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Previously On: The Walking Dead - "No Going Back"

The Walking Dead's second season closes out in an appropriately depressing, yet still disappointing fashion.

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Editor's Note: As always, this is a spoiler heavy discussion of what takes place in the season finale of The Walking Dead. If you haven't played the episode and intend to, maybe don't read this yet.

Following up on the heartbreaking conclusion of The Walking Dead’s first season was undoubtedly going to be challenging. Over the course of that first season, Telltale Games managed to develop one of the single most memorable character relationships I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing in a game. Lee and Clementine were an amazing pairing, utterly, believably human in their interactions with each other and the other survivors around them. Even when the plot occasionally veered off into less engaging territory--remember the menacing guy on the radio?--my attention remained transfixed on the screen so long as Lee and Clem were there. As sad and brutal as that first season’s end was, it was exactly the ending that Lee and Clem’s journey required, a moment of pure, tragic beauty.

The Walking Dead’s second season, even in its best moments, has never quite captured that seemingly effortless chemistry between characters. Clementine is still Clementine, but few of the characters she’s partnered up with this season have even come close to matching the kind of relationship she shared with Lee. Kenny, despite being a familiar face, has gone so far off the rails that by the time the final episode opens, he’s barely recognizable as a functioning human. Jane took over something of an instructional role in the second-to-last episode, but her sudden surge in notoriety came so late in the season that she’s barely had time to establish herself at all. The remaining survivors all exist as little more than sketches of emotional states, figures designed to trigger specific story beats when it is convenient. With no one, strong presence for Clementine to play off of, the story has effectively been reduced to the tale of a little girl who does little save but react to the often stupid, irrational things the adults around her constantly find themselves doing.

The whole marketing campaign for this season has been about you being able to create your Clementine. The five episodes of this season have, on paper at least, been about providing opportunities to shape her into the character you envision her as. In order for that to be true, the season’s finale ought to have been about a culmination of your choices throughout the season. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the season closes out with a single, brutal choice that splits the narrative into several distinct endings. That choice ultimately has very little to do with what you’ve actually done over the course of the season. Rather, it requires you to think carefully about how other characters have behaved around you. You are thrust into a situation where you decide which of two characters of presumably equal importance will die. This is certainly not an easy choice, nor is it one that lands without emotional impact. But even in the “best” among the many endings to the game, there is a sense of hollowness that comes along with it.

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Before we get there, the episode has to put Clem and her remaining friends through 90 minutes of tragedy and terrible decision making. Things pick up in the middle of the heated gunfight that closed out episode four, with Clem’s group locked in battle against the Russian ambushers aligned with Arvo. That battle turns out to be the only significant bit of action prior to the end, and it concludes with both the convenient (and expected) return of Jane, and without a single friendly survivor dead. Well, except for Rebecca, but we already knew she was gone by last episode’s end. The group barely takes a moment to eulogize her before moving on, callously reminding us that she was never that important of a character, especially once she delivered her baby.

That baby becomes the focal point of “No Going Back.” Kenny becomes obsessed with finding a safe place for the child to grow. While everyone else certainly wants to keep AJ (Alvin Jr.) safe, Kenny’s desire boils over into madness at times, pushing others in the group further and further away from him. This is the one thing “No Going Back” manages to do well. Kenny’s unhinged behavior has a terrific build to it, oscillating between dejected sadness and full-on rage in exhausting fashion. Gavin Hammon gives one of his best performances in this episode, and the writers do a terrific job of making Kenny’s violent swings feel at least reasonably organic.

Sadly, he’s the only character who gets this level of treatment in the episode. Jane remains ever the stoic, socially uncomfortable character she had made herself out to be, but she takes on an air of needling petulance when dealing with Kenny that makes her increasingly difficult to like as the episode goes on. She says smart, reasonable things, then proceeds to badger an emotionally fragile man at every opportunity. When that finally reaches its natural conclusion…well, we’ll get there in a moment.

The biggest issue throughout “No Going Back” is a sense of aimlessness. Following the gun battle, the episode spends an inordinate amount of time making Clem converse pleasantly with other characters. Seemingly, the idea here is to refamiliarize the player with these people to give what happens later more heft. Instead, these moments feel more like stalling for time than anything else. You are certainly reminded that Bonnie, Mike, and Luke are people that you have an acquaintance with, but the way the script tries to reassert their presences is clumsy and mostly kind of dull. I certainly wanted to be more interested in Luke and Jane’s burgeoning relationship, Bonnie’s crush on Luke, or have any idea who Mike was other than a person who reacts to things, but this season didn’t do enough to earn that interest.

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So when Luke finally dies in a terrible accident, I can’t say I felt a whole lot about it. I didn’t want him to die, and I did my best to try and keep him alive. I covered him as he tried to rescue himself from the break in the ice we were traveling over, and when he sank beneath the ice, I beat my pistol against it until Clem fell through herself. As is so often the case in The Walking Dead, I tried very hard to save a character who was unsaveable. Because of this, Kenny becomes increasingly furious at Arvo, who he blames for every miserable circumstance that’s befallen the group. And suddenly, Bonnie now hates me, because I wouldn’t run up to use my tiny frame to try to hoist him out of the ice. Bonnie, who had been so kind and friendly throughout the season, had reversed course purely because she felt I hadn’t “done enough” to save her unrequited crush. I had wanted to like Bonnie, but by this point, I was pretty much done with her.

Everything that takes place over the course of the next chapter is just a mess. Kenny flies off the handle and starts beating Arvo, which I tried to stop, only to get smacked in the face for my trouble. Eventually he skulks off to try to repair a pick-up truck parked behind the house we’d taken up in, which leaves everyone else to grouse about his behavior. This is especially true of Mike, who couldn’t telegraph his sudden sympathy for Arvo’s plight any harder outside of just walking up to Clementine and saying, “I like Arvo now.” Jane keeps reminding Clem that Kenny’s one’s step closer to the edge, about to break, etc. Bonnie won’t even talk to me. Then Kenny miraculously gets the truck working, and yet another argument about where to go erupts. Kenny wants to go find Wellington, the rumored settlement that’s supposed to be completely safe. Jane and Mike want to go south where it’s warm. Everybody yells a lot, then somehow ends up agreeing to sleep on it.

While doing so, Clem wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers Bonnie, Mike, and Arvo trying to steal the truck. Because Kenny has so thoroughly alienated these people who claimed to be my friend, they are actually willing to rescue a kid who helped set us up for an ambush, steal our only mode of transportation, and abscond to wherever the hell while leaving the rest of us (the baby included) to fend for ourselves. Look, I get that Kenny is a nightmare at this point, but this is the very definition of an unearned heel turn. Nothing in Bonnie or Mike’s character up to this point justifies this kind of reaction. Maybe they were pieces of shit all along and i just never realized it. I don’t know. But by this point I was done putting in any work to keep them in our group. I called out to Jane and Kenny that we were being robbed, and what do I get for my trouble? A bullet in the shoulder, courtesy of Arvo.

Fuck Arvo.

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Here is where “No Going Back” takes a turn. As I said up top, this season’s biggest issue has been its lack of a meaningful character relationship. And as if to further prove that point, the episode plops Clem into a dream sequence featuring none other than Lee himself. I’ll happily admit I was glad to both see Lee’s face, and hear Dave Fennoy’s voice once again. The scene itself takes place on the RV, after Duck’s been bit and Carly had been killed. The conversation itself is a bit of a nothing. Clem expresses some fear at Duck’s inevitable death, they talk a bit about Lily (who I had allowed to come with us following Carly’s death) and at one point, I tell Lee I never want him to leave me. Even knowing what would eventually come to pass, I couldn’t help it. Nothing that happens in this scene is significant to the plot, yet it turned out to be the scene I savored the most, even as it served to highlight the utter dearth of worthwhile relationships this season has managed to build.

Clem snaps back to reality, finding herself in the truck with Kenny, Jane, and AJ. As Kenny drives recklessly through a minor snowstorm, he and Jane bicker back and forth about every stupid little thing. My cries for them to stop acting like children (situational irony very much acknowledged) went unheeded. Eventually Kenny is forced to stop the truck, upon discovering a blockade of abandoned cars on the highway. He goes searching for more fuel, and only seconds later walkers begin swarming toward the truck. Clem tries to drive the truck out of there, but ends up crashing right away. Jane bolts with AJ, and Clem is left to fend for herself in the snow, picking off sluggish walkers and she tries to find her remaining companions. She discovers a rest stop where Kenny has taken refuge. He demands to know where AJ is, and before you can really answer Jane shows up alone. She doesn’t say where AJ is, just alludes to some accident, while leaving Clem only a hint that she should stay out of “whatever happens next.”

Whatever happens next is a full-on death fight between Kenny and Jane. Kenny loses it, and no matter how many times you try to get between he and Jane, you just keep getting pushed out of the way. The fight is brutal and desperate, and in the end, you’re left with a single choice that defines how the season will end. Will you kill Kenny, or will you turn away and let him kill Jane? If for some reason you’ve made it this far but don’t want to read about specifics of the endings, this is your final warning before I start digging into them in detail.

In my first play-through, I shot Kenny. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to kill either of them. If we’re really considering what my Clementine would have done, she would have probably winged both combatants with a non-lethal shot and tried once again to save them. But that’s not an option the game provides, and in the heat of the moment, rapidly thinking through everything that happened over the course of the season, I chose to kill Kenny. I hated that choice the second I made it. Kenny, the last vestige of Clem’s adventures through season one, the guy I couldn’t have hugged fast enough the second I saw him in episode two. I shot him because I believed he was beyond saving. In his dying moments, he seems to echo this notion. He thanks Clem, tells her she made the right choice. I told him he was going to be with Katja and Duck now.

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It’s a beautifully sad moment that is, regrettably, robbed of its poignancy by the revelation that Jane had simply hid AJ in a nearby car to prove a point. She wanted Clem to see what a madman Kenny had become, and she was willing to make you kill him to prove it. I couldn’t handle that. I don’t care how right you think you are. Doing something so reckless and insane is beyond forgiveness, at least in the heat of the moment. Rather than going with Jane, I set Clem off alone. Doing so resulted in a scene of Clem, by herself, smearing walker guts on herself as she carries AJ through a horde of zombies. Kind of a bad-ass moment, I guess, but to me it felt oddly empty. Even though it was almost exactly what I thought would happen at the end of the game (as predicted here), it didn’t satisfy me in the least. Maybe it was because of my nagging feeling that killing Kenny wasn’t the right decision, even if he himself had told me it was. In going back and trying the ending where I stay with Jane, that notion was reenforced. None of the Jane endings felt right to me, so I went back again and did the reverse.

The ending that results from allowing Kenny to kill Jane felt a lot more right to me, even if I still hated the situation. The idea that I would just forgive Kenny after he stabs Jane to death is not one I can quite stomach, but I also didn’t feel like shooting Kenny after he’d already killed her (something you have the option to do). So I forgave him, trusted him that had Jane not put AJ in danger, or alluded to him being dead, that Kenny wouldn’t have flipped out like this. His behavior throughout the late episodes of the season felt like a perfect build to this meltdown, though, so in truth no, I didn’t believe him.

It didn’t matter though, because the ending that resulted from staying with Kenny felt much more like a meaningful capper on this season. Kenny gets you to Wellington, or at least as far as the wall that surrounds it. A woman guarding the tower makes you drop your weapons, then proceeds to throw you a bag of supplies, informing you that there’s no room left at the inn. Kenny is understandably apoplectic, but in the midst of his rantings, begs them to take Clem and AJ. Clem won’t hear of it, but Kenny is insistent. He implores you to think of AJ, and to think of your own young life. There is an option here where you can tell Kenny you won’t go, that you want to stay with him, but I didn’t take it (and I’d love to hear in the comments what happens if you do). To me, doing that felt like more of a betrayal than leaving him. Kenny, for all his madness, has wanted nothing more than to see Clem and AJ living in safety, the kind of safety he so badly wanted to provide his own family. Denying him this would have thrown that back in his face, and I couldn’t do it. The final moments between Kenny and Clem don’t quite reach the level of emotional weight those final moments between Clem and Lee had, but it’s the only ending of the available options that felt in any way “right” to me. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't tear up a bit as Kenny walked off into the distance.

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Yet no one ending to “No Going Back” ever felt completely satisfying. In one ending, you’re forced to kill one of your last remaining emotional connections in the world to end up with someone who is strong, yet cold and probably a bit sociopathic. In another, you have to let one of your last remaining emotional connections fly off the deep end, murder a friend, and then quickly forgive him in order to get to an ending that feels even remotely correct. In between, you can ultimately set out on your own, but the single scene ending you get there doesn’t provide any meaningful closure to what’s taken place throughout the season.

Maybe none of these endings feel completely satisfying because they simply don’t make good on the promise of creating closure for your Clementine. Again, the choice you are forced to make has roots in the behaviors of the characters Clem has associated with for much of the season, but in reality her actions and choices don’t really come into play in a significant way. It’s not about Clementine as much as it’s about who Clementine has been stuck with. If you want to read deeper into it, I suppose those people do represent highly specific, highly exaggerated paths for Clementine. Kenny is all emotion without reason, a man who feels so much that he’s lost the ability to control it. Jane represents pure calculation in absence of any emotional connections whatsoever, a woman who has abandoned caring about people for the sake of self-survival. In killing one or the other, you are making something of a determination on how you want your Clementine to be. Are you killing Clementine’s emotional self, or are you abandoning pure logic for the sake of retaining human connection? That’s how I read it, anyway, and even if you don’t subscribe to this theory, the only thing that really matters is that no ending completely works. Each forces you to forgive a terrible transgression almost immediately, lest you be forced to set out entirely on your own. Had that solo ending been rendered in anything beyond a scene that felt like a cheap, post-credits bumper, I might have been more okay with that. As it is, it’s not a satisfying capper to the season. And when I say satisfying, I don’t mean “happy.” I don’t ever expect happy endings in The Walking Dead. I do expect endings that make me feel like the journey I’ve just taken has been a worthwhile one.

This is the last, lingering question of The Walking Dead’s second season. Has Clementine’s journey been worthwhile? As much as I love her character, and I’ve appreciated the malleability Telltale has given her in this season, my ultimate answer is that I’m just not sure. This season has been a roller coaster, full of red-herrings and strange choices that often negated my personal involvement in the story. How weird was it that early episodes spent so much time building up a would-be villain in Carver, only to remove him from the picture entirely halfway through the season? What was the point of Sarah’s character arc, if all that time spent trying to protect her was only in service of leading her to an inevitable, gruesome death? Who were these survivors Clem took up with, outside of being bodies for her to talk to, and convenient plot devices? What was the point of the 400 Days tie-in outside of some context for Bonnie’s back story? Even when the first season periodically veered off the rails, that core relationship between Lee and Clem kept the story from coming completely unglued. The events of the story took a backseat to the characters, and the season sang precisely because of it. Here, the character relationships took a backseat to the story, and the season suffered for it.

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Random Notes

Thanks again to everyone who’s taken the season two journey with me. It’s been a bumpy ride, to be sure, but it’s also been a fascinating one to write about, and I hope you enjoyed this series of recaps. I don’t actually think I’ll end up doing this for the upcoming Tales from the Borderlands series, as I just don’t have enough personal interest in the Borderlands universe to want to say much of anything about it. But if a third Walking Dead season rears its head, I expect I’ll dive headlong into it as I did this season. Here’s hoping we end up with a new cast of characters. I’ve enjoyed my time with Clementine overall, but I think many of you out there will agree that it’s probably time to move on.

Alex Navarro on Google+