit too late, and some concrete hints to her backstory would've been far better appreciated during season three, but it's definitely portrayed well here. No, the nature of the flashback doesn't really tell us in definite terms what happens, but the implications -- Michonne's lover took their son to death with them, or maybe it's just them going to another settlement and getting fucked up in the way? Turns out that you can have your cake and eat it -- Michonne's backstory is still as mysterious as ever, but by peeling back some layers we make her a lot more human.
Perhaps the most powerful moment is when Michonne walks with her two newly-acquired handless, jawless walker pets as she walks alongside a horde of zombies she sees a dreadlocked black woman who looks similar to her and it ends up unnerving her enough to break her cover and just slaughter like two dozen zombies. It shows that, like Carl and Rick, beneath all the hard-ass badass samurai lady she's still, well, human, someone whose priorities isn't 'how to kill a horde of zombies' or 'where to get supplies to survive the next week' or 'are any of my friends still alive' but simple things like movies, art galleries and dinner.
Michonne ends up tracking Rick and Carl to their newfound shelter, while Carl himself has his own victory by getting a lot of resources as well as the fact that his father turned out to be alive, so that's three people having their small tiny victory -- which is insignificant in the wake of the global zombie apocalypse, but we're human and these sort of small victories end up being very significant.
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