A draft slams the front door shut. The marauder, already worked up to the limit, turns around and, in fright, without looking, pulls the trigger. Who knew that a cheerful guy would be in the line of fire, getting out of the most hopeless troubles? A few seconds later, the villainess is avenged by a shot in the stomach, but Clementine, who has lost another friend, does not get any easier.
Were the first minutes of the second season. “Heroes don’t die from random shots!” – I want to shout in the face of the director, but the director shakes his head. Now they are dying. The time of heroes is gone, the time of people has come.
The material was written based on the results of acquaintance with all five episodes of the second season. You can read the review of the first episode here.
What are you fighting for, Mr. Anderson?
The beginning of the new story turned out to be completely unsystematic: Clementine was winded for an hour and a half along the rapids of the turbulent river of life. The same fate awaited all her future companions: flight, uncertainty and complete internal confusion.
Plans are frustrated, goals are blurred, methods are unreliable. The second season of The Walking Dead is a real kaleidoscope of failures, in spite of which the heroes survive and increasingly lose their moral compass. After the woeful first season, which, however, inspired optimism, the second is seen as a standard of despair and despondency. Even when the heroes finally find a target – a sacred target! – what are they doing? They wallow in internal strife and firmly, greedily hold on to their vices.
In general, in the new season there are as many as three independent endings with significant options – this somewhat distinguishes the novelty from other Telltale games, where the ending is one, but with several faces. There is a place here for a tearful finale and a new flight, but the saddest one remains the most elegant among the denouements. The authors had the creative power not to repeat the successful experience of the last victory (although its trace is definitely felt here), but to write an unusual and, to everyone’s horror, believable story about weak and strong people.
Warriors of alien ideals
Since Telltale was making a story about a changeable and fragile human essence, then images for such a task are not needed from the weak. And here the developers have succeeded.
Kenny – the embodiment of responsibility – developed much more complicated, much brighter than the central character Clementine. In the first season, he lost everything and has now turned from a determined flowering man into an indifferent, grief-stricken figure who has lost the meaning of life. He has become cruel, rude, harsh and demands complete submission, because he knows better how to save your troubled asses. Only Clementine pulls back the novice despot and does not allow her hands to be stained with blood. Or does not pull back.
On the opposite side, there is the concept of independence, which acquires new facets of meaning in the dead world. The lively girl Jane is the personification of freedom: if not for this, she would seem like a stereotypical “soldier” (even the name is appropriate). Jane experienced a lot, lost her sister, but she learned a lesson from her troubles completely different from other heroes of the saga. The key to survival is loneliness, partners are a burden that pulls you to the bottom, and any group is doomed to collapse and death.
This confrontation between the two “elements” in the second season has become key. Mutual assistance, disastrous heroism and the mythical walled city of Wellington, a guiding star for Kenny and his rare supporters, on the one hand, and bitter freedom from responsibility, on the other. In the end, they face head-on, but there is no one to fight for. A brutal savior and an eternal traitor – like real dramatic heroes, they will fight for their ideas until their last bunlike the first season.
the sequel has a much more even narrative: each episode creates new conflicts and new opposition. Only the fourth is almost entirely devoted to seeking refuge for a pregnant lady with a nasty, nasty character. We did not see the nonlinearity promised by Telltale, but the heroes successfully poke their nose into the consequences of their actions. The logic of these same actions is much more obvious here, although, as we have already said, Lady Luck regularly brings her to her knees. Or Mr. Evil Rock. His intervention can be assessed in two ways, but in this story of a difficult opposition of will and weakness, there is not a single meaningless “death for the sake of death.”reath, and having made their choice, they will put a brilliant end to a tense story.
