Sunday, January 8, 2012
Television Walking Dead: Season 2.5 Sneak, Frank's Version, and a Zombie Shark
Posted by Gabe Wardell on Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 8:39 AM
AMC's Georgia lensed "Walking Dead" is not coming back from its midseason hiatus until Feb 12?
To tide everyone over, AMC offering this sneak peak video of episode 208, Nebraska (Note: you must first register to watch):
Thus far, Badass Digest's Devin Faraci has been less than impressed with season two:
Some have speculated that the program's second season is reeling due to the departure of producer Frank Darabont.
We'll never know for sure what the show might have looked like with Darabont in the mix, however, an exclusive from Ain't It Cool News offers a glimpse, and gives a complete outline of what happened, as well as a note from Darabont himself, outlining his plans for the show:
(Read the complete piece here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/52526)
I wanted to kick off the 2nd season with the flashback episode Sam (the guy in the video above) describes, which would have followed a squad of Army Rangers getting trapped in the city and trying to survive as Atlanta falls.The idea was to do this with a very focused “you are there” documentary feel. Not going all shaky-cam, but still making it a bit rawer and grainier than the rest of the show. We’d start with a squad of maybe seven or eight soldiers being dropped into the city by chopper. They have map coordinates they need to get to; they’ve been told to report to a certain place to provide reinforcement. It’s not a special mission, it’s basically a housekeeping measure putting more boots on the ground to reinforce key intersections and installations throughout the city. And we follow this group from the moment the copter sets them down. All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from “the city is being secured” to “holy shit, we’ve lost control, the world is ending.” Our squad gets blocked at every turn and are soon just trying to survive. I wanted to do a really tense, character-driven ensemble story as communications break down, supply lines are lost, escape routes are cut off, morale falls apart, leadership unravels, mutinies heat up, etc.
...So the story follows these soldiers through hell as the city falls apart and the squad implodes, with Sam’s soldier being the main character and the moral center of the group. He becomes the last survivor of the squad, and he finally gets to the map coordinates they’ve been trying to get to from the start: it’s the barricade at the Atlanta courthouse intersection from the pilot where Rick later finds the tank. The soldier is still alive when he gets there, but he’s been bitten. He’s accomplished his “simple” mission, but he’s gone through seven kinds of hell to do it (including being forced to frag his squad leader), and now he’s dying. And he crawls off into the tank just to get off the street and under cover. As his fever builds and the poor guy starts to hallucinate, he pulls his last grenade and considers ending his life. He sets the grenade down on that shelf for a moment to reflect on all the shit and misery that brought him to this sad end-point of his life, and to dredge up the courage to pull the pin...but before he can act, the fever burns him out and he dies.
The kicker comes in the last moments of this episode:
After the soldier dies this squalid, lonely death...and after a quiet lapse of time...we do a shot-for-shot reprise from the first episode of the first season: Rick comes scrambling into the tank to escape the horde...blows that zombie soldier’s brains out...now Rick’s trapped...fade out...the end.
The notion was to take the “throwaway” tank zombie Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier’s story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his journey, but don’t reveal who he is until the end. The idea being that every zombie has a story, every undead extra was once a human being with a life of his/her own...was, in a sense, the star of his own life’s movie. And we’ve followed this one particular guy and seen how his life ended; we witness his struggles, see his good intentions and his failures, and we experience his godawful death in this tank. That’s why I cast Sam as that tank zombie in the first place instead of just casting some extra. I had this story in mind while filming the pilot, and I knew I’d need a superb actor to play that soldier when the time came.
Wow.
That Darabont was planting seeds like this as far back as the show's original pilot leads one to wonder how many layers to this onion will now remain un-peeled, which secret passages will be forever undiscovered, and what other roads will go remain less travelled.
The series half-finale showed some promise. Let's hope the remaining creative team can get the show out of its rut and back in gear.
Otherwise, what we might have on our hands is a zombie shark.
Comments (2)
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Great article. Thanks for sharing.
It all really kind of pisses me off.
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