I posted this in the comments of the episode’s discussion thread but it’s a bit long winded for a comment so I figured I’d make a separate post.
I want to preface this by saying that I mean no disrespect to people who enjoyed this episode, let alone the many people involved in the writing and production of this episode. I have worked in the film and television industry consistently for the past decade so I understand that there are a lot of moving parts in a production and sometimes a story can look great on paper and somewhere along the way it just doesn’t translate to being “successful” on screen. I also understand that this episode was produced early on in the pandemic before protocol had been firmly established for film sets so I can appreciate that there were limitations in the story they could tell.
All that being said, this was the least successful piece of storytelling I’ve witnessed in a really long time. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what the episode was trying to say that we didn’t learn from the previous Daryl/Carol episode or at some other point in the show and all I can come up with is “Daryl and Carol are affected by their falling out”. Even that’s a bit of a stretch because nothing that happened to them during this episode was the result of their fractured relationship. Carol was trying to make food for the community to somehow redeem herself after a series of unilateral, selfish decisions that put other people in danger but she kept getting sidelined by a pest problem as well as the pitfalls of solar energy. How is that analogous to the state of her relationship with Daryl or anything to do with anything that’s currently happening in the series for that matter. The same goes for Daryl’s part of the episode that was even less significant to the story (or his character progression for that matter). He goes on an absurdly mundane quest to find a replacement part for a damaged part on his motorcycle. I’ve been putting off replacing the windshield wipers on my car. Should I document it when I finally get around to it? Is that compelling storytelling? I get that the writers created obstacles for him with the teetering car and the group of walkers he comes across but the episode was so slow that it gave me time to consider the fact that AMC very publicly announced that he’s getting a spin-off series so there was never a possibility of him getting crushed by a car or devoured by walkers so those obstacles had no stakes. The only part of Daryl’s story that pertained to his relationship with Carol is that when he was replacing the damaged wire on his bike, it would have been a little easier if he hadn’t lent his smaller knife to her before they parted ways but that would’ve been the case even if they had parted ways on good terms. The other day I was looking for my drill and realized I lent it to a friend awhile back. Is that compelling storytelling?
The last thing that really drove me nuts was the “stone soup” story. I was so fascinated by how terrible that story was and the fact that it pertained to absolutely nothing in the episode that I actually spent a good twenty minutes researching it online because I was so convinced I was missing something. First of all, it’s an actual fable that dates way back which blew my mind. Secondly, the moral of the fable is that “sharing is good”. It’s literally that reductive. Don’t get me wrong. I totally get the importance of teaching the virtues of sharing to children but that wasn’t even my takeaway from the story. To me, the message seems to be that if people don’t want to share what they have, you can trick them into doing so especially if they’re dumb enough to believe that you can make edible food where the main ingredient is a fucking rock. On an aside, in my stone soup deep dive I leaned that there is a traditional recipe for stone soup or “Caldo de Piedra” which originated in pre-Hispanic Mexico in what’s now considered the state of Oaxaca. It’s a fish soup prepared using carefully selected stones and apparently it is only to be prepared by men. Also to learn and use the recipe you must first consult with the indigenous elders so if nothing else, at least I can say I learned something.
Submitted March 26, 2021 at 03:18AM by 2packred https://ift.tt/3rqhYfV
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