Despite a bit of a scheduling hiccup, our talk on episode 4 of The Walking Dead Season 2 is out.
Instead of discussing the episode itself, I want to touch on something that happened concerning this episode elsewhere. About two days after recording this episode, IGN held a sit down with two of Telltale’s designers. During that talk the subject of Sarah’s death came up. It was made light of as well as the rash way a player has to behave in order for Sarah to save herself. Greg Miller labeled it a troll on the audience by offering a chance to slap Sarah, but this ended up being the action that saved her. This was apparently to a large contingent of the fanbase that hated Sarah and like most female characters and audience hates, desires to do awful things to her in order to get rid of her. Compassion is not a strong suit in gaming.
This caused some outrage at the treatment towards a non-nuerotypical character. In effect, saying that if you are not “normal” you should be left to die. We didn’t discuss this and Sarah didn’t even come up too much in the conversation. We sort of brushed her off. Neither Chris, nor Nick, nor myself hate the character and treated her how we would any other desperate survivor in Telltale’s zombie apocalypse. Situation by situation. However, we all do agree, to various degrees, on one thing: Sarah was a poorly written character.
Every time we have discussed a scene with her in it, we have come away rather confused. We understood there is something off about her but also had absolutely no clue what that might be. In fact, we weren’t sure if she wasn’t nuerotypical and just very sensitive and sheltered, leaving her unable to deal with the horrors. So little detail was given or developed about her, we didn’t know what her deal. And one of the worst things in a character relationship centric story like this is to continuously leave a character vague. While that may be fine for the first episode as she gets introduced and there is time later to develop her, that development never seemed to come. I don’t know if that was due to the writers being far more fractured this time around or not knowing what to do with her or just scrapping some plans after she proved to be overwhelmingly unpopular.
The Walking Dead Season 2 has been a mixed bag for everyone. It had some pretty high, highs, but some really low lows. Sarah is just another one of those misused, underwritten elements of a scattershot season. Underwritten enough I feel she fell to the Rorschach effect. Those who don’t see themselves represented enough in media cling on to any potential representation even if it is in fact not there. This is the burden of the creator and not the audience to make themselves clear and with Sarah they did not.
For all other thoughts on this episode, head on over and listen to the podcast.
“Fallen, but never forsaken.”