The Walking Dead continues to be heartless and brainless
The unrelenting, un-dead behemoth that is The Walking Dead continues to dominate, but why are we watching?
“Why am I still watching this?”
This is the question I often find myself asking during every episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead. The show continues to do ridiculous numbers in the States, over 13 million for last week’s episode, which on cable is incredible, but this is a question that’s been there since the really low point of Season 2 and doesn’t look likely to go away anytime soon. For viewers the show unfortunately still shares the lack of cerebral power and capacity for sudden violence with its main antagonists.
The answer though is probably the same one most people give – for the zombies. It certainly can’t be for the plot, character development or dialogue, as the art of subtlety and story-telling deftness in The Walking Dead was long-ago hacked off like a bitten limb. If a show came along with equally good zombie effects (which do continue to be excellent) then I suspect I and many others would drop this show in a flash. Watching zombies kill or die is always entertaining, but this show is beginning to challenge that idea. It looks like back when ‘the suits’ decided to fire Frank Darabont at the end of Season 1 they took the old zombie adage of “remove the head and destroy the brain” too close to heart.
With such a premise, when the characters’ lives are always at stake, perhaps it would be an idea to create individuals who the audience actually care about it. Neither caring if someone gets eaten, nor actively wanting anyone to die doesn’t result in much viewer investment. What little we know about these people isn’t fascinating, and others we know nothing about. When they have the opportunity to dig a little deeper into a character, to add some nuance into the cast, the writers have more often demurred. Michonne, for instance, holds so much potential if they would actually spend some time developing her, delving into her past. She began as a mysterious woman with a sword and now, after over a season of scowling, she’s still just the chick with the katana but now allowed to smile a bit more – now that’s either lazy, or just stupid. The writers cannot keep attempting to generate surprise, suspense and plot merely using violence. Yes we all want to see fights and deaths, but as well as, not instead of, plot or character development. A character can be killed off and for a moment it’s unexpected, but when you don’t care about the person it might as well just be another zombie.
There’s no room for subtlety here, everything is shoved in your face, with characters expositioning all over the place and symbolism made as obvious as possible – “Hey Rick’s not wearing his sheriff’s hat any more everyone! Get it? See, SEE!” Character depth is not aided much of the time by the acting – the main character of Rick Grimes is still achingly dull, and Andrew Lincoln seems to mistakenly believe that staring off into the distance with your head at various awkward angles will accurately convey the grief, the loss of confidence and fear his character should be feeling. Thankfully this season we have another The Wire alumnus in Lawrence Gilliard Jr to join Chad Coleman, and hopefully up the acting quality average. And this all isn’t helped by the monotonous tone. There’s no room for anything but the reinforcement that life is shit and hope is weakness. There’s never any humour or light in the darkness (something that Breaking Bad in contrast achieved expertly), and there just has to be something more to it or it’s not just depressing, it’s boring.
Last season’s attempt to create an external villain with the Governor was the right move after the dreadfully boring infighting of Season 2, but it was handled poorly. A character who was supposed to be menacing one minute, charming the next, and psychotic at another just didn’t work – there was no real basis behind him or his actions. The time at Woodberry became an annoying distraction, a great opportunity to expand the world wasted, and closed off in a damp squib of a finale. Now we’re back in the confines of one location, a la Hershel’s farm, and we all know how well that went.
The creation of an internal conflict with a mysterious individual(s) in the latest episode is promising, but for me the whole situation was just symptomatic of the show’s lack of brains. I know it’s just TV and I’m probably being pedantic, but who has the strength to overpower two adults, and then get them to be nice and cooperative and lie down while they’re set on fire, all in the middle of the day, without being discovered? And while we’re being pedantic, why not spend some of the last six months reinforcing the weak chain link fence this is basically your only protection?
What the writers need to do is ignore the zombieness for a minute and imagine a scenario in which there are small pockets of people left around the country after some nationwide disaster. How are the groups going to function, what will the conflicts be, how will they survive? Now create a gripping drama under these circumstances, with rich characters that have their own differing motivations, desires and ideas, not just two dimensional cut-outs who do and say the same things all the time. Then add in the zombies – imagine how much better that would be than what we’ve got at the moment.
We continue to watch The Walking Dead in the hopes that it will get better, that watching might require more brain-power than the undead, that we will be surprised again, that we might one day care about a character other than Daryl (because he’s awesome), but mainly we watch because they have become so good at creative zombie deaths; someone might as well edit out all the other stuff and we can just watch hours of that instead.