The Walking Dead Season Two, Episode 5

With Episode 5 of the second season of The Walking Dead, we come to the end of a journey, a very rocky, very inconsistent journey. This season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead has been hampered somewhat by the expectations set by the first one. But more so by the up until now unknown struggle against the necessity of getting everything into place for this final act in Clementine’s journey.

I felt much of the first episode of Season Two spent a bit too much time getting rid of the old status quo so that Clementine could finally settle in with a new one. I had hoped that once that was done we could get on with a new story and a new conflict to drive forward this new tale of her maturation in a harsh, unforgiving world. At times, it seemed like the game had indeed settled into doing just that. It gave us a goal to reach and introduced an antagonist. But the sands kept shifting. The season provided no stable ground, no focus to allow us to understand what we were supposed to be getting out of the events of each episode.

Lee was our rock in the first season. Whatever happened and whoever joined or left the party, we had Lee and his desire to protect the little girl that he found in a tree house. No matter what, we could always come back to that foundation. However, Clementine herself is a somewhat inconsistent figure in Season Two. She grows and changes. She learns now on her own, whereas Lee was teaching her in the previous season. Yet, even that isn’t a constant, as the people around Clementine are not always the same people. It’s not that things kept moving forward in this season, but that every single thing kept moving forward. It felt like this season wasn’t satisfied in exploring with any thoroughness any of the concepts that it brought up.

If the goal of the first episode was to get all the pieces into place to begin Season Two proper, it seems like the all the rest of Season Two was an exercise in getting all the pieces into place for the final confrontation at the end of this episode. The designers saw a great dramatic high point that they wanted to reach, a powerful choice between two competing forces in Clementine’s life. However, just to reach that point meant a lot of ground had to be covered, often with a slight disregard for the importance of the journey. In the first season, each step with Lee was important; each leg introduced a new significant moment between surrogate father and daughter. Season Twofeatures moments of importance for Clementine as well, but they get lost in the need to keep going.

A lot of physical ground gets covered in this fifth episode, “No Way Back.” The remains of the group solider on through the snow, cold and hungry, resting at different points only long enough for the night to clear so that they can keep moving forward to they know not where. It is here that The Walking Dead seems to have remembered what it is good at: presenting interesting interpersonal conflicts. The issues in this episode have been there all through the season, but they have lacked the substantial weight of the arguments presented in Season One. Despite all the yelling, there really weren’t viable alternatives between competing characters’ agendas and philosophies.

In this final episode, differing views collide, not abstract philosophies but ones colored by the taint of human fallibility and personal hypocrisy. These persepctives arise from selfishness tainted by caring for others and protectiveness tainted by a disregard for others. Actual options and hard decisions for the player are influenced by these character conflicts and the feeling that one’s choices matter once again.

In the end, “No Way Back” creates a narrative heavily informed by the game’s own history and culminates with Clementine taking all that she has learned and what she has been taught into a final decisive act that will dictate her fate. Choice has been a rather touchy subject within Telltale games, as players are often left wondering how much meaning there is to any of them. Up until now, it seemed that fate didn’t care much for what we decided in Season Two. The game pushes forward with the same scenes, our choices only coloring our impressions of those moments differently. It is a valid method of creating interactive fiction, but often not one that the self importance of Telltale’s presentation of choice seems to be going for. Now all that coloring of events has come to fruition, allowing the player to decide what he or she will make of Clementine out of what we learned and what we remember of the lessons taught over the last two seasons. This truly is her closing chapter. Her education is done. Her journey is done.

I wish I could speak more specifically and less abstractly about the episode, but this one really is about what each individual player makes of their Clementine. The surprises and the impact of moments are best experienced first hand. Just know that it is a fitting conclusion and an overall high point in the series. Was it high enough to warrant the inconsistent preceding four episodes? I don’t know.

The Walking Dead: Season Two doesn’t feature any really self contained episodes. Telltale as a whole seems to be moving away from the episodic flavor that they once favored for the sake of telling a single story that is broken up, possibly needlessly, into smaller parts. The consensus is that Telltale’s other recent episodic game, The Wolf Among Us, should be considered a single work and played as such. It feels like the same could be said of The Walking Dead: Season Two. The episodic format is a holdover from a time when it was necessary for Telltale to be able to continue making games and no longer seems like an inherent part of the stories they tell.

RATING 9 / 10

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