Joe Reviews The Walking Dead

After several aborted attempts, I finally managed to get hooked on Walking Dead, and I'm now caught up on the episodes. Keeping with my absurd practice, I will now review it, even though I know logically that my opinion about it isnt important to anybody at all on the face of the planet! But, I have these thoughts, man....they gotta go somewhere! They gotta go somewhere!!!!!! Otherwise my brain is gonna blow up!!!

I'll lead with the punchline; Walking Dead is worth a watch, and it has a handful of genuinely fantastic episodes, but it's quite uneven. From about the middle of season one through the middle of season two (basically the entirety of the Rick/Shane/Lorrie melodrama), it's a hard show to get through, but it improves markedly after that. The plot arc of The Governor and Woodbury offers a significant jump in quality, due in large part to the jaw dropping acting chops of David Morrissey, who really knocks that role out of the park. The post-Governor plot lines are still strong, but they lack the more engaging political nuances that the audience gets to experience with The Governor plot and are more of a return to the basic themes of danger, hopelessness, and survival that dominate the early seasons. If the show's plot doesn't go somewhere interesting fast in the 2nd half of season 5 (starting in February), I very well may lose interest again, not because the show is poorly executed, but because it appears to be so committed to a "realistic" portrayal of a post-collapse world that it induces a strange combination of states in the viewer: horrified boredom. There are only so many times one can watch a group of people be ambushed by zombies or marauders before it just becomes old hat. We get it; it's a dangerous place, and people we like are going to die, and it probably isn't going to get any better. Artistically, I can respect that. That probably is what it would feel like to live in that world, but as far as entertainment goes, it's just not my cup of tea. Despair and escapism are strange and, for me, nearly incompatible bedfellows (though obviously a LOT of people like it; the show's ratings are huge).

There are a lot of things I like about the show, which I'll mention here in no particular order. The actors are mostly quite good. The sundry ethical dilemmas presented by the show offer insightful social commentaries and critiques for our pre-collapse society. The show highlights, for instance, the absurdity of our obsession with material things, while simultaneously highlighting the absurdity of how taken-for-granted they are. As the show progresses, it becomes clear that the zombies are merely an environmental danger that can be managed with enough planning and ingenuity. The real drama of the show becomes the problem of social interaction in an anarchic, dangerous, and materially scarce environment (basically the Hobbesian state of nature, if that nature had mindless reanimated corpses that wanted to eat people). These are classic political problems. How do groups build trust? Why do neighboring groups (or countries, or what have you) go to war? Why do leaders so often seem to become dictatorial and corrupt? How should groups distribute scarce resources? How do we resolve collective action problems? How do groups create and then enforce laws? How can we pursue compassion and mercy when resources are so scarce and the world so dangerous?

I think the show does a pretty impressive job of realistically portraying what it would be like for groups to try to solve these problems on the fly after the complete and sudden collapse of society's institutional frameworks. Its view so far seems to be pretty conservative (predominance of zero-sum thinking, that cooperation between groups is unsustainable and that war seems inevitable, that rights will collapse under the imperative of survival, that charismatic psychopaths will rise to power and become Leviathan, and that mercy and compassion must be subordinate to strength and survival).

I hope the show continues to explore these political themes in interesting ways, with fewer plot lines consisting of "somebody got lost in the woods and we need to find them" or "we need to get food. Let's go in here. Oh no, there are zombies there" or "oh no, somebody turned into a zombie...will their friend/lover be able to kill them, or will they just cry and cry until they get bit?!?!"

My problems with the show mostly have to do with its inconsistent application of realism. The show clearly wants to be unromantic about its characters' fates. It has no problem killing the darlings (though apparently fans have threatened to riot if they kill off Daryl). I respect the show's willingness to portray bleakness; not many television shows can get away with that, and it certainly bucks the general Hollywood trend of cliches, truisms, and feel-good endings. Walking Dead's problem is that it lets the pendulum swing too far in the other direction, giving the characters implausibly bad decision-making and implausibly bad luck. Of course, any horror fan knows full-well that ridiculously bad decision-making and luck are one of the engines of the entire genre, but the implausibility really stands out in contrast to the show's other attempts at realism. The effect is that the show feels sadistic; it's actually going out of its way to hurt these characters, and in turn, the audience. There were definitely a few scenes where I audibly muttered, "oh c'mon, just fuck off" to whomever was writing the script.

My other main issue is some inconsistency in the depiction of how dangerous and how ubiquitous the zombies are. Is it hard to kill 10 zombies, or is it easy to kill 10 zombies? The show seems to waffle on that question depending on that episode's particular plot requirements. Why can the characters take out 50 zombies in a prison, but they're scared to clear out one of the other thousands upon thousands of empty rural farms because the farmhouses are "overrun"? Why can the characters sometimes hear the zombies from a considerable distance away, but sometimes the zombies can sneak up on them in the woods and appear to move without making any noise whatsoever? How is it that zombies appear to be more-or-less physiologically intact, when many of them died from being eaten? Wouldn't the zombies who attacked that zombie have eaten most of their flesh, and wouldn't that make them more-or-less incapable of locomotion? The show mentions that zombies can starve, but if so, why aren't more of them starving (this is basically the plot of 28 Days Later)? The zombies always seem to stay away just long enough for non-zombie-related plot and dialog to happen, which might be 20 minutes or 2 minutes. Very convenient. Zombie pervasiveness seems to be causally related to the exigencies of human melodrama.

The show establishes that the zombies are easily led in one direction or another; they follow any significant sights or sounds. Well, why not dig a giant pit and put a loud speaker in the middle of it and lure them there and then kill them? Why not lead them off a cliff? If they are so easy to distract, why not distract them?! If they are too much for your fences, BUILD BETTER FENCES!! I understand that these are not necessarily engineers, but fence/wall building technology is not all that sophisticated! Why is nobody working on the fence?!?! Why is nobody building walls?! You took the time to find and raise pigs, but nobody stopped to say "hey, maybe this constant pressure of heavy bodies against this chain-link fence could turn into an issue at some point!" Why do the characters always act surprised when dead people turn into zombies? They have seen this occur many, many times! This should not have come as a surprise! The show has established that zombies are easily tricked by covering oneself in zombie guts; why don't the characters cover themselves with zombie guts every time they go into a dangerous area? There should be a bucket of guts and a shower waiting by the gate for everybody to use as they come and go.

Basically, I don't buy the show's basic premise that this outbreak would have been so hard to stop that it would have caused the government to collapse. The zombies aren't that hard to avoid or kill, except when the show needs to manufacture some drama. I get that without the collapse angle, it wouldn't be that much of show, but to make it plausible, the zombies should have been more formidable, which would have required fewer dumb decisions by the characters and fewer inconsistencies.

These inconsistencies bother me more, again, because in other areas, the show works so hard to be realistic. C'mon, be more consistent with your realism, show about reanimated mindless human corpses!!!