I’m just watching The Walking Dead for the zombie effects now, but as the cast of zombie extras grows, the individuals are all your plain old zombies, the species with the lumbering gait, extreme dermatitis, and uncontrollable hunger for braaaaaaaaains. Whatever. Not giving a shit about the comic — or, “graphic novel” for you nerds out there — I only gave the show a shot because of Greg Nicotero’s effects, especially the crawling, dessicated fucked up half-skeleton from the promos. I’m also kind of a sucker for lone characters wandering abandoned environments, but that conceit rightfully died halfway through the first episode and all of the show’s creepy viscera comes from zombies shot in the head, zombies axed in the head, zombies bludgeoned in the head, etc.
I gotta say, you don’t see that sort of shit on Mad Men.
But I didn’t realize how little respect I have for this show, how much the writers are big fat cheating cheaters, until this episode, the first one in the series demanding some real pathos from the audience, where we need to consider the value of these characters and what losing them might mean. It’s the first episode where anyone dies, and we need to say goodbye to Amy, Ed, that guy who was digging the holes for no good reason last episode, and some random extras who contributed nothing to the campsite. So long Amy, we hardly knew ye. I mean, really, we hardly knew you. Like, who the hell were you?
An obituary for Amy: Amy was a foil for Angela. Angela neglected her little sister and now that civilization has collapsed, she’s guilt-ridden over all the missed opportunities. What makes all of these characters so damn insufferable is that they’re all reduced to a single trait or two and the story has too, too quickly devolved into Lord of the Flies and Zombies, where each character symbolizes a facet of human nature and every plot point is an opportunity to show humanity consuming itself. Rick is saintly and heroic. Shane is strong and resentful. Dale is patient and wise. Lorri is female and… uh… all womanly with her distaff female woman-ness. I should’ve probably been clued in with the introduction of bigot Merle back in episode two, finding the time to make racist remarks and beat up that black guy even though they’re sort of in the middle of the freaking zombie apocalypse and maybe there are more important things to focus on at the moment, Merle. There’s also Ed, wife-beater and implied child molester, although I appreciate the lazy-ass writers finding the restraint to not give him a mustache to twirl as well.
Come to think of it, I can’t come up with a single book, or movie, or TV show where civilization collapses and the surviving characters retain their complexity instead of emerging as this ridiculous dominant emotion. Certainly not Lord of the Flies or Lost. Battle Royale. The many iterations of Survivor. Although they all did a good job of telling a compelling story, and interestingly, creating compelling villains that were worth the energy to hate…
But the five or so minutes spent with Amy and Angela just felt like waiting for the denouement, we knew Amy’s body was going to regenerate and Angela’s too practical to let her zombie sister bite her, and every interminable second we spend with them is a second we’re not spending with Ed’s wife hacking up her dead husband’s head. The whole episode, in fact the whole series, feels very much unearned, and the violence doesn’t enlighten the characters so much as stimulate the audience’s visual cortex and fantasies of shooting up a bunch of shit, like House of the Dead. The videogame, not the Uwe Boll. Or the Uwe Boll movie; the point’s pretty much the same either way.
Amy gets a hole in her head, and we leave Joe — another character we’ve spent all of ten minutes getting to know — by the side of the road, because he’s a Good Guy and has to stoically sacrifice himself for the benefit of the group, and then there’s the CDC and that one klutzy guy. Because the Centers for Disease Control only has one employee, and that guy has to cure the zombies, and write up those CDC pamphlets about “So You’ve Got Gonorrhea”, and also mop up the bathroom floors, because the CDC only has one employee. Also, they have some weird video diary system out of a 1985 B-grade lost-in-space movie.
What I’m realizing is that I don’t trust The Walking Dead to tell any kind of good story. It’ll plod along — zombie, zombie, zombie, normal person with evil intents, zombie — but there doesn’t seem to be any room for these characters to grow, especially not trapped underground at the CDC. I don’t know, and don’t care, how the comic book managed to put together seventy issues, but I see the series just lumbering along, vacuous, crying for some brains.