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In the previous page, Lacey was threatening to shoot. In this new page that threat perhaps carries more weight, seeing as she’s now got the safety catch off and a round actually chambered.
It’s something I notice every time now that it happens in movies or TV that I didn’t even think about while growing up. The bad guy has a pistol to their hostage’s head, threatening to shoot them. The hero hesitates… so in order to show how serious they are, the bad guy racks the slide of the pistol, usually taking it off their hostage’s head in the process, then puts it back now that they’re ready to shoot.
Which begs the question, why weren’t they ready to shoot before they tried taking a hostage? Why doesn’t the hero tackle them the moment they start messing with the slide, a tacit admission that if they’d pulled the trigger the hammer would have fallen on an empty chamber? You never see a bullet popping out in this setup, after all.
Sure, the real-life rule is to treat all guns as if they’re loaded and capable of firing, but it’s just funny to me that the dramatic action of racking the slide means the hostage was technically in no danger up until the bad guy did so. But it happens anyways, because it makes a satisfying sound and is a big cool motion and shows how serious things are now.
Except now for me it has the opposite effect because it reminds me how silly it is. But it’s been a part of cinematic language for so long that people just accept it, the same way they accept that chest compression CPR alone can bring someone back to life. Hopefully they never have the opportunity to be disappointed by reality.
Lacey is being very serious, and the situation is serious. But Lacey and the situation are also on some level silly. That aesthetic fits quite nicely into Zombie Ranch, don’t you think?