There’s been a lot of discussion about the similarities and differences between Robert Kirkman’s comic and Frank Darabont’s television adaptation, but for the most part, I’ve embraced the changes that have been made. For instance, Kirkman would never insert a flashback into his story, but tonight’s season finale opened with one, going back to the early days of the outbreak when Shane attempted to rescue Rick from the hospital. We all know how that turned out, but I was a little surprised to see the military acting so callously – shooting anyone they came in contact with regardless of whether they were infected or not. To be fair to Shane, he had no shot of getting Rick out of their alive with all those machines, but even though he was kind enough to block the door with a hospital bed to keep the walkers out, that doesn’t make up for his adulterous betrayal.
Back in the present, Dr. Jenner welcomes the survivors into the CDC facility, but on one condition: that everyone submits to a blood test, just to make sure no one’s infected. Once everyone checks out, Jenner takes them on a tour of Zone 5, and before long, the survivors are laughing, drinking wine, and generally just enjoying themselves for the first time in a long while. Jenner isn’t impressed, and neither is Shane, who feels like they should be getting the answers they came for instead of getting wasted. But he doesn’t like what Jenner has to tell him – that most of the scientists left to be with their families when the outbreak hit, and others just committed suicide – and so Shane decides to wash his sorrows with a little booze.
Actually, it was probably more like a lot of booze, or he would have been smart enough to walk away after discovering Lori perusing the building’s makeshift library all alone. At first, it seemed like he was just trying to apologize for the way he’s been acting lately, but the more that Lori pushed him away, the more aggressive Shane became. He swears that he didn’t lie about Rick being dead and couldn’t do anything to save him (which is true), but forcing yourself on someone isn’t exactly the way to their heart, and Lori let him know it by scratching his neck. He definitely looked sorry about it the next day after he sobered up, but the damage was already done. Plus, it’s not like his feelings have changed any, and you can bet that Shane is going to become more of a liability the longer he’s around. Just wait until Dale tells Rick about what he saw in the woods.
Most of the survivors were nursing a hangover the next morning, but they still wanted some answers, so Jenner decided to show them what he’s been working on. TS-19 is a test subject who was bitten and then agreed to let the scientists record the infection process to better help their understanding of the virus. Oh yeah, and it just so happens to be Jenner’s wife. He’s still mostly in the dark on what the virus even is, but he does know that resurrection times vary (as quick as three minutes or as long as eight hours), and though it restarts the brain stem, the brain itself remains inactive. Apparently, the French were the closest to figuring out the cause, but they ran out of time when they started losing power in their area.
