The Walking Thread

[Content Note: Descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Spoilers are lurching around undeadly herein.]


"On top of everything else, I gotta go pee SO BAD."
UGH THIS FUCKING SHOW. In case you hadn't had enough of gobbling zombies, violent patriarchs, reproductive coercion, torturous governors, child predators, and cannibals, how about indentured servitude and a rapist cop whose female partner serves up other women to keep him happy? JESUS FUCKING JONES.

When last we left Grimes Gang, Daryl had just returned to Church Camp, and someone was with him, but we don't know if it's Carol or Beth. Or both. Previews of this week's episode helpfully spoiled that we'd be finding out what Beth had been getting up to, though, so that's where we pick up.

After having been snatched from the road by unseen characters in a black car marked with a white cross, Beth wakes up in a hospital in Atlanta. Dr. Hipster and Officer Meanlady explain to her that she was rescued by their people and now she owes them for saving her. Okay. Cool start. Very welcoming.

Dr. Hipster shows her around the facility and gives her the expositional lowdown on their system. They are essentially slavers who abduct ("save") people from the outside, bring them to the hospital, fix them up, and then put them to work to earn their keep. If they die, their bodies are dumped down an elevator shaft where the resident basement zombies eat them.

Also, Officer Meanlady is in charge, and she is terrible. By virtue of the fact that she has no respect for anyone else's agency, and continually makes bad decisions in order to protect her people.

Basically, this episode is about how Rick Grimes would be so awful if he were a woman.

But he's not. So he is a Great Leader.

Anyway! An injured man comes into the hospital, and Dr. Hipster doesn't want to waste resources on him, but Officer Meanlady tells him to save the injured man or else. So he stabilizes him. Later, he will tell Beth to give the man the wrong medication, which kills him. And Beth realizes it's because the injured man was a doctor, too, and, if he lived, there would be no need for Dr. Hipster, and Officer Meanlady would cast him out into the abyss. So he set up Beth to kill his rival.

Well, he seems terrific! Also: If you're wondering why TWO doctors would not be useful, I have no fucking idea. Possibly because this appears to be a community comprised of a total of five people.

Beth makes friends with a young black man named Noah, who was "saved" with his dad, but they let his dad die. He's fixing to escape. He also takes the fall for her when she kills the injured doctor on Dr. Hipster's orders. And Officer Meanlady beats him up, even though she knows he's lying, just to make a point.

Noah is nice to Beth and gives her a green lollipop. Officer Predatorfuck finds it hidden in her room, and approaches her while sucking on the lollipop, then makes her suck on it. If that sounds like a scene of metaphorical rape, that's because it is one. Dr. Hipster intervenes just in time.

But Officer Predatorfuck isn't done yet with Beth. From another "rescued" woman, whose arm is forcibly cut off against her will after she's bitten, Beth finds out that Officer Predatorfuck promised her escape in exchange for sexual contact, and he reneged.

Later, when Beth is searching Officer Meanlady's office for an elevator key to escape with Noah, she finds the other "rescued" woman on the floor of Officer Meanlady's office, having killed herself. Officer Predatorfuck comes in and tries to rape Beth, but she hits him over the head with a jar of lollipops, and he falls to the floor just in time for the other woman to reanimate as a zombie and bite the fuck out of his neck.

I literally can't even make this funny. It is just terrible and gross and gross and terrible.

Beth and Noah make their escape. Or try to. Noah makes it out through the labyrinth of zombies while Beth shoots at them, but Beth is caught by other police officers who hang out at the hospital and handcuffed and taken back. She smiles that at least Noah has gotten away, because if Beth learned anything from her dad Hershel and her second-dad Grimes, it's that ladies need to sacrifice for men.

In the final moments, Beth is skulking down a hallway in the hospital with a pair of scissors in her hand when a new patient arrives on a gurney. It's Carol! Dun dun dunnhhhh!

So, here's the thing about this show: Every new horror suggests that most of humankind is irredeemably reprehensible, if left to their own devices. If society breaks down, people are the wooooooooorst and will behave like monsters toward one another. Yeah, yeah—we've all read Lord of the Flies.

Personally, I happen to think that society is already a lot more fucked-up for marginalized people than the Rick Grimeses behind this hogwash seem to think it is, but that people are basically good if they have their basic needs met, and that this show increasingly looks like the paranoid fever-dream of privileged white men who think society is going all to shit because they're suddenly forced to occasionally hear about the cruelties and indignities exacted upon oppressed people and see some resistance to that oppression.

But, okay, irrespective of one's position on the Lord of the Flies thesis, this show's apparent solution to the breakdown of a kyriarchal social structure is giving the kyriarchs unlimited power to make decisions for everyone and enforce a more rigid implementation of the same system.

Ha ha nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooope.

All of the worst things that keep happening on this show (with the possible exception of the zombie virus, though I'm ready to find out that's the Frankenstein's Monster of a Grimesian Superpatriarch) are products of an unchecked kyriarchy, with small tribes led by petty tyrants scrabbling over territory and resources, because there's no more social contract. How is libertarianism working out for ya in the zombiepocalypse?

Anyway.

Next week: Carol!