Viewers of the Walking Dead want a Resurrection

Posted by Ebonstorm on December 8, 2014

Yes, this is a picture of Beth Greene (played by Emily Kinney) at a happier time (relatively speaking) in the series, the Walking Dead.

It’s the Mid-season and time for sweeps

This is a picture of a time, fans wanted prolonged, they wanted the series to explore this relationship, help it blossom. The fans hoped it would turn into Love and Zombies as our intrepid farm girls managed both get the pick of the male litter in the “Walker Apocalypse”. So many fanfictions already ring out with the love and wedding bells for Beth and Daryl Dixon.

Alas that time, that hope…<sniff> that hoped for dream has been dashed upon the rocks. Then smashed with more rocks from a followup landslide. Which is then promptly covered up with mud from the mudslide and topped off with an avalanche that covers any trace of Beth Green.

Just the way I like it.

Yes, Beth Greene (played by Emily Kinney) is dead. And if you screamed out spoilers, too damn bad. Watch your Tivo or DVR already.

I am sympathetic to young actresses needing work and being out of steady work is a bummer. But have you seen this girl without all that country dirt, stylish mud and artfully disheveled hair? What a beauty. So don’t weep too long, she will be back at work in just about a minute.

But don’t cheer yet sports fans because there appears to be a fan outcry. (No, your’re not surprised either?) Beth shouldn’t be dead. There is a petition going around which should have just broken 25,000 about six minutes ago. What happens to it after that is unknown but I would expect something to be cluttering some executive’s email in about an hour.

Comic Book.com releases the story of the petition and the heartfelt demands of its creators:

“Beth Greene (played by Emily Kinney) was killed off in the mid-season finale in season 5 of The Walking Dead. Her death was far too soon and the writers threw away the potential of a perfectly good character. Her story wasn’t over. Emily Kinney and her character don’t deserve this. There was so much more to be done with her character and they chose to kill her in a disgusting, unsatifying death that caused more anger and dissapointment than shock and mourning. Beth was a symbol of hope that a lot of women could relate to and see themselves in (especially self-harmers who saw her as someone who overcame their suicidal/depressive feelings). By sloppily killing her it just shows that she was used to further a man’s (Daryl’s) storyline. We realize that the circumstances she dies in are irreverisble, but this is television. Anything is possible. By signing this petition you can at least show your support for Beth. Let’s show Emily Kinney how much we love her and want her back.”

There were plenty of other people who could have died instead of Beth. I mean the police woman, she died. That was good, karmic justice. Tyler James Williams was not even on the show an entire season, he could die at any time. I mean we already have four or five black characters now.

One (Mishone)…two (Tyrese)…three (Sasha)…four (Crazy Priest, who surely can’t be long for this world)…five (Mysterious Roaming Black Guy who only gets thirty seconds on the screen at the end of every show)… six (Bob). Oh, wait, Bob is no longer with us. We still have a record number of Black cast members. So I don’t know about you but I was sure one of them was going to catch a bullet or slow walk-by chewing…

Why am I not sad that Beth is dead?

From where I was sitting in my mental director’s chair, yes, someone else needed to die. The cast had gotten a bit plump and difficulty to juggle. Some complexity is good, gives us some polarity and conflict but the season had been filled with cutaways, dangling threads, lackluster characters, phoned in deliveries, a bit of moral ambiguity (I mean Rick, really? Slamming into the guy and breaking his back? Damn!) So we needed something to tighten up that ending. A character who people would care about. No, no one was really upset besides Sasha about Bob. He wasn’t a likable character. Not his fault, he wasn’t ever given an opportunity to shine, and an actor can only do so much with a role that isn’t.

Death Checklist Activate: Rick, nope. Daryl, nope. Michonne, nope. Kids, nope.

Glenn’s group? No. The reveal Eugene lied and there was no cure was already rocking that group. That group isn’t allowed another shocker till they join up again.

Whose left? Tyrese? Unlikely. He survives the comic for some time and while the character is still unpopular, I think there is room to grow and the conflict between Tyrese and Rick is too good to NOT deal with.

Sasha? Yeah. I see her doom approaching. But not yet.

Crazy Priest? No one likes him or cares for him. If he gets eaten, most won’t even notice.

So we have Carol and Beth. Two women who spent a bit of time away from the main group and story and represent complete opposites as far as characters, character arcs and potential growth of the characters in the future. While the Beth and Daryl fans weep, the Carol and Daryl fans are secretly and quietly rejoicing.

The Verdict (and rationale)

The producers chose Beth over Carol because Carol’s recent arc had made her more more popular than she had ever been. Beth had been gone for a while, (and wasn’t really the most popular of the members of the ensemble) The expectation was, her return ensured she would have a particular emotional value because of her youth and as a relatively undeveloped character there was plenty of life left in her (so to speak).

So her death has more ratings value because, she was young, cute, perky, had just started gaining value because of her reappearance, her connection to her sister as the last member of The Farm, meant now only Rick has any living family members. (I would keep my head low, Carl…)

Beth’s death was both strategically valuable and emotionally shocking to both the characters and to the viewers who were to surely have formed an attachment to her.

My prediction was they would kill Carol because she had such an awesome Heroic Arc. She could die now and have been fulfilled individual (as fulfilled as the Post-Zombie Apocalypse allows, at any rate). She had been transformed from abused wife, who lost her daughter tragically, to only cool head in a tight situation, to being put out of the group after doing the right thing by killing the infected people, to being an ice queen putting down a child who, as sad as it is to say, had to die.

She leaves the group, does not die, instead survives and even thrives, gets hard and finally returns to the group, just in time to “Rambo Up” and cover herself in zombie guts, infiltrate and recon enemy territory, blows up a propane tank (which wouldn’t happen for real but dramatic license made her look even more awesome) saves the group from becoming Kibbles and Bits, and walks away into the sunset.

Anything she does after this is just gilding the lily. Carol has entered into the Awesome Hall of Fame and the only thing she could do now to put her over the top is Daryl.

Beth had to die. It was the only logical thing to do to make midterms end on a painful, “you bastards” note and drive folk to come back and see (now that their favorite was gone) to see whose gonna be next.

After all, isn’t that the name of the game?

Kill Your TV. It’s making you stupid.

Posted by Ebonstorm on August 9, 2013

COMMENTARY / OPINION

Okay, that’s not fair. TV isn’t making everyone stupid but it IS making some of us, stupider by the second.

My writings on this site address some of these issues. Indeed the very name, A Matter of Scale talks about the fact our problems are no longer solvable by a single person, they have grown too large to address unless we are all involved. It is literally a matter of scale.

I probe into the questions of why we can do certain things like creating food on a massive scale, transforming it into any number of other forms and distributing it to people for what is an amazing economy of scale, while at the same time, we throw away food by the ton at our supermarkets and megastores while people all over the planet are suffering from starvation.

We don’t seem to see the contradiction.

We don’t seem to feel the suffering.

We have become disconnected from our humanity, our sense of feeling, our sense of responsibility.

Our sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves has eroded to just our family, the people we share a blood relationship to, or maybe our religious group who base our affinity on the invisible relationship we have to a divine being who may or may not exist. We devote our time, our energy, our efforts to THAT relationship while allowing our more reachable, touchable, necessary and mundane relationships to people outside of our blood to languish, to fail, to wither away, in some cases right before our very eyes; opportunities for love, laughter, and a life worth leading languishing on the vine.

I wanted to write something as touching as A. Person did, showing I understood his wrath at things like Game of Thrones, where people invest so much of their emotional capital into something that doesn’t exist. Where people are so upset about a thing that happened, not at all, anywhere, while real atrocities which would make the Red Wedding little more than an afternoon of fun for the whole family.

I am with him when people say to him that he is crazed for NOT participating in Game of Thrones, only the most pivotal television to have ever happened ever. Because like him, I say, it is not real.

Are you seeking treachery on the scale of Game of Thrones?

How about the financial institutions that gambled with the mortgages of millions of people and lost it all.
Then needing to be bailed out by the government, who is in actuality the voice and the money of the people.
Then to find out later, the banks would not only fail to be accountable to anyone regarding what happened, they would have a profit that made their previous earnings insignificant by comparison.
But the ultimate treachery was made manifest when banks, having been rescued by the government, the agency of the people, turned around and told the people who rescued them “‘Fuck Off’ you won’t be getting any help with your mortgage.”
Instead you will be put out of your home onto the street, and I, the banker, will still make money while you and your family rot, displaced and dispossessed, on the street, dodging the police for living in your car, struggling to keep your job and hold your family together and those same bankers will never know a day of drudgery or suffering ever again in their lives.
These same bankers will derail the economic policies of the nation by making sure what little regulation that might protect people from their predations in the future will NEVER happen.
This did not happen to a single family. This happened to MILLIONS of families. Amplify the anguish and suffering of the Red Wedding, score it like the Nielsen ratings and you would have had a show that would have had epic numbers. No show could compare with the anguish of the Red Financial Crisis of 2008. More people watched helplessly, more lives were affected negatively and more economic value was destroyed than any other financial event in the history of the world, including the Great Depression.

The Red Wedding was a mercy killing by comparison.

I wanted to let you know that as terrible as the Economic crisis of 2008 and its effects continue, there are still a multitude of things taking place out there we are still in denial about and television and its masters ensure we stay divided, broken, unfocused, and unable to marshal the will to make a difference.

Instead of a Clean Energy Age we are doubling down on the Remnant Fossil Fuel program, where we poison our environment draining the last of the fossil fuels from every last crevice in the ground to make as much money as possible while killing as many people now and in the future as possible.
We lose one Rhino and five lions a day. We also lose one Elephant an hour due to poaching. 15000 species which go into extinction every year while we increase the temperature of the Earth, poison and overfish the seas, and generally make a mad dash to convert the Commons into wealth for an elite few individuals.
I acknowledge my share of responsibility because while I am not wealthy, I do benefit tangentially from that wealth being generated by living in the US, a nation of vast and unequal wealth, though I enjoy none of it specifically.

Instead, I am going to let you watch this video which says what I would like to say to everyone. Instead of watching the fake Game of Thrones or Scandal or Law and Order SVU, you instead turn off your entertainment and watch more responsible news. See the events unfolding in your life, sure to affect you, your children and their children. Be the hero of your own story and fight for those unborn billions who WILL inherit a broken planet, displaced millions, and an economic system which will promote the very idea, if you aren’t already rich, you don’t matter. That if your ancestors did not find a way to exploit someone less capable, less rich, less intelligent, less educated, more ethical than they were, then they deserve the spot on the ladder Darwin made for them.

Know such thinking is a lie. Your value cannot and should not be determined by someone who is willing to burn you like a hunk of coal for their personal wealth.

You must value you and your potential contribution to the world. Your value isn’t solely determined by your physical beauty, your physical acumen in sports, or your intellectual capacity. It is determined by your humanity and your willingness to put yourself out for someone who has nothing to offer you but their thanks.

And in a perfect world, their thanks would be all that you would need to get on your way to the next person who needed your assistance.

Life is mean, brutish and short is the message of Game of Thrones. Our world replicates that quite nicely.

But the idea that it could be more is always there in all of our minds. That fairness is a possibility, helping your fellow man does NOT take food out of your mouth, being aware of where your food comes from does not make you less of a cool person. That saving animals, trees and our environment in general does not make you a tree-hugging liberal.

It makes you a decent person to think about what we do now affecting the future.

Stop listening to the lies. Trust the voice deep inside you buried under all of the failed aphorisms of television, of Darwin, of a dog-eat-dog world and know WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

But we have to stop listening to the lies being propagated to keep us poor, divided and uninformed. Kill your TV. Take your mind back. Change the world, one smile, one hand, one heart at a time. Game of Thrones can’t even compare to the feeling you get when you do.