OK. I was very hopeful after the first episode that things in Walking Dead Land would get better. In truth, I did like this episode more overall than the first, but it still had some pretty glaring problems. And for the record, I didn’t read the comic books this series is based on, so if they’re following the books to the letter (which they aren’t) and you want to say that the things they are depicting happened in the comic books, that’s fine. It doesn’t make the story problems magically go away. But anyway.

The episode starts with a flashback. Why, I’m not sure, since the flashback told us things that we already knew: Grimes gets shot, his partner the Ma-Shane tells his wife, who then tells her kid. We never saw it happen, but it seemed reasonable to assume that it would happen roughly along those lines. Maybe they thought we forgot he was shot and in a coma despite being reminded of it every single time Shane and that harpy of a wife have a conversation. Maybe they wanted to illustrate how difficult and heart-wrenching it is to be told that a family member you love has been shot, which I think most people probably would intuitively understand. Or perhaps they wanted to show that Shane wanted to bang his buddy’s wife and Rick and the harridan were having marital problems before he was shot, but the fact that the two started humping pretty quickly also does a good job of suggesting that perhaps there was some sort of attraction there. Most likely, I think the writers felt they needed a huge sign that says LOOK AT THE JUXTAPOSITION AND ROLE REVERSAL HERE! because they believe the average television viewer is dumb as fuck.

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