There was a great opportunity missed to kick some serious momentary ass in last night’s mostly comatose and soap-operatic premiere of AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” but given how overwrought and overacted and frankly over-tedious the 90-minute episode was to watch, it isn’t a surprise to me that the chance escaped the series’ dimwitted block of writers.
The bulk of the decidedly drag-assed second-season starter yielded the above tweet about midway through an episode that went the little girl lost route, centering on a search for a lass who gets lost in the woods after an encounter with an apparently migratory zombie “herd” that — thanks to the crappy writing — literally materializes out of nowhere. Seriously: the extra large group of undead come shuffling up behind the survivors on the highway out of Atlanta they’ve just driven up. What did the ghouls do as the caravan of survivors motored on past a couple minutes earlier, hide? Play dead?
Stoopid. Stoopid. Stoopid. But I digress.
Anyway, the search ultimately brings the group to a church, where –shocker! — they don’t find her. The girl’s mother then seeks solace in the sanctuary, praying before a statue of crucified Christ, and I was soooooo hoping the scribes might’ve grown a backbone and made it a daring scene, instead of a flat and cliché “please let my daughter be safe” speech. But of course they didn’t.
See if I were the one writing it, I would have given it some shock value. Mom would still be in the church, still desperate and begging for the Lord to spare her daughter’s life. But then I’d have her look up at Jesus on the cross hoping for a sign, followed by a shot from behind Jesus’ head back at her. Then I’d come back from the mom’s POV for a low-angle close up of Jesus’ face… only this time for a split second something’s different. Something’s not quite right. Then — bam! The sonofagawd suddenly rears his head up gape-mouthed and crazy-eyed and hissing at her and straining to free himself. Cut quickly back and forth between close-ups of her eyes going wide with fear and Zombie Jesus struggling crazily. Finally he wrenches a hand free from where it’s nailed and he reaches out grabbing a handful of her hair and woosh: she wakes up. Screaming, if you’d like.
A cliché in its own right of course, but one far more entertaining! Sacrilegious and certain to anger Kirk Cameron followers the country over? Absolutely. But it’s a series about zombies and apparently it’s being written by zombies, too. For Christ’s sake.
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