CletusMusashi

Maybe they'll travel to a place so remote that it doesn't even have neatly-cut lawns. Either that or they'll meet the secret evil conspiracy of landscapers who have been out mowing every night, in order to raise Yog-Sod-Thoth.

You sure you're still gonna have enough energy to be up at 8 tonight?

It still say the title sounds more flashbacky than musicall. And apparently I think about these things too much, because today, while I was sleeping really,really late,I had a dream about Ed's ghost visiting Carol. I wish like Hell I could remember any details, but I honestly can't. Hopefully it'll happen, though. Carol would destroy Ed. And bonus points if it's still also a musical. Not sure if it's worth a return of Ghost Lori, though.

Eugene would be (a vastly inferior version of) Peter Boyle. Unless they run into former governor Jesse Ventura, who bears an amazing resemblance to Boyle, and might well have lost enough of his remaining marbles during the zombie apocalypse to be caterwauling out musical numbers. You know... if that was their Beth-replacement plan all along... I'm totally down with it.

Knock, knock. Who's there? Beth. Beth who? Gesundheit.

The only Michonne/Gabriel interaction I want to see is her slapping the shit out of him when she finds out he's been using her katana to shave his head with.

One really good thing this marathon period has done for me is given me a chance to catch up on the comics a little bit. Last year I was able to find a copy of Issue 1 on the library shelf, but since then I'd never ben able to find anything earlier than 5. Today I finally got my hands on copies of 2 and 3, and was very surprised by that. But it actually makes sense. Fans of the series aren't reading the books right now; they're watching TV.

Most of 4 and 5a just don't compare to the earlier seasons, especially 2. So I'm specifically trying to avoid marathon-ing this weekend, because as it is I'm already sufficiently used to watching Eugene and FPP that I'm sort of vaccinated against bad episodes. Last thing I need is to raise the bar too high, and then discover that Sunday's episode consists entirely of Abraham finally going full dolphin.

Danai would probably love to get to do something different!

She's probably the funniest character on the show, because they can just go full crazy with her, The others all have to have some level of functionability, but she is just full on crazy. Also, when she and Pam are in the same scene, they're the show's funniest duo.

Really big beehives in the case of Michonne...

I'll take the minority opinion and say that, while I do not consider Carol an unattractive woman, I do not think her haircut looks good. However, it makes a lot more sense in that environment than a lot of the doos that do look good. To me it looks like she just carries a pair of scissors around with her and whenever a section of her scalp gets all caked up with zombie guts (which is probably about five times a day when you're as badass as Carol,) she cuts the worst of it out. How it all ends up in Rick's hair after that, I haven't quite figured out yet.

Two weeks in a row of superior episodes! This show's strong points are the personalities and dialogue. Too much plot, honestly, just gets in the way of that.

I think that's an interesting point. Rick was at his best and sanest when he thought the ZA was only a temporary issue. Rick was a good honest guy who believed firmly in law and order, because in his experience most serious problems could be solved externally, once authority showed up. Carol, by comparison, had never settled on that particular faith, and eventually decided that you had to solve your own problems, or at least the problems of those close to you. Rick can, when the mood strikes him, be just as ruthless as Carol, but he still has a weird naive streak where, no matter how much you think he's progressed as a character, he'll suddenly be taking a baby's advice about whether or not to help Abraham follow Eugene. Carol is never as naive as Rick is sometimes. This post has been approved by The Georgia 'Tatorial Committee to Elect Carol Peletier.

I am... almost as horrified as I am amused.

Haiku for the seasons: Season 1: A hero gets shot. Then civilization falls. Then he fights zombies. Season 2: One group saves zombies. Rick's group just moves in with them. Zaniness ensues. Season 3: Move into prison. Then find whole town of people. It's evil though. War! Season 4: "All leaders are bad. 'Unless they are named Rick Grimes!" Really? WTF? First half of Season 5: Carol is awesome but most of these people suck. Where's Lord Fluffington?

So you're saying it'll be a musical? Ghost Beth returns! To me it sounds like a good title for a flashback episode. Remember when out of the blue they suddenly did a flashback on what Bob was doing a few months ago? (Hint: He was running from zombies and drinking.) Well, now there's a lot of characters we don't know much about. Granted, most of them are about as difficult to guess as Bob was: I'm pretty sure Father Gabriel was a priest, and that whenever a spider got into the church he screamed like a little girl and jumped up onto the alter until one of the old ladies from his congregation tossed it outside. And I'm pretty sure Rosita was trying to find a way to make her insurance company pay for "Better Taste in Men" pills. (Hint: She failed. But Gareth didn't.) Carl was in the Scouts and hoping to soon earn a merit badge for Appreciation of Haberdashery. Abraham was just recently back from the war, and was trying to find inner peace by working at Sea World where he could spend all his break time admiring the dolphins, but was forced to leave when his weight flunctuations revealed that he was not, in fact, an actual walrus. Michonne was caught in a traffic accident alongside two trucks, one carrying nuclear waste and the other carrying Ninja Chia pets. Eugene was watching porn. Tyreese was trying to play a first-person shooter game with his eleven-year-old niece, but kept freezing up because it was just too much for him to handle emotionally. Daryl was discovering a magazine called Emo Hair Fashion, and found himself strangely fascinated, but when Merle made fun of it he had to lie and say he'd found it on the ground and only picked it up for fire and toilet paper. Carol was walking grimly past a hair salon in which other wives chattered excitedly about how thrilled their husbands were going to be when they got home. Daryl was gazing into the window, longingly, but ran away when he saw Carol look at him. Noah was working in a laundromat, with really mean organized-crime bosses. And Morgan was also around somewhere, probably for about sixty seconds, looking dramatically at something. Maybe reading a newspaper article about zombies, while eating breakfast? It'll be as much plot as he's had all season.

Better question: Can he control Zombie Bison? They could pull any car wherever you wanted, without worrying about gas or maintenance. Take that, MIchonne!

Woody Allen as The Ventriloquist.

I think Father Gabriel is the new Lori.

Dale was also killed for redundancy. They had Heschel taking over the Kindly Old Guy role, plus they still had Lori to cover the Big Googly Eyes role. That doctor at Grady knew exactly how this show works.

I predict that the next episode will start with Abraham walking out of the bathroom and saying "Wow, I feel like I lost fifty pounds!"

Blasphemy! Katrina was always boring! She's the main reason I quit bothering to watch that show. Beth, even when she was singing, never actually made me contemplate giving up on the show. I may have thought she was an idiot sometimes, like in that "Hey, wouldn't it be therapeutic to burn down our shelter in the middle of the night so we can walk through these dark zombie-filled woods" crapfest, but even that wasn't boring. It was just stupid. The only main character TWD has had that was almost as boring as Katrina was Bob. I think a better character to compare her to might be Tara. Tara is young, female, cute, optimistic, prone to short-term foot injuries, and willing to fight but not really what you would call a hardened badass. Also, Tara is single. Oh, obviously the shipping possibilities are different. I don't see Tara ending up with Daryl, that's for sure. But single characters are characters who you can stick into whatever adventure you want without triggering off a bunch Glenn-and-Maggie type angst. So it's a really valuable niche for the writer to have someone in. But two someones in too similar a set of demographics might be more than they need. Beth may have been rendered somewhat redundant by the fact that, ultimately, Tara was a better "Beth" than Beth was.

IT WAS A RATTLESNAKE!!! In no southern dialect whatsoever are rattlesnakes referred to as "mud snakes!" The "actual" mud snake is Farancia abacura, a big, fat, beautiful, completely harmless, glossy-black salamander-eater with brightly-colored belly markings that extend up onto its lower sides. But as much as I love snakes, I'm not a nazi about regional common names not being as organized as taxonomists would prefer them to be. I'd be wide open to, for example, the idea that whatever neighborhood Beth grew up in had a strange habit of calling water snakes "mud snakes." But a solid-land species from a group that pretty much anybody who knows there is more than one type of snake can easily identify? That's just moronic. I've been holding this herpetology rant back forever. But now that I've let it just run its course, all I can say is... Daryl... you tried. You really honestly did as much as you could with the material you were given. Not knowing the difference between a baby mud snake and an adult ringneck? Sometimes that can be confusing. But a terrestrial, dull, blotchy, triangular-headed thing with really rough scales and a rattle on its tail is probably not a mud snake. This is like mistaking a great horned owl for a sparrow hawk. Daryl got off easy. Dawn also tried to teach Beth, Now Dawn is dead and everyone who she occasionally cared about in moments of sanity is trapped in the same lollicop nightmare they always were, but with all the extra chaos that comes with a power vacuum. Although actually... speaking of power vacuums... there could be one Lorde HandyManne holed up in there, who steals most of the intelligent people into his secret organization, running and maintaining all the equipment, while the rejects try to run the asylum. Scary thing is: that might still be the best system we've seen yet on this god damn show.