Zombie Cliche Lookout: Ace in the Hole?
There’s this moment in a lot of stories – zombie and otherwise – where it seems like the good guys have a pretty solid handle on things, and then the bottom drops out on them. It’s a pretty great way of raising the stakes, provided that it’s done well. It can be easy to mess it up and give the bad guys a sort of dues ex machina of their own. Done well, the audience should be able to look back and see a lot of little signs that things weren’t going quite as well as they had assumed at the time. In fact, it should be glaringly obvious in retrospect, despite being shocking at the time.
Of course, I write this secure in the knowledge that I telegraphed the shit out of this reveal long in advance. You guys had this figured out, and I surprised no one. But still, you have to aspire to something, right?
About this Episode:
My goal here is for today’s episode to act as the big “gotcha” moment, and guide the comic into it’s finale. Assuming we take Gus at his word, and he does look like a trustworthy chap, this shows us that Henry and his people are clearly bad guys. Sure, they may have some justification for what they’re doing, probably along the lines of disgusting social Darwinism, but regardless, their methods are unethical to the extreme. Murphy and Russell now realize this, but it might be too late to do anything about it.
Hopefully, I’m not completely off my game here.
Discussion Question: Sole Survivors
There’s something magical about a single survivor that comes back out of a horrifying trial. It shows that they have something special; their will to survive is stronger than that of everyone around them. That being said, I’ve found I have a hard time picturing a sole survivor as a male, let alone a big tough biker guy. When I picture a sole survivor, I picture a woman. I suspect a big part of this is my age and the number of terrible horror movies I’ve watched over the years. So how about you guys. You hear the term “sole survivor”, and what pops into your head?
Typo alerts: “My goal here for for today’s” 1st for–>is 😀
“are clear bad guys.” clear–>clearly
“number of terribly horror movies” terribly–>terrible 😉
Not so bad as Monday’s typos, less than half as many in fact! 😀
Fixed all, thanks.
I ‘m beginning to wonder if Jess, Bill, Henry, and the guy on the radio are as good at intelligence gathering as I had thought they were. If they’d had real intel on the other members of Murphy and Russell’s group they might have realized that they’d only just begun to gather up supplies and don’t really have that much potential, having just made it through winter. Unless of course they went out unseen in the winter and gathered more supplies.
There’s a hundred and one – wait a sec, a hundred and two – questions Dave could answer if he’d revisit the winter part of the story arc, even if it’s just in flashbacks.
Obviously, this also tells us that this group that “hired” them to help deal with Gus as being desperate to get supplies. Or maybe they’re offloading Henry onto this group because they just know he’ll eat them out of house and home! 😀
In other words, who else thinks that this group is struggling for supplies and just wanted to offload a wind bagging moocher named Henry? 😀
They know what they’re able to observe directly. They can overhear things, so they know who is who and can get a general sense of people’s personalities. They don’t know anything more than that, such as past relationships. They weren’t following these guys prior to the zombie apocalypse, so their intel is limited as a result.
The sole survivor could be a bad-ass hero.
They could also be a weasel-y coward, who sacrificed their companions to make it.
Depends on how shifty they’re acting when they tell their story.