The Walking Dead: You’re never alone, especially in ‘Isolation’
By The title of tonight’s episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead couldn’t have been more misleading: “Isolation” is an episode about the utter lack of isolation in the confined settings of a prison-cum-anti-zombie outpost. Even those moments in the episode in which characters were ostensibly isolated — as when Herschel tells Carl that “It’s peaceful out here” when they’re “alone” in the woods collecting elderberries — were undermined by:
Or, even more obviously, when Daryl, Michonne, Tyrese and that-other-guy-from-The Wire were driving along an empty road and heard voices on the radio, indicating that they weren’t isolated, and then ran into this lot:
Those are the more prevalent examples of the episode’s visuals defying its title, because they’re both keyed in on plot points: Herschel appreciates being alone when he isn’t, and Daryl et al accidentally run into one of the most populous zombie hordes on the show to date after hearing a faint voice on the radio. But I’m more interested in how the visuals themselves undermined the idea that this episode was, thematically, about “isolation,” and you can see hints of it in that first image of Carl and Herschel above.
If you look at it, there are three planes within the frame: in the foreground, you have Herschel; in the mid-ground, you have Carl; and in the background, you have the walker. All of the planes are occupied in a way that, conventionally, makes a frame feel “crowded.” If a director — in this case, Daniel Sackheim — uses a shot in which three people occupy all three planes in an episode once, you might not notice it. But in this episode, Sackheim consistently stacks the frame, almost from the opening shot of the episode…