I know that at least one of my regular blog readers waits to watch The Walking Dead until after the season wraps and the DVD/Blu Ray sets appear — which is the way I watch Dexter — so let me do a SPOILER alert:
If you didn’t see last Sunday’s episode titled “Clear” (Season3Ep12), skip this post till later, or just skip this post:
(And — to put a little more SPOILER space in between the opening and the main text — no, I’m not thinking about doing regular commentary on specific episodes of TV shows. Sure, it’s tempting, but I’ve got a long queue of posts that I’ve been meaning to do for almost a year — even some Walking Dead posts. . . .)
“Clear” is of interest here because it features the return of Lennie James as Morgan, which ties into some of the commentary done for Cheese Theatre’s showing of The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price as another, earlier guy named Morgan. I don’t know if the use of the name Morgan in the original comic book series was meant as a nod or in-joke to that Ur Zombie movie, but I’m sure that’s the way the TV crew has been using it.
I mentioned on Cheese that the title credits for Season One of Walking Dead feature the turning doorknob as Morgan’s zombie wife tries to get into the house, which had happened previously in the Vincent version with his dead wife and his doorknob. “Clear” references this by having the word “doorknob” prominently placed among the graffitti on the apartment wall. (Shaun of the Dead does a quick nod to the Vincent doorknob scene, too.)
(And by the way, I figure the use of the graffitti “Edgar turned” atop “Wallace turned” on a fence probably is a ref to Edgar Wallace, the original writer of King Kong, but have no idea if it is anything more than a throwaway. . . . However, if a giant ape shows up later in Walking Dead, remember you heard about it here first.)
If you caught that broadcast of Cheese, you’ll recall that host Bill Arney specifically talked about how Vincent Price roamed around picking up dead zombies (or vampires, or mutants, whatever they were exactly), throwing them into a big pile and burning them. Hey, guess what Lennie James is doing in “Clear”?
Yep, to “Clear” means he kills off some zombies, picks them up, takes them to a big pile of previously burnt zombies and immolates them, too. Like Vincent, he has big cannisters of gasoline to feed the flames.
Got to love it, and thought I’d better mention it, since it didn’t come up in The Talking Dead afterwards — who would have thought that Cheese Theatre would be more on top of zombie trivia? But it was.
(Meanwhile, my quest continues to get my pal Morgan “The Morgman” Holmes to pull a ring tone from The Last Man on Earth, maybe the part where the lead zombie is wailing, “Morgannnnn. We’re goinggggg to killll you, Morrrgggaannnnn. . . .” If my name was Morgan, I wouldn’t pass that up.)
