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Lately, I’ve found myself growing a little bit less enthusiastic about The Walking Dead. I hadn’t connected with the characters early on as I had in the first season and as a result, the entire second season just didn’t feel like it had the emotional punch that the first did. Perhaps this was just my brain trying to save me from being hurt again? Decent effort, but pull it together next time, will ya? Amid the Ruins is probably the most emotionally charged episode of The Walking Dead this season. The story, what happened and where it’s going made me hurt and angry but it’s difficult to talk about without a gigantic tangle of spoilers.
Editor’s Note: Due to the nature of The Walking Dead, this review will contain a fair bit of spoilers regarding the story up until this point. If you’re new to this, welcome aboard! Here’s your box of Kleenex, go start at Season One, Episode One – you have some catching up to do.
The stakes couldn’t be higher going into this episode. Rebecca is literally hours away from having her baby and walkers are pounding at the gates of Carver’s compound. Kenny and Rebecca had just finished exacting some revenge and it was time to face the masses. Masses of walkers. With Jane giving some solid advice on how to get through the herd, all that was left to do was just slather yourself with blood, steel your nerves, and waltz right through them – like it ain’t no thang.
Well! That didn’t happen, did it? Things went downhill faster than Clark Griswold on a lubed up toboggan. Carlos was almost instantly mauled by walkers and Sarah ran off into the woods, somehow managing to make it past all of the walkers without so much as a scratch. Shit, we should have taken her advice. Serita was attacked and everything went in slow motion, forcing us to make a decision that seemed like a no-brainer, with the consequences at the beginning of this episode. Did you make the right decision? And this is where we begin.
Amid the Ruins continues The Walking Dead‘s tradition of giving you some ambiguous moral choices. What’s the right choice? It feels often like a series of progressively bad and worse choices. That doesn’t necessarily make the story bad, but it makes the entire episode a real downer. It shows that sometimes, there are no right choices.
This episode in particular makes you question some of your closest held beliefs about how you’ve been surviving. Clementine may just be a little girl, but it shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that she’s smart, and people can see that. So why exactly is she in a group that’s falling apart at the seams? Are they holding her back? Or are they only thing keeping her alive? It’s a difficult thing to think about, but it’s something the game wants you to think about. If that’s not textbook foreshadowing, then I don’t know what is.
This is a Rebecca-heavy episode – after all, that baby is coming any second now, but here’s also some time spent with Jane, the lone-wolf. Not only does Jane offer some solid advice (reminds us really) on how to get through a herd of walkers, she teaches Clementine how to more easily dispose of them – take out their knees first. She does this because she wants Clementine to know that she can make it on her own, without a group of people weighing her down. After that, the option was given to us to take out a walker’s knees before stabbing him in the eye. Bodies prone were also subject to eye-stabbing. I hope that this is something that the game sticks with in the final episode, and it’s not written off as unfeasible, or forgotten entirely.
People relying on Clementine doesn’t feel so awkward now, and the moments when it’s written in, it feels more genuine than “Do this Clem, because otherwise the game will be boring.” You need to talk to a friend because you really feel like you’re the best person to do it, not because you’re the bravest or have some secret knowledge. Slip into a small opening because you’re the smallest. When something goes wrong, the other characters are apologetic to you for making you do that because you’re a kid. For the most part, they’re still pretty dumb, but they seem to have their own ideas on what to do.
Amid the Ruins is a good episode by itself, but its biggest flaw has been a glowing point of weakness for the entire season. Earlier in this review I mentioned that I hadn’t formed any meaningful connection with the characters. Hell, I was pretty indifferent to them, even when they locked me in a shed. Sure, I grew to like the more and more for little things, but there was nothing that really made me think “yeah, this is my new family. We’re in this together.” Well, this being The Walking Dead, you can take a wild guess what’s going to happen to them.
And that’s the problem. People dying is getting to be almost too predictable.
The game drops some pretty obvious clues as to who’s going to bite it next, but others seem to be completely at random and their deaths feel cheap. Characters that you might have been rooting for, characters that you could see were changing for the better, just axed (not literally…uh, spoilers I guess?). I can’t fault this episode too much for this – perhaps it’s a message of the fragility of life and how quickly and needlessly it is lost? It leaves a sour taste in my mouth just the same.
This episode left me feeling angered and hurt, but it’s more than likely because I was supposed to feel this way. I felt cheated out of my friends’ lives and angry that there was nothing that I could have done to prevent it. And now we go into the final episode with that anger, and the thought of what if I can really make it on me own?
(7 / 10)
Good
(7 / 10)
