Tales of the Walking Dead -
Season 1, Episode 4: "Amy / Dr. Everett"
In the fourth episode of TOTWD, we're introduced to Dr. Everett (Anthony Edwards), a researcher turned environmental extremist with his theories that the rise of cannibalistic corpses are somehow nature self-correcting after man's destructive misuse of it. Yeah, showrunner messages aside, Everett never explains how a major, unprecedented event such as the aforementioned cannibalistic, reanimated dead occurred and what connection it had to man's misuse or destruction of the environment. Nope, he just moans on and on about nature being reclaimed, even going so far as to use an electronic neck monitor on "Specimen 21," a walker he believes has some sort of social / survivor interaction with other walkers (e.g., leaving a killed animal for others instead of eating it himself, etc.).
Enter Amy (Poppy Liu), a scrambling, breathless survivor with a melee weapon worn over her left forearm; she enters the territory used by Everett for study and is nearly killed--with Everett watching, the latter only "saving" her when she is close to killing "Specimen 21" who wanders off with no means of being tracked. Everett makes it clear she is not welcome, but when she falls ill (from eating unripened Nightshade berries), she is reluctantly taken in and nursed back to health. Separated from her group, Amy is eager to find them, and requests Everett's help, but he's become such an isolationist / extremist, that he only cares about studying the walkers.
Parting ways, Amy is the one who locates "Specimen 21" (in life, a former colleague of Everett's), information she uses in exchange for Everett's help getting back to the zone her people had last settled in. Eventually, the duo see walkers eating some of Amy's friends, save for one, who--with Amy's intervention--escapes...and Everett does not lift a finger to help, always falling back on his idiotic theory concluding with allow "nature" to take its course.
During the fracas, "21" falls to a piece of a marshland, which floats away; panicking, Everett uses a rope to lasso the wrist of "21", begging a pissed-off Amy to help pull the walker in, but at as it seems "21" will be rescued, an alligator--one of the former zoo animals reintroduced to the wild--rises from the water, chomping into "21"--and pulling him underwater.
Everett is--for the first time--upset (but not about humans being killed...), and begs Amy to join his research--to carry on his work whenever he dies, warning her that she will die if she returns to her people (noting the sight of circling buzzards is the sign of a walker herd nearby) . Amy is only interested in her people, and leaves Everett behind.
The following day, Everett starts his day again, heading to Amy's camp, only to find the members all turned into walkers--including Amy. Somewhat disturbed by his prediction for Amy's fate coming true, he readies a belt, presumably to capture her to take the place of "21".
NOTES:
Like the real world, the WD franchise is populated by all manner of personalities, which--quite obviously--is helpful for storytelling sake, but that does not mean every personality is interesting. In "Amy/Dr. Everett", we have Dr. Everett, who is such an environmentalist extremist, constantly arguing against the survival of humankind (which makes his research pointless, since its being recorded for...?) that his past, present--his reason for being only inspires audience rejection, unless someone was hoping he would end up realizing the value of fellow humans..just as he was attacked by a walker.
The episode's writer (Ahmadu Garba) was not clever with the Everett-delivered messaging; the apparent point was to make him distasteful, yet we the audience were supposed to find some nugget of truth amongst the piles of crap. It did not work, and in the end, the Amy character was simply a tool--not to teach Everett the error of his ways--but to justify his self-serving approach to life by ending up as part of his continued experiments.
Once again, TOTWD presented a story with no purpose, focusing on characters no one would possibly find interesting or just entertaining in the survival horror format.
GRADE: D.
