The Walking Dead S7 E2: The Well

I guess that was fine. It was certainly better than last week’s episode and was a palate cleanser after the pointless slog through hell of the season premiere.

The sight of King Ezekiel and a CGI tiger in an auditorium was unexpected and amusing, as was Carol’s very fake glee. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on in the most wonderful way,” she says, maybe speaking for the viewer. Later she displays over-the-top joy at the prospect of more than one cobbler per day before stealing clothes and weapons. It seems the Kingdom is the latest in a long line of utopias, this one complete with a choir singing Bob Dylan.

It was refreshing to see Carol’s innocent act end quicker than it did in Alexandria. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” King Ezekiel tells her. I’m also happy he dropped his pose so soon since all that archaic, theatrical talk might have gotten old. It was an intriguing point the “king” made that the people in the Kingdom needed some kind of authority figure like him. The fact that both characters almost immediately called one another on their BS is an encouraging sign that The Walking Dead may be moving out of its cycle of the group finding a seeming paradise that is too good to be true and then falls apart.

One interesting wrinkle in this story is the Kingdom’s subjects sabotaging Negan’s people by feeding them zombie-tainted pork. I’d like to see more of these unexpected and largely unexplored effects of the plague, like what happens to the animals and environment. The show seems to be starting to world-build a little more. Several communities are establishing trade and as messed-up as the dynamic is, this is a step toward civilization.

Ever a student of Greek myth, Carol refuses to eat the pomegranate seeds that would keep her prisoner in the Underworld and thus leaves the Kingdom for a little house outside its gates. I really liked her visions of seeing the zombies as they were before they died, showing that she is being affected by the real people behind the dead.

This episode makes me wonder what exactly Carol wants and what the point of survival is in this world. She has been through too many false promises to feel safe in the Kingdom, but if she won’t make a new start there, what will she do? The Kingdom may fall down but isn’t it better to have that safety for a little while and see how long it lasts? Is it better to give that a shot and maybe not fail? What is the point of just surviving alone in a little house with nobody else around her?

I had the most coiled dream

I dreamed I was at a public pool with a bunch of other people. It was raining torrentially and the water level was getting so high that we were trying to figure out how to drain some of the water. Somebody else in the pool told me there was a plane crash engineered by the IRA but I said I had a half-day and wasn’t refreshing CNN.com every minute so I missed the news.

As I was getting out of the pool, I almost stepped on a blue snake that was coiled on the top rung of the ladder. It looked almost like a ball. I swam away. Some guy in the pool picked up the snake and went to throw it at me. I asked him not to and told him I’m deathly afraid of snakes. I swam farther away and he threw the snake at me.

I woke up in a panic and could hear myself sort of whimper. I accidentally kicked the cat off the bed (sorry, Ororo). I not infrequently have these nightmares about snakes, which I’ve been terrified of since I was a kid. I’ll wake up and sort of forget where I am for a moment and thrash around and then settle down and forget it.

Steve and I were talking and are hoping whatever child we adopt, that the child is not interested in snakes or spiders. He can have pictures or something and that won’t bother me because I can avoid them. If he wants to go to the reptile house, someone else can take him and I’ll wait outside because I would prefer not having an embarrassing panic attack in public. Under no circumstances will we have a pet snake or spider in the house.

So I have this phobia and it’s annoying but I’m content never to get over it. I’m not afraid to leave the house or anything and it’s uncommon to see a snake in this part of the country, so it’s never an issue beyond the nightmares (I also don’t like looking at photos of snakes). This isn’t something I’m going to confront so I can be healed or any of that nonsense.  

The Walking Dead S7 E1: The Day Will Come When You Won't Be

Negan, monologue, monologue, commercial, Rick, hatchet, zombies, fog, commercial, flashback to the very recent past. Is it Glenn? Is it Glenn? No, it looks like it’s Abraham who got a barbed wire bat to the head … wait … no, it’s Glenn after all.

I had heard rumors very recently that two characters would die on the season premier of The Walking Dead. (I barely thought about the cliffhanger over the summer, which was probably the opposite of what the show intended.) It was a pretty good fakeout since we had been conditioned to think Negan would only execute one person but nobody ever said there couldn’t be two deaths. The show pretty much had to kill a core character if this whole thing were to mean anything. Who else were they gonna killed, Marianne or whatever her name is? Who would have cared?

Meh. I’m pretty much immune to the deaths on this show at this point. After all, it is called The Walking Dead and there’s been so much death that I’m numb. I guess it’s a shame to lose an original cast member but it’s season seven. We’ve had plenty of moments.

That eye bulging out of Glenn’s ruined skull while he choked out his last words to Maggie was rough to watch. I had been hard on the cast on stabbing a bunch of sleeping people in the face but at least that was painless. What Negan did was torture. I guess that makes it appropriate that the show tortured the audience as well as the cast. At least Jeffrey Dean Morgan is engaging (I laughed out loud when he told (P)Rick, “It’s a brand new day”) so that helped in an episode that was basically one long Negan monologue.

Rick is pretty much broken, after Negan nearly forced him to chop his son’s arm off (the son who had an impressive growth spurt overnight). This is like Abraham nearly killing Isaac to prove his love to God, only the Old Testament God didn’t carry a bat wrapped in barbed wire.

Horror can be upsetting but still fun, as we can scream and laugh about the screaming we did. The execution of two cast members and the near-dismemberment of a child cross the line into torture porn, something I have no interest in. I’ll stick with my Sunday night viewings but the premier was just a miserable experience. I am hoping this won’t be the new tone of the season.

Mr. Robot

We recently caught up with Mr. Robot. I very much enjoy the show. I think season two might have been my favorite since it was more poetic and surreal, and it also showed the consequences of the characters’ actions.

During the first season, I wasn’t sure whether or not I was supposed to find Elliot and the hackers at F Society to be good people because their hacking of E-Corp unleashed too much chaos and the characters didn’t seem to care. We had taken to referring to Mr. Robot as Asshole Club.

I sympathize with the fact that E-Corp’s corporate greed led to the deaths of Elliot and Darlene’s father and the death of Angela’s mother. But F Society acted in a way that destroyed our economy and hurt a lot of regular people, who no longer had any debt but also faced widespread economic instability. The people at F Society were immature (their name is not something an adult would choose). They engaged in naïve revolutionary talk about “we need to fight the system” without really understanding how to fight that system or understanding the consequences.

The characters also engaged in casual cruelty and didn’t seem self-aware about this. Elliot hacked the private information of his therapist for no real reason. To gain access to E-Corp’s servers, he humiliated a security guard (for which he later apologized) and tricked an employee that her husband had a disease diagnosis (for which he did not apologize). No, I didn’t think Elliot was huggable or anything like that. He was kind of a douche.

I think Mr. Robot maybe wanted the audience to believe these are not good people from the beginning. The show telegraphed this in the first season, with Elliot meeting Mr. Robot in a Ferris wheel, looking down on the people below like ants, a reference to villains in The Third Man. (See, that film class came in handy.)

In the second season, we saw the consequences of these people’s actions. The hack of E-Corp has led to innocent people not having access to money or hard-earned assets. Half of F Society are on the run, the FBI is onto them and Darlene and others know they’re in over their heads.

They also followed up on a plot point that annoyed me in season one when the characters freed some dogs at a shelter, before they could be euthanized, and let them run free. The show filmed this like some feel-good scene where each person let a dog out of the cage simultaneously. See, these good hackers are setting animals free just like people! I’m not an expert but I remember thinking, “Won’t those dogs just end up back at the shelter? If they wanted to help these animals, they should have fostered or adopted them.” Sure enough, in season two, all the dogs were back in cages, waiting for euthanasia. I like the follow-up on this.

I do like Mr. Robot. I hope the hackers get foiled in the end by a manual typewriter.

When Heroes Fall

It is disheartening when your heroes fall. This has been especially prevalent this election season, when people we admire turn out to be not quite what we thought they were. No one exemplifies this sad reality more than Ken Bone.

As every schoolchild knows, Ken Bone was in the audience of the second presidential debate as an undecided voter. He is a power plant operator in Illinois and according to Wikipedia, was born in the early ‘80s. At the debate, while wearing a red sweater, he asked the candidates a question about energy policy.

Notably, Ken Bone wore a red sweater. It was a zip-up sweater that appeared to be cable knit. Again, it was red.

All across the nation, we stopped to appreciate this icon, who stood in an audience and asked a question while wearing a sweater. A red sweater. Endorsement deals poured in, media appearances proliferated, articles by desperate journalists multiplied, and his meme exploded all across the screens of bored office workers nationwide. Ken Bone and his red sweater passed into myth. He was whatever archetype we wanted him to be.

Almost immediately, this Icarus came back down to Earth. A sad nation learned about his controversial comments on some kind of Reddit forum. Ken Bone had feet of clay after all, no more to be worshiped by an adoring public for his red sweater.

Are there no heroes anymore? Can any icon stay pure? I haven’t been so disappointed since Joe the Plumber turned out to be less than superhuman.

Self-Checkout Lane

So what’s the consensus on self-checkout lanes at the supermarket? Do we love them? Hate them? Indifferent?

I know a lot of people hate self-checkout but I like it to the point where I don’t want to shop at a supermarket that doesn’t have it. There can be some annoying problems, like when I get a “remove items” message when I didn’t place anything on the scale, but mostly it’s efficient. The lines are shorter and I can bag my own groceries in peace.

I had an annoying experience at the Acme near us last week. Normally I go to Shoprite to do my weekly shopping because it’s cheaper and on the way home from work. I ended up at Acme because I was already in the shopping center and figured it was easier to go there. It was like a symphony of inconvenience.

I stopped going there because that particular Acme seemed unusually expensive. I’d buy chicken or something and it was a few dollars more expensive for no reason compared to the same brand elsewhere. Plus it’s one of those small supermarkets and it never has everything I need. I think I was missing four things last week. It wasn’t exotic stuff either — they only had beef canned food for cats instead of the chicken and I usually buy some of each. So it wasn’t the end of the world but it was annoying.

This store had removed all the self-checkouts, which was a deal-breaker for me. Last week when I went, there were about four express lanes open and only one regular lane. I had about 19 items so I had to go in the regular lane. It wasn’t the cashier’s fault that nobody could help her but it didn’t help that it was a laughy, chatty experience in line while my meat was starting to spoil. They sent someone over to help the cashier but she was just bagging groceries. I can bag my own and she would have been better off opening another lane.

I was close to leaving my cart in an aisle and driving out of my way to Shoprite. It would have been quicker. Thank you for listening to my riveting story.

Life in the Fast Lane

Last weekend at Cedar Point, Steve and I splurged to become part of the 1 percent of amusement park-goers. We bought fast lane passes and bypassed the hoi polloi waiting in interminable lines for the roller coasters.

Instead of waiting up to two hours for rides, we were able to breeze in, laughing a carefree laugh as we traipsed through the much shorter lines, going almost to the front. It warmed the cockles of our overprivileged hearts to look down on the ants below us, snaking through the mazes to wait to get on Valravn or Millennium Force. Please congratulate us for our good fortune.

Let me tell you, waiting is so bourgeois. Why do it when you can pay not to? I certainly never relished my time with the commoners during previous park visits, surrounded by coarse talk of their workaday lives as ditch-diggers. Last weekend, Steve and I were able to wait with our fellow aristocrats, discussing the finer things in life, such as stock tips and proper private jet maintenance. We were sipping champagne as we waited while below in the depths, the smell of domestic beer wafted up from the riff raff.

This is not to say we were not magnanimous in our privilege. I waited humbly and spared a kind smile at the lower castes as the employees integrated their rag-clad masses with our cashmere privilege. I had thought of throwing money down on the unwashed like some kind of robber baron, or at least offering them some cake, but I realized that it serves no one to act like a boor in our victory.

After all, crammed into those plastic and steel cars, were we not all the same, at least for a few fleeting moments?

A Short Summary of the Vice Presidential Debate

The scene is a Donald Trump rally, aired in its entirety on several networks.

Donald Trump: Vladimir Putin is a great leader. He’s certainly a better leader than Barack Obama.

Two weeks later, the vice presidential debate convenes.

Sen. Tim Kaine: How can you defend Donald Trump’s comments about admiring Putin? The Russian leader has annexed a neighboring territory and persecuted his political opponents. How can you defend that?

Gov. Mike Pence (shaking head and smirking): Oh, that didn’t happen. He never said that.

Kaine: Two weeks ago, Trump said, and I quote, “Vladimir Putin is a great leader. He’s certainly a better leader than Barack Obama.” He’s made similar comments regularly throughout the campaign.

Pence (smirking): That never happened.

A video screen behind the candidates suddenly begins playing footage of the Trump rally.

Donald Trump: Vladimir Putin is a great leader. He’s certainly a better leader than Barack Obama.

Pence (smirking): Oh, come on. What does that prove?

Kaine: It’s on video. It was on live TV in front of hundreds of people. We have several eyewitnesses who can attest to the fact that Trump said it.

A federal judge, several police officers, a surgeon, three college professors, four district attorneys and a notary public rise from their seats in the audience.

Pence (still smirking): Pshh! (He gives a dismissive hand gesture)

Audience at home: Pence is a poised and polished liar! He wins the debate!

Forgotten Bronze Age

Every few months, I’ll go to Second and Charles to buy some used Bronze Age comics. I’m completing my collection of any back issues from the early ‘80s that I don’t already have.

I’m also trying to reclaim those lost comic books, the Marvel comics I remember having and somehow traded away or lost over the years. I have a list in my head: Captain America #284, Iron Man #178, Fantastic Four #217, Defenders #123, etc. I’ve found a few of these white whales over the years and I was able to see and remember the old stories that stuck in my mind for decades but that I hadn’t seen for a very long time.

Last weekend I found a back issue that I didn’t remember I once had: Hulk #286. I vaguely remembered the cover of the issue, so I picked it up on a whim. After opening the book, I remembered the story immediately: the Hulk battles a mercenary in Kang the Conqueror’s dystopian future. I even remembered certain panels, like a green gamma blast hitting Bruce Banner and knocking him off his feet. I hadn't even thought of this story in over 30 years. I must have traded the issue away.

It brought me back to being a Marvel Universe-obsessed kid back when the issue was released in May 1983. It showed me a memory I didn’t realize I had forgotten. What a little burst of pleasure for just $1.