Carver underutilized?
One of my main beefs with S2 was that stuff happened too fast, and as a result Carver got the shaft WAY too early.
Personally, I feel that he should've lived past chapter 3, and taken over the group (with Tavia and others; probably the other 400 Days characters) as they continued to travel after the horde takes the department store. Carver should've been a determinate end choice as well, with us getting to to learn more about his past, if we decided to have Clem get close to the guy. I think it would've added more to the story if Nick and Sarah's death was tied to Clem going along with values/mindset of Carver; the whole the weak are only here to provide sustenance for the strong, if they themselves refuse to become strong type shit.
Clem leaving with him could've easily been a better alternative to one of the ridiculous "Clem and AJ Alone" endings, that, to me, is practically suicide if written properly.
Comments
I said that he should've been a determinate as well, meaning you have the choice to kill him/have him killed too.
Still, he was underutilized, in my opinion.
Carver was a great villain. Much more interesting than Jane or Arvo.
But I wish he wasn't 101% evil. The story tries to convince you that he had good attributes, like Kenny did, but it falls flat because we never ever get to see Carver's humanity or vulnerability. From start to finish he's a smug, comfortable, murderous sociopath who doesn't even feel pain. He's a monster, not a human, and as a result he's rather flat.
Yup, that's why I felt he was underutilized. Bonnie said that she felt sorry for him....but the writers never gave us anything to go by to justify her saying that.
Carver hanging around Clem, and showing her how cruel the world is, while gradually opening himself up to her, would've been great. Better than what we got for Ep 4, anyway.
Also, Jane and Arvo aren't villains. The only villain in the season was Carver....another misstep given he was killed off in the 3/5 act.
Well, it'd have been interesting if some of Kenny 2.0's attributes were transplanted onto Carver. Instead of Kenny, it's Carver who declares himself a father-figure to Clem and puts Clem through a very creepy grooming process.
And I meant that after Carver's departure, there really wasn't a strong human conflict - unless you call idiots bickering and a couple of expendable plot device foreigners "conflict". The 'antagonists' of Episode 5 were Kenny and Jane, and Arvo existed mainly to provide Clem with a "moral dilemma" and then provide Kenny with a very shitty excuse to be evil without actually disturbing the player. The way Arvo is treated by everyone in Episode 5 makes it seem like he single-handedly caused the gunfight, even though nobody who the audience cared about was even HURT. Maybe I'm the only one who finds it terribly convenient that the narrative pulls the cheap trick of having Arvo shoot a kid in order to justify Kenny's cruelty towards a crippled foreign teenage boy.
As you can imagine, the bad writing in this season only became more apparent once Carver was out of the picture.
Most villains in TWD universe seem to usually have short story arcs. I felt as Carver went out in a blaze of glory, instead of fading away. Carver definitely made his impact on Clem and felt like a real villain that will be remembered even long after he is gone.
Carver reminded me of my dad. Kind of why i liked him. Your right though, they killed him off way to early. They didn't go into any of his back story which was a mistake, why didn't they go into who George was. We didn't know what motivations he may have, or what his intentions were. He beat up Kenny, so we had to get our revenge. IMO not very original.
Carver was a great Villain in some ways. I wish they would of played him out to the end. I found his character more interesting then the whole Kenny/Jane back and forth.
Yes, I wanted to side with Carver and leave the group with him if I could. But his potential wasn't wasted and his character wasn't killed off too early. We know just little about him, which makes it more difficult to understand who he was. Ep3 antagonized him more, because it was about how the blind desires lead only to death. That's why we should get a DLC explaining at least the smallest part about his past, because this is what Carver needs to be understand and appreciated as a character.
This is why TTG shouldn't hire celebrity actors, if a character is linked to a celebrity Voice actor, you know their gonna die.
"William Carver is a dangerous man. He's the leader of a camp not far from here, and he's very smart." -Carlos
Uh...okay? If by smart, you mean the Governor 2.0 who does bad things just because he's bad, then yes. Carver is smart.
When exactly he did something bad just because he was bad?
Am I the only one who is fine that Carver died at Episode 3?
Poor Luke.
Nope. :>
He takes the group hostage. He executes Walter ( and possibly Alvin) intitally. Then he blames everything on Clem's group saying "they were the ones causing problems here." He was just kinda psychopathic in comparison to the build up he received in prior episdodes.
Poor Reggie. The one armed man is king... MY ASS!
Kenny killed Johnny, Carver killed Walter, Alvin killed George, Carver killed Alvin (determinant). He might've killed someone else instead of Walter (even though Walter was a man who gave shelter to people Carver was after), but he didn't want to start killing off Cabin Group. He believed that everyone deserved a second chance and murder is the finality.
it had to be in one of the rewrites. i know that the "next time on the walking dead.." arent so accurate, i it seemed like it was carver trying to teach clem "the way of the world" instead where he stays behind sarah to we dont know why, it should have been carver "teaching", trying to convince her to turn to the dark side (sorry for the stupid Star Wars pun/joke). and i think that the biggest problem that this season had was probably a lot of rewrite for whatever reasons. myabe it was budget idk. but in all i still liked this Season.but i see where they couldve change a few things.
I'd be fine with Carver doing all the evil stuff he does in his appearances, so long as we also had a scene or two where we got to see a more human side of him. Bonnie talking about him being "over-stressed" is a laughably pathetic excuse.
Giving him a scene where he acts genuinely nice, or showing just how vulnerable his community is (having a scene where bandits attack the group and kill some innocents) would help sell the idea that he was a well-intentioned leader who slowly fell into corruption. As it is, it's easy to see him as just some bully who was evil from the start.
At first, I thought it was cool.
Then Episode 4 came out and I realized that he was killed off for Kenny's character development.
D'oh.
I didnt really see it as Developing Kenny more. Honestly I found it more stupid that Kenny and Rebecca were the only ones who wanted to kill Carver
That just goes to show that there were too many characters and the writers didn't know what to do with them. Bonnie and Mike are bland and pretty much have no opinion other than "I hate Carver nvm I hate Kenny." Carlos' role of hating Carver is now stolen by Kenny; Luke, the guy who supposedly first led the cabin group away from Carver to begin with, doesn't even have a coherent interaction with Carver - we have no idea why on earth he suddenly had a problem with killing Carver after he just proved how dangerous he was.
Ugh. Again, the 'shock' of killing off a major villain halfway through the series is undercut by the fact that the subsequent conflict is way less interesting.
What went wrong in Season 2:
It didn't follow a full storyline on 400 Days characters + Carver. Season 2 would have been way more interesting with them actually playing an important part like Telltale said.
Instead, we get cameos which literally serve no purpose but to stop the story dead for a few seconds while they spout a non-sequitor.
So Wyatt the stoner becomes a jerk who calls Clem "dude" and literally stops her from seeing Carver so that he can tell her that Carver doesn't like waiting. Vince becomes a tattle-tale who doesn't like Tavia smoking.
"Bill don't like idle hands" will forever haunt my dreams.
#idlehands
Proof that Carver cut off Reggie's idle arm!
;ooooooooooooooo
I think Carver was killed off because of the game budget. Michael Madsen (his VA) is a relatively famous, high-profile celebrity.
Carver was an awesome baddie to me and I wish we got to see more of him. Wasted potential in my opinion.
Better left wanting more of Carver than less of him, I say. Could have stood to be around a little more, but like others have said, budgeting was probably part of why he wasn't so I'm fairly happy with what we got. Just imagined Carver with a checklist of stuff he's supposed to do he keeps pulling out of his pocket and consulting before his screen-time's up: ✓ push Reggie ✓ beat the stuffing out of Luke ✓ beat the stuffing out of Kenny ✓ go out in style spouting insults
It was his own fault..., beating breaking and (almost) killing Clems group showed me that it was his time
The way I feel about Carver is similar to the way I feel about Gareth from the TV show. Great villains who could have been expanded upon and given more development, but that was cut short with their deaths. I wish Carver would have lasted longer, there were so many different things the writers could have explored, especially his past with the cabin group. I want to know what he said to Rebecca to make her cry, what he said to Sarah after he murdered Reggie, what his relationship to Luke and Carlos was, who George was, all of that will never be answered now. I wish we had gotten more.
Carver was an awesome character. I wish Telltale gave him more development.
He's not underutilised , he is the rug at Howe's where people can whipe their feet on and some upstanding teeth to remove the crap from underneath your shoes
maybe some DLC where Carver was a calm man , and after the Z-A started(and this is speculating his wife was raped by strangers his friends were eaten and he was robbed and left for dead ) there he is now in s02 a psycho who doesn't trust anyone and kills almost for pleasure