TWD: Community Theater and the Post-Apocalyptic Name Game

I spent a large part of this week’s slowly moving episode wondering what odd and, hopefully, oddly fitting moniker I’ll give myself in the event of the zombie apocalypse. Which is to say that this week we met King Ezekiel and we saw the reemergence of Carol the Happy and Hapless Homemaker. It was all very meta: watching these actors’ perform characters who are themselves acting. It was like watching almost every Black and Brown person I know interacting with their colleagues at work. Maybe that’s why I both understand it and have too many feelings about it to be completely amused watching it. I wonder, to, how those among us who don’t need to code-switch **cough privileged cough** experience these scenes and characters. Is it amusing to watch a long-loc’d Black man put on an affectation so that he can be respected? I guess it would be if I didn’t see it every day. But then again, if the guy at work is doing it well, they don’t see it at all. Either way, from gate, I didn’t believe that Ezekiel believed what he was saying (though I acknowledged the possibility of untreated mental illness). However, I completely understand why Carol reacted how she did.

First, there’s the Carol act. Real Carol, who still had a gun might have euthanized Shiva on site like the big cat was at the prison and had the flu. Second, if I meet a Shakespearean king with a tiger on a leash sitting in an empty auditorium (except, of course, for his faithful manservant who is hovering behind him) in the G…