The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Game, Season 2, Episode 4.
The memorial statue at Parker's Run, a fictional Civil War site used as the setting in episode 4 of The Walking Dead Game, featured a lone soldier carrying what looked to be a dead comrade over his shoulder. Beneath the valiant display, a plaque reads: Fallen, but Never Forsaken. The soldier's sculpted determination is a powerful image as he struggles to bring the fallen man home. A proper burial was likely important to these men, as abandoned bodies would have disappeared due to wild animal activity. They also ran the risk of being forgotten altogether if buried under unmarked graves.
The Civil War site created for this episode's setting is dedicated to the Battle of Parker's Cross Roads, a skirmish that occurred between Union Forces led by Jeremiah Sullivan, and Confederate forces led by Nathan Forrest. It occurred after Union forces blocked the advancing Confederates from returning across the West Tennessee River after an expedition into enemy territory. During the battle, a second Union force, led by John Fuller, charged the Confederates from behind. When Forrest and his men were able to repel the surprise attack and retreat across the river, they barely escaped with their lives. Suffering the most in casualties, many men under Forrest's command were likely faced with the dilemma of escaping the trap lain by the Union soldiers, or risking their lives in order to carry the wounded or dying with disregard to their own self-preservation.
When I first noticed the emphasis on the statue in episode 4's trailer for "Amid the Ruins", I was naively expecting Kenny to toss Nick over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, because for some odd reason, the statue really resembles the two of them. Maybe it's the camo-print texture on the fallen soldier's pants? Of course, when the episode condoned Nick to an early death and left Kenny as a shell of a broken man, I pretty much gave up hope on hearing Nick yell "Mister, I ain't a boy!" again while Kenny forcibly gives him a piggyback ride. I began to wonder if the statue had any impact on the story, and after re-watching the cutscenes involving its emphasis, I was pleasantly surprised by how well Telltale folds each of their allegories into their episodes. With the war setting scenery and the emphasis of the statue carrying the physical burden of a body while the characters carry a much heavier load in emotional burdens, this episode actually seemed to focus on a theme prevalent in The Things They Carried.
While the statue was likely built to memorialize the courage of the men who held onto the dead so they wouldn't be forgotten, it now symbolizes the internal burdens each character in the episode must carry with them, even if they think they've abandoned them for the purpose of self-preservation. Unlike the soldier's physical struggle of carrying a body with him, the burdens that episode 4's remaining survivors must shoulder are purely emotional, and thus, much harder to shed.
Kenny in his tent, he reveals that each death--Sarita, his wife Katjaa, and his son Duck, are punches he cannot carry anymore. It's no wonder then that the man still standing in the statue resembles Kenny, because he outwardly encompasses the struggle of carrying the guilt and loneliness associated with losing his family, until the weight he takes on is so much that he begins to crack under it. Luke even notes the struggle when he mentions hardships and how Kenny seems to break a little with each loss instead of hardening himself to it like Jane.
When Jane and Clementine leave the camp together, Jane is shown glaring at the statue for an extended period of time, hinting that she has her own cross to bear. Jane can't seem to stop mentioning her little sister, Jaime, whom we can safely assume is dead given Jane's outraged reaction when Rebecca asks.
When she and Clementine find driver's liscenses while looting corpses, Jane jokes that some people cannot leave the past behind; however, she still finds the time to mention Jaime as if she can't forget her little sister even if she's now part of the past Jane claims must be left behind.
Later, Jane explains that her sister had given up on living and that she had to carry her if she didn't want to walk--even across four states. Jane is, or rather was the physical symbol of carrying her guilt. She was a big sister who couldn't face the fact that her little sister did not want to march through the hell the world had become anymore, and pushed Jaime to persevere anyway. Eventually, Jane admits that she left Jaime behind, believing it to be the right thing to do, just as she believes leaving Sarah behind is the right thing for Clementine to do.
In this case, she is the opposite of Kenny, who can carry a bitten Sarita back to Parker's Run with him out of his stubborn refusal to let somebody he loves die without a fight. While it's true that Jane stubbornly fights to keep her sister alive, she eventually makes the choice to abandon her sister, and while this frees her in a physical sense, her constant reliability on memories of Jaime shows that Jane is still carrying her sister, and will always be weighed down by her own guilt that she refuses to acknowledge.
Before she leaves the group, Jane adamantly tells Clementine that it's better to be on your own, and that she doesn't want to see what happened to Jaime and Sarah happen to Clementine too. Even as a cold loner, by saying this, she has openly admitted that the deaths do affect her, and she is not strong enough to carry the load of another. It's the real reason why Jane can't stand company, and it's ultimately why she doesn't stay with the group. In the end--she simply can't handle losing people, and so she isolates herself to keep it from happening.
Even though Luke tries to carry Sarah out of the trailer, he is unable to because of his broken ribs. Later, after leaving the trailer, he laments that he was the first one to make it out of the trailer alive as if he had already made up his mind about leaving Sarah behind. Luke has also spoken openly about "leaving folks" when the group was trying to escape Carver's camp with wounded members. During "Amid the Ruins," if Nick hasn't already died, Luke will react less to his death than Rebecca. In Luke's case, he seems to mirror Jane at first because he abandons his burdens for self-preservation; however, he doesn't seem to dwell on them or feel as much guilt as Jane does.
Rebecca has been carrying her share of guilt since players first spy on her in episode 2. She has had an affair and is scared that her baby isn't her husband's. Later, once Carver recaptures the group, she must shoulder the guilt of putting the group in danger since Carver mainly pursues her because he believes the child is his. This belief also compels Carver to eventually kill Rebecca's husband, the man she's in love with. In her mind, Alvin dies for the mistakes she's made. Instead of the weight bearing down on her shoulders, Rebecca carries this guilt in her womb. Eventually, she is unable to carry both the physical and emotional weight, and dies several hours after the birth of her child.
Although it's obvious that Kenny is carrying a staggering amount of survivor's guilt on his shoulders, a few dialogue choices in episode 4 can reveal that a little girl has been carrying just as much, if not even more. Throughout season 2, there have been many references to season 1's protagonist, and Clementine's protector, Lee Everett. At first, they seem like fond recollections of a fallen friend as innocent as claiming that a history nerd like Lee would love the Civil War site in "Amid the Ruins." However, when Kenny complains of the people he's lost, Clementine has the choice to break her silence and claim that she had to shoot Lee, so Kenny shouldn't act like he's the only one who's lost somebody. It's clear that Lee's death is the heaviest burden Clementine carries with her.
In season 1, Clementine believed the man on the radio would take her to her parents and left Lee to find him. This indirectly leads Lee into a walker's bite while searching for her; this is the bite that ultimately kills him. Even though the accident couldn't possibly be her fault, Clementine must live with the nagging feeling that maybe if she hadn't left, Lee would still be alive. Throughout season 2, she expresses the idea "sometimes people die because of me". This is a clear indication that when people die around her, like when the bandit shoots Omid for trying to protect her, she automatically accepts the blame for their deaths and adds the weight of each life onto her shoulders.
Below are a few examples of guilt that Clementine has likely accumulated throughout season 2 so far:
- When Christa loses Omid and her baby, her cold interactions with Clementine could have convinced Clementine that she was to blame.
- Christa may also be dead because Clementine runs from the bandits robbing them in the woods at the start of the season. How Clementine answers Walter determines whether Nick lives or dies. Carver kills Reggie because she can refuse to help Sarah finish her work, or forget to finish her work while helping Sarah.
- When Kenny nearly dies from Carver's beating, her guilt could stem from the fact she didn't speak up soon enough. So when Kenny assures her that it wasn't her fault, in a way, Clementine can apply his words to all the situations that she believes she is responsible for.
- But even this comfort is short-lived, as after the group escapes Carver's camp, Clementine's decision to cut off Sarita's arm or let her live with the walker bite will cause yet another death for her to add to her guilt.
The statue at Parker's run has definitely captured an undercurrent of unspoken emotions in "Amid the Ruins." Emotions that can't be properly explained given Luke's prompt of "Are you okay?" Even if players choose "no", it will never be a sufficient enough answer for Clementine and the increasing weight of the dead piling on her shoulders. The only question now is, will she continue to accumulate it to the point where she crumbles like Kenny, or will she cast it off like Luke and Jane so that she can forget in order to live?
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