This op-ed features spoilers about The Walking Dead’s “The Grove,” if you have not seen this week’s episode please be aware.
Every week fans are used to seeing violent images, gore and guts on AMC’s The Walking Dead but this week’s episode “The Grove” showed a darker more disturbing side to the show that audiences might not have been fully prepared for when they watched the show this Sunday.
This season of Dead has had the main character split into different groups following the collapse and overtaking of the prison which had been their home for the entire past season. This half of the season has not been making headlines and many fans considered it to be slow, that all changed last night.
“The Grove” focused on Carol and Tyreese along with two younger children, Mika and Lizzie and infant Judith. The episode includes classic zombie kills but halfway through the show takes a dark turn and never looks back.
Lizzie, the oldest of the group, believes that the zombies are people and “will come back,” which leads her to kill her younger sister Mika in cold blood. Carol and Tyreese arrive at the scene to find Lizzie covered in blood and asking if they would be upset with her. This scene leaves the audience with chills and a disturbing feeling about how this situation would be resolved. The resolution is heartbreaking and all in all disturbing, Carol has to shot Lizzie in order to protect herself, Tyreese and Judith.
The writers and the producers took a risk with “The Groove” and showed the murder of two young children on primetime TV. Writer Scott Gimple and director Michael Satrazemis pushed the envelope one step further last night by exploring this side of the apocalypse, which focused on the living killing the living, instead of the dead.
Did the writers and the producers go to far with these scenes? Or is it that as an audience we have been built up to handle scenes like these two? Fans are used to seeing gross zombie murders each week, we see characters that fans love brutally killed but these two scenes had a different and more realistic vibe. These scenes confronted the audience with the question of what would we do in this situation and how much darkness the audience could handle before we had to look away from the television screen.
The past few seasons have been the writers preparing the audience for something like this, something more realistic and darker, but now the question is did they go to far? Even for dedicated fans this episode was hard to handle. Showing this on primetime TV was a bold and risky move. It was one of the darkest moments in the shows history by far.
The production team on the Walking Dead has never been afraid to make the audience feel uncomfortable and distributed but these scenes will change the course of the show forever. Which after all, might have been the point because these characters are now changed and can never return to their former selves.
Did you think “The Groove” went too far for primetime TV? Comment below.
image: AMC