Yes. No matter how much I despise Travis.....once you put yourself in his wimpy shoes (lol) it's hard not to feel really bad for him. He was completely helpless and watching that realization hit him more and more.....was a bit heartbreaking.

 

The second-most saddest thing about it all is that Travis is right: everything bad about Chris' transformation goes all the way back to Travis and Liza's relationship problems, divorce and the circumstances behind Liza's death.

So when it came down to saving Chris, I honestly think that Travis was a dollar short and a day late. I'm not saying that there's no hope for Travis or Chris. But now, Travis is completely powerless.

It's all up to Chris now. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone can trust that he can make a good decision.

The first saddest thing about this whole Chris problem is that Travis will allow the truth to eat him alive and turn him into God knows what.

By the way, if you caught that zombie/vampire reference, it was totally intentional.

MORAL OF THE STORY
If you have children with someone, you have created a family. So you should do everything within your power to keep that family together. Because if you don't, it will have far-reaching consequences. One of them being that the children (AKA usually the only ones who are 100% innocent) will be the ones who will get burned the worst. And they will hate you for it.

 

Yes, the moral of the story is totally true. We don't have a clue why Travis and Lisa's marriage failed -- whether it was a fling with Madison where they both worked at the same school or something which came along after Travis and Lisa's relationship had fallen apart for totally unrelated reasons. We do know that Chris, like so many children of divorces today, hated Travis for abandoning his mother. The ZA was an oddball chance to fix that but then Lisa ran off to nurse others, abandoning Chris. I understood the pull of "duty" that made her do it, but I also understood Chris's agony as his mother drove away with the military. Next thing we know, they've found her and shortly after the rescue, Travis has put a bullet in her brain, which was the right thing to do, but Lisa did not even say good-bye to Chris before she asked for this and Chris did not yet even understand the way the zombie disease works. It's almost as if Chris feels he was never important to either parent.

I don't like Chris. I view him as irredeemable -- BUT, if Chris could forgive (which typically children of a divorce cannot), them maybe there would be a chance for him. Worse yet, I don't see how Travis is going to get over this, but to survive, get over it he must.

 

Well said, Zvivor. Not every conflict has to involve someone heroic. Anti-heroes are much more relatable. Chris is an important part of this story, and Travis' look of absolute dejection was quite understandable, as his guilt for failing his first wife and son. Happy endings are for suckers.


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You're 100% right. Chris is the only one who can save himself. Granted, he will need a lot of help (changing your environment and the people you hang out with is going to be very, very difficult in the zombie apocalypse) but nobody else can/will do it for him.

It's sad because he is so young. And everyone knows that most young people have little to no sense, especially when it comes to helping themselves.

Judging how the last two episodes will feature a lot of Travis, we might find out more details about Liza and Travis' divorce. But from the conversations the two had in last season's "The Dog," it seemed like Travis had a problem of being too soft, that he tried to fix to everything and that he wasn't supportive of Liza's career aspirations.

Liza also unintentionally contributed to the Chris problem. Because I think Chris' problem also has a lot to do with the fact that Travis and Liza never allowed Chris to become part of Liza's dilemma. To make matters worse, right after Travis put down Liza, he walked away to the seaside in a stupor with Madison following him. Leaving Chris to cry over her dead body. Alone.

Up until the midseason finale, every time Chris needed Travis to be on his side, Travis was elsewhere doing something else for somebody else.

 

As I see it, Chris might just end up being the most awesome character on the show.

No, no. Hear me out! Chris has gone to the dark side. But he's not Darth Vader yet. He can either continue down the path he is on, OR he can reach a moment when he realizes he is wrong about everything he has thought about his life up till now.

People who fall the farthest tend to climb the highest - IF they can turn themselves around.

At the moment I have nothing nice to say about Chris, like the rest of you. Honestly I don't think the writers of this show have the depth to write this kind of Chris story and I'm not expecting it. But how wonderful were they to prove me wrong.

 

e w

The writers of TWD did have the depth to write your story line -- they wrote so many complex stories, it was made the show. If [whoever the writers are] could write write what you suggest, it would be an enormous boost to the show.

 

I think the fact that Chris was not at the gates with the other two at the end of the episode suggests something important has transpired.


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This is one of those WTF issues I just don't get about these two series. TWD, as you say, is complex, with believable people who have good and bad qualities. You believe these characters, and you believe IN these characters. FTWD comes not even close to this level of character sophistication. I don't know why this is but the difference is glaring in its intensity.

 

Parental life not being perfect isn't a valid excuse to be a depraved asshole of his level. It does give you an excuse to have reservations about your parents and for a young person to have confusion and other normal factors, but in no way could that be an encompassing catalyst for what we've seen from Chris. Sometimes parents divorcing is a good thing for the kid if the relationship and home is really toxic. Chris is not an abused kid, he might be a slightly neglected kid, but his experiences are both ordinary and unspectacular and in no way explain what we are seeing from him. They contribute to what we're seeing, which would be a teenager blowing things out of proportion(a common feature in the modern western world), but the growing nefarious behavior in him descends from factors that are totally out of his parents control.

Everybody in the ZA is going through seriously emotionally heavy stuff. Some people adapt to it with their humanity intact and others have that facade stripped away and move into evil behavior. The Governor is the biggest example of this, because he was an ordinary, run of the mill middle class father pre-Apocalypse and then turned into a leader/monster combination post-Apocalypse. The Apocalypse stripped the facade away and revealed the true core.

Chris' experiences IMO are just all too convenient to reveal what really was lurking beneath the facade.

Sometimes even flawless parents, who do everything reasonably right by their kids, just have duds.

 

Chris is not a victim. He's a grade A little **** that deserves whatever is coming to him from his poor decision making and atrocious disposition.

Young people are naive and stupid, but his home life wasn't so toxic that it would create a monster. Travis was even trying to coddle him in his failed attempt to reach him. Nothing about his personal experiences are extreme enough to write off his inherent terrible internal qualities and make him out to be a quasi-victim that Travis and Liza are heavy to blame over.

They were weak parents. But how many people have weak parents and don't turn into degenerate sociopaths? Majority of people.

 

**** that noise.

Shane degraded due to a number of factors, which included his group being totally against him after risking life and limb many times over to protect them. Shane started out a hero and then degraded into a mess.

Chris started out a punk and has done nothing but harm others, with his group and father being totally supportive and coddling his punk ass. Shane got nothing but grief and disrespect from the majority of his people in S2, whilst trying to do the right thing and mostly being the rational one.

Terrible comparison.

 

Strand was the quickest adapted, if not for Strand they'd have never made it out of LA. Chris also hasn't shown much in the way of survival and becoming a psycho doesn't mean you're adapted and balanced in this new world. He'd be dead if Travis didn't go after him and try to coddle him back to mental health that doesn't exist.

It's also erroneous to say Daniel and Nick don't count. So all veterans of war and the horrible things involved in it are mentally adapted to something like society rapidly collapsing due to an explosion of flesh eating walking corpses? Better prepared and less able to shocked than somebody who's had a cake life and more experience with weapons and survival tactics, but that's a joke to suggest that he wouldn't count as one of the quickest adapted just because of his background in a Central American war decades prior. The ZA is a really crazy thing.

I also don't see the connection to heroin junkie = adapted to ZA automatically and not counting.

Chris hasn't adapted to anything other than his sociopathic true self that was lurking beneath and any real comparison to Shane is wholly invalid.

 

I don't know if I'd say Strand's actions and quick thinking were adaptation, I believe he acted on a skillset he had already developed. He was in pretty poor financial condition when we meet him, and his survival skill set enabled him to take advantage of Thomas. But the rest is true, their survival can be credited to Strand.

Agree with your comments about Chris, He ate the chickens not the eggs, and joined up with people he can't trust. Not very smart nor would that be cause to believe he will survive very long on his own.

I do believe Nick has grown. But he is also acting out the same dynamic from his past, running away from his family and hiding out or in a stranger's company.

 

Disagree here, Chris is psychological unstable, and unsound. When one doesn't have full control of their facility, they lose their ability to react rationally or commit to sensible, rational actions. Which is why law provides such people with a "non compos mentis" defense or mitigation of guilt.

pretty sure seeing his father kill his mother, before he understood the implications of being bitten and turning, caused a him to fall into a sort of psychosis.

Not saying anyone should "baby" him or that the group should coddle him.. If I were them I'd just leave him be, Let him go off.. Let him go..

From a point of fiction, Chris disappearing for a while and returning as a crazed villain would be great storytelling

 

Chris has become one of the most interesting characters of late, specifically because of his sociopathic tendencies. He was also looking for someone to accept him as he is, which he's found, however temporarily, with the brat boys. The fact that he's not with them when they approach the gates of the hotel speaks volumes. Why he's adapted? Because he's not afraid to kill, unlike Travis.


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Yeah, he's a nutcase and that's how I have described him. But he's not a victim that's deserving the sympathy of a victim just due to having weak parents. His mother being put down before turning -- welcome to the ZA, everybody is experiencing horrors.

If they should have let him go and not coddle him and he's not a victim and just is simply mentally unfit, then what are you disagreeing with me over?

 

I'll rephrase and put it another way, to see if you agree and I'll consider your response.

As I'm sure many veterans can attest to, some of their brothers in arms come back from the war and the horrors they've seen pretty jumbled up. Some veterans come back and are able to reintegrate more successfully than others. Now two men of the same company/platoon may come back in very different psychological conditions after their tours. Just because one is stable and the other isn't, doesn't mean we shouldn't extend our desire to understand to BOTH soldiers.

Much in the same way some people are predisposed to conditions like clinical depression or even Parkinson's disease (which in fact is a neurological disease much like psychosis is) some people are predisposed to shock, and temporary psychosis.. (oddly enough malfunctioning or damaged neurons of the same type (albeit different areas of the brain) are responsible for all 4 conditions)

Now I know this is just a TV show, and we want it to be entertaining, it's not real life, and I am positive none of us would want for real life the same things we'd want for that TV show, but I like to extend judgements made through my beliefs/principles from real life, to the situations and characters on the show.

 

The whole discussion of the character is an attempt to understand the character and his traits and motivations. My argument was against painting the mental issue's of the character as primarily the fault of Travis and Liza. Personality defects can certainly be put on them to an extent for weak parenting and a lack of confidence and general would definitely fall under their blame.

But sociopath/nutcase/violent behavior was just stuff that was all too conveniently exposed in Chris from the instances of the ZA and his experiences.

Which I agree with you and have stated that some people can handle stuff, some people cannot. Some people retain their humanity in times of crisis, others turn into animals.

My main point is the kid is not a victim to the extent that someone can easily write off his behaviors as being attributed to his parents and his experiences and for us to feel sorry for him for experiencing that more so than the others and their experiences. He's just a crazy little deranged ****.

 

Hm thinking about it, I do agree, he can't be seen solely or in greater fraction as a "victim"