Rick Grimes is not a well man. You see it in his face; he’s been sick for a while now, not physically ill but emotionally and morally floundering, and his situation hasn’t improved. The problem he’s having is the same problem every upright optimist faces when their worldview no longer fits their world. From the start, Rick’s been an outsider in the apocalypse. His coma kept him unconscious for the brunt of the destruction and chaos which followed the zombie outbreak, which means there was no transition period. He never had the luxury Shane or Lori had, of living through a madness that made the nightmarish tedium of their current situation tolerable by comparison. He went out in a country with government, law, and a family that more or less made sense; he came back to a place where any centralized form of authority had been demolished, where nearly everyone he’d ever known and worked with was dead, where his wife was half-crazy and shacking up with his so-called best friend. Oh yeah, and where the dead walked and hunted the living. Against all of this, basic decency is going to struggle to keep up. Rick wants to be a good man, he keeps trying to be a good man, but the odds are against him. Instead of taking this in stride, realizing the situation has changed, and learning to adapt, he’s gone colder, more detached, and increasingly obsessed with control.
Also, it’s getting easier for him to kill people. This is, from a pragmatic point of view, a good thing. In “Sick,” after determining that the leader of the group of convicts our heroes found hiding in the cafeteria poses a potential threat, Rick kills him. It’s a brutal, shocking moment which helps elevate an already decent episode up to the level of the premi ère. The stalling and dithering of so much of last season (and, let’s be honest, the middle of season one) made it appear likely that the group of cons would hang around for a while before one of them inevitably stepped over a line, after which Rick would argue with Lori and whomever else was still alive about what to do next. Instead, three of the cons have already been dispatched, and while the remaining two surely have their secrets, the immediate crisis has passed. There’s no question of who is in charge here, and given the circumstances—the external dangers, the emotional turmoil of the main group, the life or death stakes—Rick’s decision looks like the right one. A compromise, or a lot of hand-wringing, probably wasn’t going to cut it. It was a Shane decision, but, once you got beyond his selfishness and growing insanity, Shane may had a point.
Except it’s not that simple, because violence carries a cost. Again: you see it on Rick’s face. He takes out the head con with a machete to the skull (which I’m just going to assume is a Dawn Of The Dead reference), and then chases down another convict who tries to escape. The second convict is where things become sort of uncomfortable; Rick chases the guy into a courtyard full of zombies, then locks the door, and tells him to run. There’s an expediency to his behavior which makes sense—he’s not actually killing the guy, he’s, at worst, giving “nature” a chance to take its course. But it’s a cold, cruel move, and it indicates a growing chill in Rick’s character that belies all his talk about “protecting the group.” This isn’t a pride situation, exactly. Rick’s growing brutality isn’t like Walter White using cancer as an excuse to over-compensate for a lifetime of second-place finishes. This is more the behavior of a desperate man who decides that being the good guy isn’t going to work anymore; he has to make the tough calls, he has to; and if that means killing and maiming and leaving people to die, well, so be it. It must require an immense effort of will to reorient yourself to this kind of thinking, and it can’t be healthy. Necessary or not, this isn’t an upward move for a guy who once devoted his life to upholding law and order. So he struggles and strains to be tougher, to be harder, to avoid mistakes by tightening his grip until his fist bleeds. This isn’t a sustainable approach. At some point, Rick may crack under the pressure, or just lose all concept of humanity. And inevitably, once you decide “murder” is a potential solution to problems, killing quickly becomes the first, last, and best option.
This isn’t a subtle transformation; by the time Lori’s telling Rick that she believes he’s a good man, and that he’ll do the right thing, we’re well aware of the gap between what she says and how he feels. But subtlety is less important now than finding some character arcs to hang the show off of, and Rick’s slide towards self-damnation can give the show some much needed spine. Given some actual acting to do, Andrew Lincoln acquits himself well, especially in a brief exchange between Rick and his wife near the end of the episode. They’re talking awkwardly to each other (this is after Lori’s forced and not entirely convincing pep talk from earlier in the episode—before Rick killed anyone this week, although I’m not sure if Lori knows about this), and Lori is asking, and then begging, for some sign that they’ll be able to work out their marital difficulties. Once again, characters on the show are talking directly about their problems, without any filter of personality or subtext to deal with, but what she’s saying makes sense. Lori is still sort of a mystery to me—I don’t hate her so much as I struggle to figure out just who the hell she is from week to week—but between this episode and the last, the writers and Sarah Wayne Callies have found a way for me to at least feel sorry for her, which helps.