After skipping a week, the Z-Realm returns and looks at the two latest episodes from season 5 of
AMC's the Walking Dead. We start with episode 14, titled "
Spend". With the extremely grisly deaths of some key cast-members, this was a very disturbing episode. Directed by
Jennifer Lynch ( daughter of
David ), it packs an emotional as well as visceral punch. You don't have to listen very closely to hear Marty be TOTALLY wrong about who Abraham hooks up with, but please forgive him, gin was involved. We follow that up with episode 15, titled "
Try" where bonds are made and broken, and where Rick finally unravels in front of all the residents of Alexandria. After this we focus on a hugely-broad variety of topics, from the
Bechdel Test, to
Madam Secretary, to car insurance. By the way, I heard you can save 15% just by switching to Zombco. Let us know what you thought of these two episodes of the TV show, and also what you thought of the podcast by writing to
mail@z-realm.com or by posting a message on our
Facebook page.
I think the Bechdel Test is pretty interesting, but it's not a feminist litmus test. As Olga points out, it doesn't get interesting until you gender-reverse it and find out that pretty much every movie has two named male characters talk about something other than a woman.
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of reasons for that disparity:
1. There's a vicious cycle that goes: Women are underrepresented in movies, movies with women in them are viewed as being unusually for women, producers avoiding scripts with more women in them because they want to produce stuff for a wider audience.
2. There's The Smurfette Principle, where a lot of stories are written with one and only one female character. I think that's mostly caused by a combination of conservation of detail and the male default (if each character has one unique stand-out character trait, and "being a woman" is a stand-out character trait, you get few women).
3. There's a general bias towards thinking about men as the protagonists and antagonists of stories in general. That one's also a vicious cycle.
On a completely unrelated topic, I actually do like Gabriel's plot thread. I though the show does a really good job of setting up why Gabriel distrusts the group (the rather shocking scene where the group brutally kills the Terminans in the middle of Gabriel's church). Gabriel might know it on one level that the Terminans were bad people, but he still has quite a lot of reason to think that Rick's group is super-dangerous. A lot of members of the group are going more than a little unhinged, and I do enjoy that sort of psychological drama.