Tales Of The Walking Dead

Well, that was certainly the strangest episode of any Walking Dead show I’ve ever seen. Not the most ludicrous, mind you. The top 10 most ludicrous episodes in AMC’s zombie universe can all be found in the last few seasons of Fear The Walking Dead, which remains the worst TV show of our time.

No, this was a bizarre, Groundhog Day-esque episode that doesn’t fit nicely in the universe of The Walking Dead and doesn’t really have to. It takes place at the very outset of the zombie apocalypse in Atlanta (yeah, somehow we’re still in Georgia!) and follows the exploits of two women: Blair (Parker Posey), a rude, self-centered Devil Wears Prada boss at a small insurance agency called ‘Circle of Trust’, and Gina (Jillian Bell) her silent, fed-up receptionist.

These two cross paths after work one day. Blair is surreptitiously sneaking off to an island with her fiancé, Brian. She’s rudely commanded Gina to stay at the office until everyone else leaves, but sees her well before closing time at the same gas station she and Brian are waiting at. She’s angry and gets out of the car to confront Gina, who says she’s looking for a snack because the vending machine at work is broken.

Blair, mean boss that she is, tells Gina (in so many words) that she’s fired. This is when things go haywire. Gina pulls a shotgun from the trunk of her car after seeing a woman drive by with what looks like a corpse in her passenger seat. She walks over to where a gasoline tanker driver is filling the gas station reserves and tells him that she wants his truck.

While this is going on, Blair rushes up to help diffuse the situation. So does a DHS agent with a pistol. That’s when the corpse we mentioned earlier starts eating the woman across the parking lot. The DHS agent takes Gina’s shotgun and attempts to hijack the gas tanker for himself. A struggle ensues and the tanker blows up when it’s hit with a shotgun blast. Everyone dies.

Parker Posey as Blair, Jillian Bell as Gina - Tales of the Walking Dead _ Season 1, Episode 2 - ... [+] Photo Credit: Curtis Bonds Baker/AMC

Then they wake back up, back in the office having the same conversation that they were having with their co-workers at the beginning of the episode. Only, they remember. Well, at first we only know that Blair remembers. We find out later that both Blair and Gina can remember—and that they keep returning to that same scene and keep dying in various variations of the same fiery death.

There are reasons that they both keep going back and after a montage the two basically give up. They bust open the vending machine at the office and have an actual conversation. This leads them down a path of empathy and understanding, where both women learn new things about one another. Blair eventually apologizes for being such a jerk all this time. They decide to work together.

I won’t go over every last detail of the episode, but it ends pretty well and I found myself chuckling along with the funnier bits and genuinely enjoying myself. Maybe it’s because it was just so different—a little reprise from the self-seriousness of The Walking Dead. Last week’s episode was also a bit on the goofier side, but the characters made so many silly decisions (like leaving the damn bunker!) that I had a hard time enjoying it as much. At least here, the premise is so absurd it’s a little easier to just enjoy it for what it is. It was also nice to see actual character development here, something that has been sorely lacking in these shows.

Still, while I enjoyed the performances from both main actors, the Groundhog Day episode wasn’t without its flaws. Chief among these is the fact that it should have been about half as long. This would have been a good short. Maybe pair it with another short to comprise one episode block. The novelty of the rinse-repeat storytelling wore off pretty quickly, and made other writing choices a bit harder to swallow.

For instance, you don’t just hop into a gas tanker and drive away. This is a big truck that requires a Class A CDL to operate. Semi-trucks often have a lot more gears than a normal vehicle. I don’t know about you, but if I hopped into a truck with ten forward gears and two reverse gears, I might be a little hard-pressed on how to drive the thing. Worse, a gas tanker is a liquid load, and liquid loads are much less forgiving when it comes to steering and maneuvering. They slosh around. Breaking too hard can throw the truck’s balance off badly.

This, in other words, is a terrible vehicle to try to commandeer. Yes, having that gas would be great—if you had it parked somewhere, fortified and had some other vehicles to fill up using its gasoline. It would be an awful, beastly thing to attempt to drive around especially without experience operating vehicles this size. When the episode starts to drag, you think about these things more. You also start to wonder, when you know you’re going to die each time and then be born again to try another day, why wouldn’t they try something new a little bit sooner? Gina wants to go see her family, but never attempts to just get there in something other than a tanker? Surely there are other options, especially when you get to try and try again.

Also, there’s a scene where Blair calls the cops to intervene with Gina’s hijacking plans. It’s a spiteful move, but it’s also absurd. There’s a zombie outbreak going on. All the cops would have their hands full. And that scene was weird. They start fighting each other and there’s a zombie eating some lady’s face off and the cops just . . . melt away? Disappear?

So there’s these lazy, sloppy elements that, at this point, are classic Walking Dead foibles. With the tiniest bit of critical thinking you could avoid each and every one, but even more unique and interesting Walking Dead scripts are apparently put together slapdash without a whiff of quality control.

I enjoyed ‘Blair / Gina’ more than most Walking Dead I’ve seen recently, warts and all. But it needed to be half as long and it badly needed someone to come over, read the script, and say “This crap doesn’t make sense but if you do this very simple and inexpensive change, it could work.”

I do that after the fact. I keep wondering when someone will offer me a job doing it before the fact, while there’s still time to make a change.

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