Walking Dead: About Zombies, Not People
One of the distinguishing characteristics of The Walking Dead comic book series was that its post-apocalyptic zombie setting was more of the backdrop to human drama than the driving force behind it. Of course, the drama was the natural fallout of the apocalypse, but the apocalypse was not what the plot was always about. Consider Dawn of the Dead as a counter-example, where the story is about zombies attempting to kill survivors and the survivors’ attempt to escape their situation. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, though it occasionally touched on such situations, was moreso about survivors attempting to get along with each other – or not – and how their relationships handled – or didn’t – their new world. Robert Kirkman, author of the series, noted in the opening of the first omnibus that he wanted The Walking Dead to be about what happened to the survivors after they escape the initial zombie attack, after the typical zombie story ended. What does a post-apocalyptic zombie world look like, in the long term?
The result of Kirkman’s goal has been a blistering, harrowing, and frequently downright shocking series of books that absolutely rank in the “Comic Books to Read Before You Die” list. And the first seven episodes, directed by Frank Darabont, of AMC’s television adaption, though a little less biting for practical casting reasons, has upheld that standard and has been one 0f the few shows on television right now that I could have recommended without reservation. But from the eighth (non-Darabont) episode on, the show has been hitting a brick wall. Criticized for its slowness, its defense may be that the audience wants zombie action when the show (like the book) is ready to just deliver character drama. But the real problem, as it turns out, isn’t that it’s a show about people (plus zombies), it’s that it’s become a show about zombies (plus people) that is unable to sustain interest when not being directly about zombies.
It’s a problem many fantasy/supernatural dramas run: forgetting that character development sometimes requires two characters to sit down and have a conversation that isn’t about the zombies, or the vampires, or whathaveyou, or at the very least isn’t about the zombie that just attacked or is about to. Such scenes grant the audience a reprieve to sympathize with the characters, learn about their motivations, and begin to see them as actual people. It is something I’ve always felt Stephen King has been wonderful at doing, and one reason why his dismissal in some literary circles is so needless. He has a gift for painting a picture of a character, and he is well aware that taking 30 pages to talk about a character’s background, sometimes tragic in and of itself, only makes the horrors to follow all the more poignant. Character development is the bedrock of good horror, and without it you just have irritating, and unearned, tension.
To illustrate this point, I’d like to discuss a particular scene (without spoilers) in the seventh episode of Season Two, “Pretty Much Dead Already.” It was a simple scene, an argument between the farm owner Hershel and his daughter Maggie, where the daughter was confronting Hershel about the decisions he had been making since the zombie outbreak began. It marked one of the first times Hershel said anything other than, “My farm, my rules!” or “That’s just the way it is!” (with an appropriate quiver of his bushy eyebrows). Here, Hershel actually began to articulate his motivations, and his daughter began to articulate hers, and why hers might be changing and why his stubbornness was becoming a problem for her. So, it was character development. It was one of those “people plus zombies” scenes the book did so well. And right when it began to get good, and we were about to get something juicy out of Hershel, some kid on the farm walks in, stops the argument, and moves the scene along to the next stupid action sequence. And there in lies the shows problem – and its salvation.
See, the problem is that the show is now made up of two types of scenes: zombie attack/encounter, and argument. There is generally little else, and the former is frankly not that interesting when we are still struggling to invest ourselves in the characters. It’s difficult to get invested, in turn, when all the characters do is argue. It’s especially grating when the arguments all revolve around the same topics. I wonder how many scenes we could find that do not involve one of the following:
- Lori arguing with Rick about Carl
- Lori arguing with Shane about Rick
- Shane arguing with anyone about Sophie
- Rick arguing with Hershel about staying on the farm
- Dale arguing with Andrea about everything she’s doing
As much potential as those discussions may have had, they lose their interest after their third iteration, especially when nothing new is said. I have grown especially irritated with Dale and Hershel, who continually make demonstrative statements (See: “My farm, my rules.”) with little explanation. Dale, for example, continuously tries to reign in Andrea’s use of a gun but doesn’t actually say why until the fourth or fifth debate, and very pointedly does not tell Andrea why, in “Pretty Much Dead Already,” she shouldn’t be getting so close to Shane when he has a very good, one-sentence way of explaining it. It’s the typical “causing of drama by characters not saying what would obviously fix the situation and explain everything” so many dramas, supernatural or otherwise, often fall prey to. It’s a shame, because Kirkman rarely fell into that trap in the book.
And that sort of summarizes the problem. The plot only moves forward when a zombie shambles along and forces the characters to react. The rest of the time, they babble about the same topics in slightly different ways. The Walking Dead does not need to expend a huge budget on zombie kills and zombie action. But it does need to spend some time on its characters. Tell us about their motivations, and play those motivations off each other. Perhaps the current writers of the show need to remember that a great deal of the killing in Walking Dead is a result of humans fighting each other, and not zombies. So far, it simply feels like they are constraining themselves to the zombie setting, and use only an actual zombie attack to get their characters to say or do anything of value. The show can absolutely mirror the book and be about the people, rather than the zombies, but so far, it isn’t about either.
