In 2012, Telltale developed and produced an award winning adventure game based on Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead. It hit the industry like an unexpected snow day, garnering praise from interactive story lovers, comic book lovers, game developers and writers. The game wasn't perfect but it impressed so many different types of people who had differing stances on the viability of interactive storytelling that it'd be difficult to say it wasn't important. In 2013, Telltale announced that they were working on a second season for the episodic series. This sent the internet into a tizzy, and if you're anything like me, you had high hopes for a season where Lee, the previous main character, couldn't unify the other characters anymore, because he was dead.
Eventually the main character was revealed to be Clementine, the little girl from the previous season who acted as Lee's moral compass. Despite probably 99% of the people who liked season 1 liking or feeling even stronger about Clementine, this decision was polarizing, to say the least. I myself was among the detractors. The main concerns about Clementine as a playable characters were that she was a little girl and thus didn't have the capability, freedom, and authority of a grown man, and that she was an established NPC in Season 1, and therefore the extent in which you can roleplay her will be limited. I knew Telltale to be capable storytellers, but I wasn't going to give them any commendations beyond that. Season 1 was pretty good, but it had some videogamey writing issues. Making an 11 year old girl seem dynamic, capable, and interesting is extremely difficult, something I wouldn't expect even a great writer to handle. That being the case, I knew Telltale definitely couldn't handle it either. The season is at it's end now, and I couldn't have been more right. Clementine as a character is handled about as well as I expected, with obvious issues like a lack of clear, out-in-the-open decision making, and Clementine just not having the physical capability to punch people. That said, I didn't expect them to do terribly, and they didn't. Clementine as a whole is a problematic lead one that drags the game down at points, but not one I would consider "failed" or "unacceptable".
Don't worry though, because the rest of the season more than makes up for this lack of laughably bad writing. Season 2 can be called an uninspired cash-in at best, an insulting, frustrating excercise in fanfic-level story telling at worst. In my TWAU review, I said that the game was a failure because your choices don't matter, and the plot threads never add up to a greater theme. The Walking Dead Season 2 manages to do something even worse, where your choices still don't matter, and the plot threads are subversive of the main theme. While TWAU was dissapointing, and at sometimes, mildly insulting, Season 2 has frustrated me to the point of headaches. The game is such a catastrophically bad example of interactive storytelling that I feel oblgiated to say that if you haven't through Season 2 yet, I reccomend you don't. The idea of this hackjob of a company getting even more undeserved money for their lack of effort is maddening.
Right away, the game gets off to a pretty bad start, with the story playing into every fear about acting as Clementine the detractors ever had. Omid and Christa, the only surviving party members from the previous game, walk with Clementine to a rest stop. Omid and Christa leave Clementine alone to take up the men's room, obviously having sex. There's no dialogue option to call them out for leaving a child alone for such a stupid, selfish reason. because Clementine doesn't know any better. The first thing you see when you enter the woman's bathroom is a robber who's name I didn't catch. The most intimidating thing you can do to her is deliver empty threats. You have absolutely no control over what's happening here, and the game seems to rub that in your face. Eventually Omid comes in and gets shot in the chest, killing him. If your player avatar was capable of adhering to strongly-held conventions of survivalism or knew how to fight, Omid would still be alive.
That isn't to say I blame Clementine for Omid's death, because it's obviously his own fault. Telltale, responding to a comment from a fan about Omid, stated that Omid's death was supposed to represent "The death of hope". That's a pretty grim statement, even in comparison ot the last season, which was gut-wrenching, to say the least. What they're saying is is that from here on out, everything's going to be grim and nihilistic. Essentially, they're matching the mood of the game with the mood of the comic books, which has always been extremely hopeless.
The theme of season 1 was excecuted through a simple but effective combination of tracts from the comic book, pasted together to end up with something that is actually a fair amount different from the comics. In the comic book, dangerous, unpredictable, and bad human beings are everywhere, and they're shown to be basically irredeemable, at least in the apocalypse. In season 1, the number of dangerous characters is quite a bit lower than you'd expected from the comics, and all but a small few have it in them to do good and act on their own guiding principles. This is culiminated in the loving relationship between a convicted murderer, Lee, and an innocent young girl, Clementine. "Hope", as Telltale calls it, is basically good in interactive storytelling. What it means is that you always have a reason to work towards the best and be understanding of rude or unpredictable characters in case they might surprise you. In season 2, you're bombarded by a sea of characters that are portrayed as ticking time bombs, disasters waiting to happen. What I'm basically saying is that season 2 pats itself on the back for making it's characters wholly unlikeable by making up some pretentious banality about the "death of hope." If there's no hope left, I might as well stop playing after Omid's death, right?
This sums up the main problem with Season 2, where it feels like it's trying to subvert everything the writers of Season 1 worked for. Of all the dumb things they did with Season 2, not using the same writers as Season 1 to continue the story has to be at the very top of the list. Seeing how I doubt Telltale would begin the development proccess of a new season without telling the old writers, I can only imagine that either
A. The old writers were deliberately shafted by Telltale in favor of newer, possibly cheaper writers
or
B. The old writers were asked to come back, but decided not to for some reason.
In the case of A, Telltale is shooting itself in the foot. In the case of B, it sounds like the old writers had no intention to continue the story Season 1 told, and Telltale should have taken that as a sign that the property really shouldn't be messed with anymore. Seeing how Robert Kirkman had little to no role in the development of Season 2, I can really only blame Telltale for this. They wanted to make a new installation in the series so bad that they were willing to dismiss the people who knew the old characters the best. This would have been alright if Season 2 focused on people that were unrelated to Season 1, like the 400 Days DLC seemed to have been implying. But they decided to focus on Clementine, obviously because people liked Clementine, and they knew their sales would shoot up. It was a tasteless business practice, valuing the cash they'd bring in over the end result of the story.
As I was saying, the Season 2 writers either seem to have only read a brief synopsis of Season 1, or they played it in full, hated it, and decided they were going to do everything they could to undermine it. This is best displayed through the themes conveyed by most of the newer characters, but they also put a great deal of effort into mischaracterizing and dehumanizing every Season 1 character that was even so much as mentioned, especially Kenny, who returns for, again, blatant pandering.
Season 1 had some obvious thematic continuity problems, especially in Episode 4. This is because most of the episodes were written by different people, or at least different people have their name on each episode. I've never understood this kind of writing proccess, but since Season 1 did end up with a good sense of unification between most every episode, I can at least say it isn't always a terrible idea. It only exacerbated the sophomoric aspects of the new writers in Season 2 though. Episodes 2 and 3 are so different in tone from each other that it almost seems like they're in different universes. Episode 4 too was seemed very cutoff, although in that episode's case there are bigger problems to tackle. Even people that ended up taking a liking to this season tend to express the opinion that Episodes 3 and 4 were riddled with problems. This means, that, at best, the satisfied consumer came out enjoying 60% of the game.
If, before playing Season 2, you asked me what the best aspect of Telltale's writing is, I would say the characters. In my TWAU review I said most of the characters were problematic, but very few of them were unlikeable, and the few that were not supposed to be liked. I also said that Telltale is usually good with making each character relevant. In season 1, essential characters include Lee, Clementine, Carley or Doug, Kenny, Lily, Duck, Ben, Chuck, The St. Johns, Holly, Omid, Christa, and The Stranger. This puts Larry, Katja, and Vernon as the only well-established characters who are inessential. In season 2, essential characters include Clementine, Sarah, Kenny, Carver, Jane, Mike or Bonnie, Arvo, and Alvin Jr. There are a few characters who's contribution to the narrative can be summed up in less than a sentence--Alvin and Rebecca, who father Alvin Jr., and Carlos, who acts as Sarah's safety net and does some medical work. This means that Christa, Luke, Nick, Pete, Matthew, Walter, Sarita, Troy, Reggie, the dying man from Episode 1, and all all of the Russians are pointless. There are even more pointless characters if you factor in the 400 Days cast. Overall, about 40% of the cast is essential, compared to Season 1's 83%. Over half of the characters do not exist to further the plot or convey a theme, at least not active. And since the "death of hope" means that most of these characters are deliberately made to be abrasive, this results in a story where almost all of the characters are annoying, and most of them aren't even annoying for a reason.
There's a reason why the "cabin group", the group introduced in episode 1 of season 2, is so well disliked by the fans. In season 1, not only were all but three characters essential, but almost everyone brought some sort of obvious utility to the group. The few that didn't were either killed off quickly or were given plenty of focus so they don't seem like two-dimensional liabilities. Amongst the cabin group, not only is everyone but Carlos practically useless, but they are given no development to justify their existance. Most of the cabin group are wholly one-dimensional, existing only as a stereotype who's contribution to the narrative is defined by the first impression of their personality. Luke is a generic young adult, Nick is a depressive young adult, Pete is a dad, Alvin is a dad-to-be, Rebecca is a mother-to-be, and Carlos is a doctor. The only three dimensional character there, besides Clementine, is Sarah, who's character arc seems to have been left deliberately unfinished.
It is blatantly obvious that Sarah is supposed to a foil of Clementine. Clementine is action-oriented, capable, and deals with tragedy quickly. Sarah is weak, brings zero practical skills to the party, and has serious anxiety problems. What I'm basically saying is that she's useless, on a practical level anyway. Season 1 had a similar character, Ben, who was even less likeable because he was older, and didn't have the same anxiety issues. It's bad enough that they retreaded the same type of character arc a second time. It gets even worse because Sarah's arc is handled considerably worse than Ben's, who's was already pretty wishy-washy. It gets to headache-inducing levels of terrible writing when it becomes apparent that Sarah never contributes to the narrative. I said that she was essential, but that's only because she's subordinate to Clementine. The choices surrounding her do a better job of making the player think about who they want Clementine to be than any thing else in the game. The problem is they only get around to doing this by creating a character that is the dictionary definition of a liability. Sarah could have been replaced with a wounded puppy and the end result would have been exactly the same. For a series who's entire purpose is to explore the nature of humanity through the world's biggest crisis, this is absolutely unacceptable.
Humanity is something that is pretty lacking in season 2 in general, when it was everywhere in season 1. Luke is shown to be a nice guy who places is great value in the lives of humans and animals alike, but apparently has no problem selfishly putting the group in danger for 10 minutes of sex. Bonnie, having horrible experiences with accidental murder herself, is very forgiving of mistakes and is willing to give people second chances, but blames an 11 year old girl for the unfortunate death of her love interest despite said girl doing everything she could to save him. Nick is depressive to the point of having no initial motivation to save a young girl from Walkers, but immediately reaches for his gun and shoots when someone who clearly posed no threat to the group comes within eyesight. In season 2, "nice" characters are so far and inbetween that you'd think they'd use them properly, like with Omid, but instead their motivations are so inconsistent and unbelievable that they barely seem nice in the first place.
On the other hand we have Kenny, Jane, and Carver--characters that abide more by Robert Kirkman's ideas on dangerous characters. Despite all three being blatantly terrible people, one of which being a repeat-offense murderer, narcissist, and darwinist elitist, all seem, in my opinion anyway, more human than Nick and Sarah, because their motivations are clouded through misguided and inaccurate ideas of what a zombie infestation really means, whereas Nick and Sarah barely seem like humans at all. Their characters are so haphazard, moody and inconsistent that, if they were real people, I would assume they were developmentally retarded.
In fact, mental illness is echoed several times throughout Season 2, but it isn't done particularly well. Trying to figure out just what the hell Season 2 was trying to accomplish, I came across someone who said that the main theme of Season 2 was giving second chances to people who honor their mistakes. This adds up, but the math required for said addition is complex and abstract. For a moment, I'm going to address the themes of each episode.
After the so-called "death of hope", Christa breaks down and kills the robber. This is probably supposed to be important, but it's framed in such a silly way that I think almost everyone found it funny when it probably wasn't supposed to be. The story then flashes forward 16 months, which is an incredible amount of time to gloss over, but I digress. The main theme of the first episode seems to deal with competency and incompetency in a crisis. Christa tells off Clementine for not being properly prepared for the apocalypse, letting the player know that even 16 months after Omid's death, Clementine is still not independent. Thanks for giving us such a great avatar, Telltale. Nevermind the fact that Christa's been with Clem for more time than Lee and hasn't taught her jack shit, so her alleged "incompetence" is almost entirely Christa's fault. Robert Kirkman in the comics places a seriously bizarre amount of fault in child characters for not acting like Nietzschen supermen, so it does fit in with the morality of the comic, but it's a pretty stupid moral, so I'm not happy. Christa gets attacked by random people for no explained reason and Clementine is left alone.
The first character Clementine encounters after that is a dog named Sammy. Sammy, being a dog, seems pretty likeable at first, letting Clementine take the lead and acting calm and well-behaved until Clementine finds food. As soon as Clem gets food, things changed. Sammy begs for food in the way you'd expect dogs to do, and Clem can either offer him some or not offer any. Either way, the dog isn't content with what it gets, so it brutally attacks Clementine, giving a serious bite. Because Telltale's object placement is more contrived than a game of prop hunt, the dog gets impaled, and you have two options. Kill the dog or leave it alone to suffer, with the implication being that you cannot bring yourself to kill the dog. Being yet another instance of a "do or do not" choice like the ones in TWAU, the narrative is obviously biased towards the option to kill the dog. There are two morals to be taken from this. One, just because someone might be charming and/or nice, doesn't mean they're not dangerous. Two, like it or not, you're going to have to deal with that. The scene where you leave the dog alone is a lot more depressing than the other, so I would say that the narrative is pushing you to end things sooner rather than later, although the game still gives you the option to make it later.
The rest of the episode is basically a meet and greet, a taste of the bland cabin group that's extended through Episode 2. We get a horrible Shawn/Duck choice where we either save Nick or Pete, except the scene is unbelievably biased towards Nick being favorable because Pete has clearly been bitten. This isn't a moral dilemma, it's a decision with an obvious right and wrong. You don't even get to decide who lives. It's always Nick who lives and Pete who dies.
Episode 2 is more personal, with more care given to the cabin group who seem less on edge now. If you save Nick, you get a scene where he reacts as pathetically as possible to Pete's death, where he refuses to escort Clementine away from the walkers and instead opts to drink heavily. Ok, whatever, even Kenny in season 1 had a few selfish moments like this, maybe it'll get better in time. Except it doesn't. Nick is the primary focus for episode 2, except because of the way it's handled, he's not even essential for the events of Episode 2 to take place. It only becomes relevant during the walker emergence in the ski lounge, which was totally pointless anyway, since Carver's group just comes in and overshadows the whole thing. Carver and Kenny's appearances overshadow Nick's internal conflict by so much that he basically becomes a non-element. Though he's characterized so poorly, Nick does give the undercurrent for Episode 2. Trust. When scrounging through the forest, Clementine and Luke find a man named Matthew who offers to take them in. He's repaid by Nick shooting him through the neck. Clementine and Luke are understandably pissed. Nick just killed a man for no good reason. Earlier in the episode, it was obvious that Nick wasn't a great person. Now it's obvious that he's dangerous, too.  Walter, Matthew's supposed husband, eventually finds out that Nick killed his lover. He is absolutely outraged and even considers murder as a viable means of revenge. Clementine can either say that Nick's a danger to the group and himself, or that Nick's "a good guy" and is going through a rough experience. If you choose the former, Walter watches as Nick is eaten by a walker. If you choose the latter, Walter saves Nick from said walker.
This is, supposedly, a circumstantially different parallel to the dog scene from episode 1. Nick is an unstable murderer, and will probably endanger the group later. Get rid of him now, and you might save yourself some trouble. The difference is it's framed in a way that obviously favors Nick. Obviously, a human is a lot different from a dog, a dangerous human is a lot more likeable than a dangerous dog, and can be rehabilitated easier. Not to mention Nick isn't even putting the group in any sense of immediate danger. Realistically, Clementine might believe that things will get better now that she's met up with Kenny and their group has food and power. There is very little reason to approach matters like Nick with an apocalypse in mind. To the player, it's more obvious that they will definitely not be staying at the ski lodge for very long. But still, the sense of urgency in the dog scene is gone completely. There's no reason to kill off someone for a mistake like that when they might get the chance to redeem themselves. Anyone who thinks anything good of Season 1 would probably disagree strongly with anything he says. Yet, despite being a clear and obvious antagonist--villain even--Clementine, is oddly enough, given multiple opportunities to sympathize with him. I've never chosen any of these dialogue choices, so I don't know what happens, but even if it's obvious that Clementine is just telling Carver what he wants to hear, this directly goes against Clem's character. Clementine in season 1 represented everything that was good. If Lee did anything immoral or violent(except to walkers), Clementine would strongly disapprove. The idea that anyone like Clementine, even 28 months into the apocalypse, could ever come around to pander to such a selfish, immoral bastard, is ridiculous.
And that's probably why you're given the option to watch him die. Realistically, this is probably just a way for Telltale to see if enough people hated Carver that much. But it's also a significant, and at the same time, bizarre development to the Clementine character. If you choose to watch Carver die, you are no longer a beacon of good. You are a girl who wants bad things to happen to bad people.
In tandem with this idea of a darker Clementine, Episode 3 gives focus to two characters who can influence Clementine to become someone more brutal than who she was before, Kenny and Jane. Kenny is, throughout episodes 3, 4, and 5, frequently compared to Carver. This comparison makes zero sense to me since Kenny is clearly not someone who thinks little of the weak.  The only similarity is their capacity for violence (a capacity that Kenny did not have to such a monstrous extent in season 1, so it's another fabrication of the season 2 writers telling you "what really happened" in season 1). Hell, you wanna know another antagonist who Kenny really did remind of me of this season? The Stranger from season 1. He's a guy with a creepy fixation on children and an inability to cope with reality.
If anything, Jane is more like Carver, something that the players have frequently acknowledged, but the writers didn't seem to. She's a lot more willing to make radical decisions and cut off "weak" and "toxic" elements to her life. She thinks of herself before the group, but also thinks of the group as subservient to her.
In episode 4, you get to know Jane better, as she awkwardly spills out a sob story about her sister, who she abandoned. If Episode 1 was supposed to be a statement that you should cut off loose ends, and if Episode 2 was supposed to be a statement that you should put your trust in people even after they make mistakes, Episode 4 was probably supposed to be a balancing act between the two. Except it clearly wasn't.
There is a post on tumblr about Episode 4 of Season 2 being a direct counterpart to Episode 4 of Season 1, one I completely agree with. This is yet another example of the Season 2 writers trying to subvert Season 1, which is one of the dumbest things you can do with any continuous work of fiction. Even if they pulled it off well, which they didn't, it'd still be unnecessary and insulting to Season 1.
After finding a pointlessly killed off Nick, Clementine and Jane find a frantic Luke and Sarah trying to get out of a trailer being torn apart by walkers. The need to leave is urgent, but Sarah is in an uneasy state of mind and cannot move. You get the opportunity to talk to her. She still does not move. You can talk to her about her father. She still does not move. Finally, Jane decides that they have to go now, despite the fact that three out of four of them have guns and there are only like 12 walkers out there. You are then given a choice. Leave Sarah to die, or slap her, as Carver sadistically made her father do, which...somehow gives her the motivation to leave. Wow.
So, without even going into the obvious offensive implications that violence is a legitimate way to get shellshocked and anxious people to "snap out of it", we already have an obvious imbalance in the theme of survivalism vs mercy. Bafflingly, there is no mercy. None. You can either let "liabilities" go or you can begrudgingly take them along through threat of violence. Sarah, now being determinant, basically disappears for the rest of the episode, until at the end of the episode, she defies the laws of physics and teleports under a falling roof and is eaten by walkers. The message? God, I don't know. You can't help useless people? So glad I bought Social Darwinism Simulator 2014.
Kenny is portrayed very negatively for most of the episode, which is an obvious hint that he's at his absolute limit and the slightest thing could lead him to snap. Jane notices this too, and so does the rest of the group. Jane, at the time, seems like a warning light, trying to get the player to notice how unstable Kenny's become. This is fine, because it fits in perfectly with her character and doesn’t take the focus off of the main group. The obvious questions left for episode 5, as of the birth scene: What'll happen to the baby? What'll happen to Kenny? Will Clementine ever be safe? Where the hell is Christa?
Episode four ends with Rebecca's newborn baby and the remainders of the group going north through a freaking snowstorm for some reason, only to find...Russians. Seriously. You can't make this shit up. Well, apparently you can, if you're Telltale. A shoot off occurs and we get our trademark Telltale cliffhanger that implies a far more dire circumstance than what actually happens.
In episode 5 we find that the Russians suck at aiming and Luke gets shot in the foot. Jane...comes back? Why? She kills one of the Russians, and is visibly horrified that she did so, claiming that she never murdered anyone, despite the fact that she basically murdered Troy by castrating him and throwing him to the walkers. So, um, why is Jane here? Almost nobody expected she'd come back in any important form, so it is a surprise, but it's not a surprise that I find particularly exciting. I'm glad she got some more development, especially by E1 and E2's writer Nick Brennan, basically the only writer the game has that seems to know how people how people actually talk, but it seems...very out of nowhere. To me Jane was pretty one shot. Historically characters in TWD who have been very independent and had their say have left or died after one episode, like Glenn, Mark, and Molly. I suppose the difference between Jane and these characters is that Jane's flaws are more pronounced, but I wouldn't consider them that much more apparent than Molly's. It becomes even weirder when the episode plays out and you realize that she is one of the focal points of the final episode, along with Kenny. Just think about this. Someone who has had heavy screentime since Season 1 Episode 1 is being mirrored by a character who just barely came into the picture in Season 2 Episode 3. Kenny has about four times as much screentime as Jane--this duality is really awkward and out of the way. It's no wonder people thought Luke would be Kenny's foil, as he's been prominent in every episode of Season 2. Absolutely no one expected Jane would play such an important role, and no one was prepared for it.
Arvo, the last remaining Russian that Kenny treats like shit, leads the group to his old home, which he says has food. Luke dies due to complications with the ice around the house and Bonnie blames you for it, because the writers have no interest in making a single sympathetic character. Clementine nearly freezes to death and Kenny beats the shit out of Arvo, which everyone else is appalled by. If Clementine watched Carver die and Clem speaks up about Arvo, Kenny will reply "Lost your taste for this kind of thing?" which is a false equivalence if there ever was one. Arvo is certainly not a bad person, at least in comparison to Carver. Carver's also a grown man.
Kenny is, again, in an exercise of thematic imbalance, basically the antagonist of the episode. Though the final conflict is between Jane and Kenny, Jane is right when she says that everyone is afraid of Kenny. It's really not Jane Vs Kenny. It's Kenny Vs The World. Bonnie, Mike, and Arvo don't leave because of Jane, that's for sure. Probably being aware of this, it's written so that, instead of the narrative blatantly saying "fuck Kenny", the two most likeable characters in the entire season have magically transformed into selfish, child-abandoning assholes who are partial to Russians. Mike, Bonnie and Arvo try to leave in the truck and Arvo ends up shooting Clementine.
Fuck the dream sequence. I know a lot of people liked it, and I admit that it could have been a lot worse, but with Kenny back, do we really need more blatant Season 1 pandering? Part of the purpose of Season 2 even existing is so that players can conclude that "their Clementine" has become independent in a way they approve of. Making Clementine again seem dependent on Lee isn't helping that, but at least there's an additional purpose to this scene. This dream sequence or flashback or what have you takes place the night after Lily killed Carley or Doug. Lee tells Clementine that as a grown up, you learn to "do what's best for the people you care about...even if it means hurting someone else." That's...uncharacteristically selfish of you Lee. You know, last I checked, growing up was about financial stability, self-fulfillment, and compromise. Not some sort of collectivist mantra about being there for your friends no matter how bad they fuck up.
Like it or not, the narrative propels you towards Lee's words. Clementine, who magically survives a gunshot to the chest because "it went straight through"(SHE SHOULD BE BLEEDING TO DEATH) is thrown headfirst into the final conflict. Kenny and Jane fucking hate each other, and each using the baby for their own agenda, run out into the cold, and eventually try to kill each other.
I mentioned before that the Kenny/Jane duality is pretty stupid. Stupidity, however, isn't enough to describe how bad the plot builds up to this climax. A breakdown of what happens: Clementine leaves AJ with Jane, who runs off looking for Kenny. A very, very boring gameplay event occurs where you take Clementine through the snow shooting at walkers. Jane leaves AJ in the truck, intentionally trying to provoke Kenny into trying to kill her so that Clementine can "see who she really is". It works. Kenny believes that the baby is dead, and attacks Jane with intent to kill.
This is the biggest problem with the Kenny/Jane duality: it's so lopsided and contrived that Jane had come up with the worst idea in the history of fucking fiction to even the scales with Kenny, Mr. "I've instigated almost every conflict in the entire series". Nothing ANYONE does, not Ben, not Kenny, not Sarah, not even CARVER--comes even CLOSE to the catastrophic stupidity that Jane displays here. She has lied about the death of an infant in order to deliberately provoke a man who has lost his entire family twice to the point of attempted murder, and then she ends up forcing Clementine to kill a grown man. Her actions, unlike Kenny's have been completely understandable and she reacts to her mistakes with genuine regret, up until this point--where she just decides to go full Batman villain and taunt a grown man until he snaps. The problem is Jane is not that she's a bad person, although she is. The problem is that she's an unbelievably written bad person. No amount of stress could justify what she's done. I'd consider it roughly as bad as Carver's beating of Kenny and Alvin.
In the Lee flashback, when Lee was talking about doing what's best, he was technically talking about Lily, but at the time, most players probably thought what he was saying would directly pertain to Kenny. Kenny "lost" it. Not Jane. Kenny was the aggressor. As he has been multiple times throughout the season, inbetween the casual xenophobia and offensive jokes. This puts Kenny at a parallel with Lily for most people, which Telltale probably thinks that it puts Kenny at a parallel with a panicky murderer.
The problem? See, something most people don't remember about Season 1, especially not the Season 2 writers, was that Lily was right. She didn't want to bring Ben anymore because he was a cancer on the group. Which he was. When negotiations didn't go as she wanted, she shot Carley/Doug. This was not an act of malice. This was a moment of frustration. She couldn't handle it anymore, she couldn't handle her group anymore. Lily was a murderer, but she was a sympathetic murderer. The same applies to Kenny. Despite the fact that the player doesn't know it at the time, Kenny, is right about Jane. She's a dangerous, manipulative selfish loner who puts her own needs before the group. I'm willing to bet that if one of the two weren't guaranteed to die here and Clementine just kept on traveling with them, the baby would die eventually, probably because of Jane. Does this justify murder? No, probably not. But what if it wasn't murder? What if Kenny wanted to ditch Jane in the snow for what she did, as she wanted to ditch Lily for what she did? Furthermore, why isn't that exactly what happened? What has happened to Kenny's character--why has he changed so quickly from a moody but loveable idiot to a madcap and delusional psychopath?
I'm painting a picture of Lily and Kenny as parallels to prove a point about how much the rationality of the characters in TWD has changed since Season 1, but the reality of it it is, the Lily and Kenny/Jane situations are completely different. Me, I shot Kenny and left Jane out in the cold. The Lee flashback's intention was probably to remind me of what I did with Lily, so I can act accordingly in the climax. I let Lily continue traveling with us in the RV back in season 1. What the season 2 writers seem to believe is that because I gave Lily a second chance to make up for her mistakes, the main theme of season 2, I should give Jane a second chance to make up for her mistakes. Same applies with Kenny's situation.
Except, well, the circumstances are completely different. I'm not acting against Lee by leaving Jane behind. Here's what's different. Season 1 painted a picture of a family. A family that worked together for the sake of survival. When Lily killed Carley or Doug, she completely betrayed the trust of that family. Did she screw up? Completely. Was she irredeemable? No. Lily did not have a clear head by any stretch of the imagination. It would be easier to compare Lily killing Carley/Doug to Nick killing Matthew than any of Kenny or Jane's violent actions. She was anxious and scared because Ben was ruining the family more probably more than Lily's murder ever could, so she panicked. This is not anything like Jane's situation. Jane, like Lily, saw that an individual was being a threat to the group. Instead of speaking up about it and making it an immediate issue, she bitched about it from the sidelines until everyone but Kenny had left. Rather abandon, constrict, or even kill the troublemaker, she chose to manipulate a little girl into killing him.
Lily was a pragmatic, other-serving, stressed young woman who was operating under guilt and confusion because of what happened to her father.
Kenny was a close-minded, self-centered, poorly organized and violent man with no sense of personal accountability and zero constraint on his emotions.
Jane was an independent, anti-social, cynical survivalist with huge commitment issues and very little ability to forgive or compromise.
My point is that they're all completely different characters from completely different circumstances, and even if you like to simplify things, it's obvious that Kenny and Jane are far worse people than Lily, and therefore, in keeping with what Clementine learned from Carver, deserve far worse.
But I am heading away from plot analysis and more into personal opinion. As far as execution goes, the Kenny/Jane scene was done quite well. Episode 5 in general had far better camerawork than anything else is in the season, the voice acting was above par, and it's very difficult to say objectively who was wrong, because the dialogue was well-written enough to make it ambiguous. There are still several problems with this scene. The first is, as I have already explained, that the plot behind Jane and Kenny is horribly managed.
The second is how it connects to the rest of the season, the inter-connectivity of the story. In episode 5 a grown man and woman fight each other in the snow for the sake of proving about. How the hell did we get here from episode 3, where the group was kidnapped by a narcissistic murderer? This is probably why the comparisons between Carver and Kenny exist, and I get the feeling that Nick Brennan wrote them begrudgingly, because it makes zero sense in the grand scheme of things but he still had to find away to justify the fact that Episode 3 even happened. Most of Season 2 has been a journey, and I don't mean that in the sense that Season 1 was a journey. Season 2 was a journey because it was basically a long sequence of movement without stopping. The locations themselves, which were totally essential to Season 1 because of how intelligently the Season 1 party used their resources and how the gameplay (which is almost gone in Season 2) revolves around them, are more of a backdrop than anything. Since 60% of the characters don't matter, and the locations don't matter, very few things about Season 2 "stand out", and the few that do usually involve violence. Season 1 has a few things most people don't remember, like the subplot with Lee's brother in episode 1, but these are so far and inbetween that I can say with absolute certainty that great care was put into the buildup of Season 1, which had a far more fulfilling ending, even if it was significantly less dynamic. Refreshing myself on Season 2 for the sake of this review, there was so much I couldn't remember just a couple months after playing it. Pete was a character? Those dead men by the river? Walter was a high school teacher? Troy was in Episode 2? Half of the interactions in Episode 3 make no sense? The peach girl? The statue in Episode 4? The narrative moves so fast and puts so little care into plot development that it's hard for me to believe there was a ground plan for Season 2 in the first place.
I have a very strong feeling that Kenny was originally not supposed to come back in Season 2, or come back much later and play a much different role. In Jane's case, I am almost positive she was supposed to be an extended one-shot character, like Chuck. There are more plot threads that could have been easily mended by giving other characters prominence or making others less prominent. Rebecca's role could have very easily been given to Christa, who never appears or is given a confirmed fate after the first part of Episode 1, if not for the existence of Carver. I get the feeling then that Carver was originally supposed to be a much more important character than he was. However, after looking at The Crooked Man from TWAU, I think it's a more likely theory that Telltale just flat-out does not know how to write good villains. I was very much aware that both Carver and The Crooked Man were supposed to manipulate me into questioning my decisions, and because of that awareness, they obviously didn't. Carver is a lot more annoying than The Crooked Man, though, because he dies halfway through the story and yet his words are echoed in the previews constantly as if they still have relevance. They don't, unless my understanding of the narrative is seriously flawed, which is something that I don't think is my fault.
Why Kenny? Why him as the driving force for the climax? In episode 5 of season 1, all the main characters put their differences aside in order to work with Lee to save Clementine. This leads to some of them dying, but they were prepared to take that risk, with the idea that Clementine and Lee held them together as a family, and if they died for their family, so be it. In episode 5 of season 2, the exact opposite happens. Everyone decides that they don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves and therefore they're going to leave a child alone with a mentally unstable and xenophobic idiot. Season 1 taught us that personal differences, no matter how apparent, take a backseat in favor of helping the people you care about. Season 2 tells us that when the going gets tough, you fucking leave. Screw other people, only thing that matters is keeping yourself safe.
This is, unless, of course, you buy the theory that Kenny was supposed to be some kind of tragic hero, and that he reflects the disintegration of the values Season 1 presented. This would be even more bizarre than making Kenny the antagonist, because it would mean that literally every other character except possibly Clementine are at best sympathetic traitors to the the theme of the game, at worst, morally corrupt. I don't buy the idea that Kenny was supposed to be likeable to the average person. There's a reason why there's an option to shoot Kenny during the struggle and not Jane.
This apparently backfired though, because as of now more players have watched Kenny become a murderer rather than kill him. Telltale described the main conflict of Episode 5 as "ice cream vs pizza", something that I initially thought was supposed to mean a fight between two things everyone liked, but it's actually slightly more complicated than that, something I think Telltale was aware of. The thing is, ice cream and pizza are both horrible for you. If you were forced to choose one or the other, certain people would have difficulty adjusting to life without one of them, but the actual fact of the matter is that you're better of choosing neither. And that's the closest thing I can find to an explanatory statement about Episode 5. You're supposed to like both, but understand the need to get rid of them--despite the fact that it wasn't built up that way.
This would suggest that the ending where Clementine ends up alone, rejecting both Kenny and Jane, is probably be the "healthiest" ending. That's pretty biased, but with 5 different endings I guess there's bound to be one that isn't directly paralleling the others. I am perfectly fine with this, because the other endings suck balls for Clementine as a character. Kenny goes to Wellington, Jane returns to Carver's Camp. In Kenny's case, Wellington can't take anyone but the children, so he offers to leave Clementine and AJ there. In Jane's case, a family seeks refuge in the camp, but Jane suggests steering them away. In both of the character-based endings you are given a choice to either differentiate yourself from your "mentor" or basically solidify yourself as a raging fanboy/fangirl of said character. Either way, you're basically an offshoot of them. If you're a player that really cares about what's best for Clementine, the character-based endings are all terrible because they all ally Clementine with incredibly toxic people. This is especially annoying because the circumstances of the fight between Kenny and Jane wasn't exactly the end all-be-all "who do you like best" statement that the writers seem to think it was. Kenny was the aggressor, and the players don't know that Jane lied until after the player makes their decision. This tips the scales heavily in favor of Jane, although at least the player still has the option to leave her afterwards. It's really weird that Clementine is influenced so heavily by her "mentor" in either case. In most games where you are given the chance to take sides, generally your avatar does not become a perfect, conventional emblem of that side. In Fallout:New Vegas, you could side with Mr. House or Caesar, both of which were heavily dogmatic individuals with incredible political power, and yet despite both of them being far more important than Kenny or Jane could ever be, the player avatar isn't forced or even encouraged to blend in with the standard adherents of those political figures. When you consider that Kenny and Jane are just everyday people, particularly flawed ones at that, Clementine, a more three-dimensional and established player avatar at most, really shouldn't be looking up to them at all.
This isn't even mentioning the blatant imbalance between the treatment of Kenny and Jane in the endings. If Kenny dies, he gets extensive last words, and tells Clementine she did the right thing. If Jane dies, she keels over. If Kenny and Clem find the baby together, it's a more emotional scene than if Jane and Clem find the baby together, and there's more to address as well. The ending where you keep traveling with Kenny isn't great for either Clementine or AJ, but the ending where Clementine ends up in Wellington is arguably the best situation for Clementine and unquestionably the best ending for AJ. Both of the Jane endings are basically the same, and neither one looks particularly promising for Jane or AJ. The endings with Jane are also more about Clementine as an individual rather than "Clementine and Jane", as opposed to the Kenny endings where it's obvious that they look after each other.
5 dynamic endings are good, but with only one of them being morally sound for Clementine and one other resulting in a safe and healthy environment for the baby, the endings are overall a failed exercise  in interactive storytelling, except when it comes to the matter of mindlessly differentiating "your Clementine" from others. Which is fitting, because Telltale marketed with exactly that purpose in mind. Critics of Season 2 have noted that Clementine has seemed less open and emotional than in Season 1, which some think is because the writers didn’t' want to step on the toes of anyone who wanted to play Clementine a certain way. Others believed that Clementine showed signs of emotional imbalance, and was holding in her emotions, eventually going to bring them out in Episode 5. As it turns out, the former camp was right. Clementine is a withdrawn and moderate character for the entirety of the game up until the fight with Kenny and Jane. In the Kenny endings, she lets out her more passionate emotions, which is similar to how she acted in Season 1 and is supposed to parallel Kenny. In the Jane endings, she remains withdrawn and cold, and even has the option to threaten to kill, obviously taking after Jane. In the solo ending, she doesn't say a word. How is this "#MyClementine?" It was TELLTALE's Clementine up until the very end. The only things you can do with the character that have major implications are watch or not watch Carver die, leave or try to save Sarah, and the already addressed final conflict. For everything else, she's as linear and out of my control as Bigby. Like more than half of the choices in the first half of Season 2 had to do with characters suffering from some sort disability. Those are more choices that reflect on me than they do Clementine.
Going back to characters with disabilities, that tract is...weirdly relevant to Season 2, to an extent that it undermines and complicates the main theme. Sarah clearly has some sort of mental disability, probably autism. Nick is heavily depressive. Kenny really does seem to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or at least that's the only thing I can think of that would make sense of his actions. Incorporating characters with disabilities is fine, yes, but it complicates moral issues to an extent that no convention or objectivity can be compelled through the story anymore. No offense to Sarah fans, but I guarantee if Jane was in Season 1, and wanted to leave Ben behind and not Sarah, she would be considerably more popular than she is now. Hell, do that and you pretty much get...Lily. If we are to use the aggressive dog from Episode 1 as a basis of comparison for the rest of the "second chance" conflicts in the game, Sarah is nothing at all like an aggressive dog. She is not holding the party back through greed, selfishness, or anything at all that she can actively control. The only things that make her a liability are things that are very likely beyond her control. Nor is Nick like an aggressive dog, because of human factors that complicate his motivations. You know the only character in the entire story that acts like an aggressive dog? Kenny. And in his case, it's more like an aggressive dog who was beaten by strangers after watching his litter and their mother die. I'm just baffled at the lack of foresight Telltale has shown, especially in such politically correct times. Out of the four characters in this game that act as liabilities, three have behavior-altering disabilities and one is a dog.
It's especially weird because the conflicts were nothing like this in Episode 1. Like I said, everyone except a small few were generally useful, even if they were prone to starting problems. That helped, but even characters that acted as "liabilities" were treated with care. Duck could be said to have some form of ADD, but that's irrelevant because he's just a child and helps Lee out the best he can in Episode 3.  Even Ben, who has something far worse than any disability, (when it comes to the apocalypse anyway) the inability to make decisions that aren't completely terrible, is portrayed as sympathetic by the writers, even and indeed, especially when a character like Lily offers to ditch them. Ben works because he's totally hopeless. He's the dictionary definition of a liability, and yet that doesn't matter ,because he's part of a family. In Season 2, the pace changes, and suddenly it is ok to effectively kill people if they carry a threat to the group--even if they have a disability. Like I said, the writers either did not like or did not understand Season 1.
This is what ties it all together, what sums it all up--all these problems with poorly presented moral dilemmas, lack of interconectivity, the stabs at season 1--it's all pretension, really. Season 2 attempted to be something far greater the writers and developers were capable of by utilizing a subversive story that dared to tread on serious modern day issues like treatment of people with disabilities and dealing with abusive family members. This is to say nothing of the horribly dumbed down gameplay in comparison to Season 1,(which was already dumb) the pointlessness of 400 Days, the Christa character being thrown out the window, horrible degrees of player differentiation up until the very end, and the high degree of pandering to certain groups of players. The Walking Dead Season 2 is an interactive story that has little to no regard for most of it's characters, and uses them as a basis to jump from impractical life lesson to impractical life lesson. It's a horrible disservice to fans of Season 1 and was, in all likelihood nothing but terrible writers being manipulated by greedy executives. It's a waste of time, and Season 3 will meet the same fate.
Don't ever buy a Telltale product again. You don't owe them anything.