On The Walking Dead

My shit never stopped being together.
- Michonne

I love The Walking Dead. The show, not the zombies. In particular I love the dialogue. The last episode - Arrow on the Doorpost - featured almost no dialogue in an episode entirely about people talking. The writers really amazing restraint.

I especially like the character Michonne. I think her introduction will mark a point similar to when Spike was introduced on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. People looking back at the series as a whole after it is finished will divide it into before and after Michonne.

Unlike the Governor, who is far more important as far as the plot arcs are concerned, Michonne is interesting. She is almost pathologically averse to speaking and she is the biggest badass on television since Al Swearengen on Deadwood. Where Al was given great soliloquies (some of the best, most poetic language in all of television history and fifty different uses for the phrase "cock sucker"), Michonne relies on the slightest changes of expression and posture. It's a different kind of acting. They are both great characters only great actors could pull off.

I am torn between wanting to know what Michonne did before the world went to shit and never wanting to know. One of the reasons the show is so fascinating is watching the characters change from who they were in civilization to who they must become to survive (Daryl, Andrea, and Herschel are good examples). But it is almost impossible (and sometimes comical) to imagine Michonne as anything other than a katana wielding name-taking ass-kicking hardcore survivor.

In my merrier moods I like to imagine her as a Barrista at Starbucks.