Ask JKM a Question #55: The Walking Dead?

A reader named Stephen C. writes:

“You haven’t written much about The Walking Dead.  It seems like it would be right up your alley.  Are you a fan?”

Hi Stephen, that’s a great question.  I am actually a huge fan.  However, I only recently caught up with the second season catalog, and am holding back on my viewing of the third season until I can devour it all in marathon form.  That’s how I prefer to watch TV series that feature serial stories. I take the same approach with Dexter, Mad Men and The Vampire Diaries.

I understand there was some grousing at an early point in The Walking Dead’s second season run about the pace of the action, but in my opinion the sophomore year was a spectacular success in story-telling and human terms. 

The final episode of the season -- involving a zombie herd migrating through the survivors’ sanctuary on a farm -- absolutely had me on the edge of my seat because the characters had become so well-developed.  There have been theatrically-released zombie films featuring less tension, and less spectacular action, than that particular installment of The Walking Dead.

Often, of course, it has seemed that The Walking Dead owes a tremendous debt to George Romero and his living dead films, but after two seasons, the TV series has ably distinguished itself because it offers something new in zombie annals: a long-form play following a series of continuing characters as they grope with and reckon with the end of the human world and human civilization. 

The Living Dead movies are generally structured around a single location (like a farmhouse, a shopping mall, a military base, a skyscraper, or an island), but The Walking Dead is structured instead around several (fragile) human psychologies.

The psychology I have found most compelling to follow, actually, belongs to poor Shane (Jon Bernthal).  He goes from being a police-man and enforcement of the law, to operating as his own law.  The grievous situation of total chaos, danger, and lawlessness enables him to express a side of himself that isn’t pretty.  

But much drama is wrought from the fact that Shane is also, largely, trying to protect those in his group (namely Lori and Carl).  He has placed that priority above everything, which is good for them, but dangerous for others. 

That choice to protect Lori and Carl is also a choice not to take risks; and not to trust others, as we come to recognize.   Shane’s love of Lori and Carl -- a human emotion -- drives him to make decisions that are inhuman and wrong.  He becomes a monster by trying to preserve what he thinks belongs to him.

In Season Two, I very much enjoyed Shane’s emotional and psychological descent into the “law of the jungle,” and was sorry to see that dramatic plot line come to an end.  However, given the tensions between Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Shane, I couldn’t see how they could both continue functioning in the same group of survivors.

I also found interesting that by the end of Season Two, particularly in the last scene or two, Rick was asserting his own authority -- an almost bullying authority -- in precisely the same manner that Shane had asserted his previously, thus suggesting that authoritarianism -- sometimes very cruelly expressed -- is a universal response to the burdens of protecting the innocent in a time of danger. 

It’s difficult to get to that realization (and beyond…) with a character or a group of characters in a ninety-minute movie, and successfully make it play as entirely organic or believable. At least it would be rare to accomplish that feat.  The Walking Dead’s brilliance arises from the fact that, week-after-week it puts its characters through the ringer and makes them face their own assumptions regarding law and order, and civilization.  Is survival more important than how survival is achieved? 

In the past, series such as Terry Nation’s Survivors (1975) and The New People (1968) grappled with these issues to some degree, but The Walking Dead provides more of a visceral crisis in the form of the walkers, and also arrives in an epoch of greater reliance on technology in our society.  So the presence of a continuing threat in the walkers and the grievous loss of modern conveniences make the series all the more effective, at least as far as I’m concerned.

So yes, count me as a fan of The Walking Dead.  Right now I’m just trying to keep my head in the sand about the details of the third season.  I’ve already read too much about it.

Don’t forget to e-mail me your questions at Muirbusiness@yahoo.com