AMC says of “Save The Last One”:
The group desperately awaits Shane's return. Shane finds himself trapped in a school, surrounded by the undead. Daryl and Andrea search for someone in the woods.
Tonight’s installment of “Walking Dead” is very strong. Its final act, foreshadowed by the episode’s first shot, a flashforward, contains a couple of bona fide “holy shit” moments.
Next week’s is even better. It puts a lot of focus on Glenn and made me realize for the first time what a terrific young actor we have in Steve Yeun.
Neither tonight’s or next week’s installment includes The Governor. No one makes it to any kind of prison by next week.
The episode begins and ends with Shane, the lawman who porked Lori Grimes after he told Lori that her husband was likely dead. Shane continues to manifest one of this series’ more interesting characters.
“Save The Last One” left me with many other thoughts.
Did Dale and Andrea bone? I believe I took them for a couple when they were first introduced last season, and I can’t help but wonder if Andrea’s “I’m not your wife and I’m not your daughter” line indicates that there might have been a post-apocalyptic hook-up she now regrets. If there is some sort of sexual history there, I can’t help but be a little creeped out by Dale’s efforts to exert control over her by taking away her weapon.
Have a look at the clip above with Andrea and Daryl Dixon. It feels like there’s some unlikely sexual chemistry growing between them, yes? Is this going to be a problem with Dale?
A big chunk of tonight’s episode follows Shane and new character Otis as they tangle with a vast horde of zombies.
And again I am set to wonder: Where did all these ambulatory corpses come from?
Only about 6,630 Americans die each day. How did a handful of decaying corpses awaiting burial (most derived, no doubt, from the very, very elderly) manage to outwit and overwhelm more than 70 million U.S. gun owners, more than 37 million U.S. golf club owners, the 48 million U.S. fireplace poker owners, more than 94 million baseball bat owners, more than 12 million pool cue owners, more than 33 million croquet mallet owners, more than 270 million car owners, more than 25,000 municipal and country police forces, more than 450,000 U.S. national guardsmen, and more than 565,000 U.S. army reservists, to say nothing of more than 560,000 active U.S. army personnel, more than 200,000 heavily armed and armored U.S. Marines, SEAL Teams one through five, 3.2 million South Korean reservists, the Chinese, Indian and Pakistani armies, and the Taliban?
The only thing the zombies have going for them, really, is their inexplicably vast numbers. They are unarmed and unarmored, slower moving than most everything else in the woods, and not a whole lot smarter than raccoons. They are poorly organized, to say the least, and cannot utilize TV stations or smartphones or update a Facebook page with news of enemy movements.
Maybe it’s a little too convenient that the zombies grew so numerous off camera -- as Rick Grimes convalesced in hospital? Why does Rick never think to ask the CDC guy -- or anyone else – what happened?
In the granddaddy of all modern zombie excitement, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” it was easy to understand why a handful of living humans might find themselves momentarily outnumbered by lumbering corpses: it was set in a rural, underpopulated area. More importantly, there was a cemetery, and presumably a handful of unburied cadavers in the area. (The “Walking Dead” crew’s decision to take to the woods also struck me as curious. In both “Dawn of the Dead” movies the characters were even quicker than the three little pigs to surmise that bricks were key to avoiding becoming somebody’s breakfast. Nobody in the Romero sequel or its remake thought erecting a tent city was the way to go.)
Some will cry, “Numbers schmubers! This show is about characters, characters like Rick, Lori, Shane, Andrea, Dale and the others, their lives, their loves, their hopes, their dreams.” Too true. The TV series gets that part right, and it's the characters that keep me tuning in.
But as the next two episodes demonstrate, these are characters who have – who must – devote their lives to strategizing against the undead.
When a horse-mounted Maggie efficiently dispatches a Walker with common sporting equipment, I can’t help but wonder, “Well, how hard would it have been to do something like that when there were only 10,000 zombies wandering around nationwide? Does the rest of the world know something that Maggie doesn’t?”
More in invisotext.
* The entire episode is set during a single night.
* The episode begins and ends with Shane shaving his head.
* The girth of Otis (the famously girthy Pruitt Taylor Vince) provides a plot point.
* We learn something of Shane’s youth and perhaps his true character.
* We learn someone, somewhere – willingly or not – once had sex with Merle Dixon.
* The lost little girl is not found this week.
I came away from this episode anxious to learn what happened next. I think most viewers will find it was worth the wait.
9 p.m. Sunday. AMC.