WALKING DEAD: Ep. 6, "TS-19"

I spent most of today watching the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and the first four episodes of the first regular season.  I then watched the Walking Dead first season finale.  Talk about a study in contrasts.  Now I have a better sense of what serial tv can be, and Walking Dead comes nowhere near meeting that potential.  The original BSG was pretty much a cut-rate Star Wars knockoff/cash-in, but what I've seen of the reimagining so far is surprisingly smart and moving (more on that in a later post); Walking Dead, on the other hand, took the much more promising source material of an outstanding and acclaimed comic and dumbed it down in almost every way--characters, story, tone, dialogue, narrative rhythm, you name it.  Look at what the new BSG did with Commander Adama and Starbuck, and compare that with what Walking Dead has done with Shane and Tyrese (T-Dawgg, for fuck's sake?!?!?).

This episode was straight-up crap.  That goes double, considering it's a season-ender.  As far as I can tell, it resolved nothing, set nothing up, and served up no other developments of any kind whatsoever, and the only difference it makes to any status quo is, now the cast is a little bit whiter (last week the Morales family split to go their own way, this week the only African American woman in the group decides to stay behind and die in a fire--and boy, they sure abandoned her with very little protest).  I think Sean nails the problem with the conflict at the heart of this episode--that it's entirely peripheral to any larger, ongoing conflicts at the heart of the series.

Shane going all Rapey Under the Influence was another blunt, trite blot on the subplot with Lori that had shown some promise of improving in recent episodes.  Daryl reverted to the broadest stereotypical version we've seen of him yet.  Even the normally-reliable Glenn failed to shine at any point.

The revelation of the global scale of the zombie apocalypse packed no punch at all (in contrast to BSG, where it feels like humans are under constant, nerve-wracking threat of extinction).  The pseudosciencey stuff was a deceptively empty placeholder for the stock moment where everything is explained--I guess the idea is, viewers who expect or need that moment will think they got it, but more perceptive viewers will recognize that the show didn't quite really cross that line.  In that sense, it's the worst of both worlds, interjecting the deflationary tone of such a moment without actually serving any purpose.

I'm not done with the show yet.  I'll give next season a chance.  But this was an awful episode to ring out a disappointingly uneven first season.

THE WALKING DEAD #79: This time, it really is ABOUT THE ZOMBIES.

One of my pet peeves about Walking Dead, both the comic and the tv adaptation, has been the claim from so many critics and commentators that it's "not about the zombies."  As I've said before, "if they so badly want something that 'isn't about the zombies,' they can fucking well find it on any other channel."  Nevertheless, I've acknowledged the grain of truth that sometimes seems to justify the claim:

What people mean when they say this series is "really about the survivors" is that the main conflicts take place between the survivors, and often within them. Mind you, the zombies are never irrelevant!--their horrifying, threatening, demoralizing presence obtrusively exerts a constant pressure on everything that happens--but they recede fairly quickly to complicating factors in (living) human conflicts that more immediately dominate the foreground.

By every indication from this issue, even that is about to go out the window.  It looks like I guessed right (not much to my credit, since as I mention it's been heavily foreshadowed) that the next Vol. 8-level annihilating crisis is going to be zombies, zombies, and more zombies, as far as the eye can see.  Here's the teaser for the forthcoming arc:

Jeebus, here I was just one post ago bitching about how the last volume felt "plodding and aimless."  Now, I'm totally stoked to see how this plays out. I guess that's what I get for doubting Kirkman.  I expect it to rock hard.  Here's wishing that the teevee show can reach a point where it can make me feel this genuinely excited with narrative momentum rather than buzz.

And on that note, as a belated update, here are Sean P. Belcher's thoughts on the first season's fifth episode. Where I cautiously allow that maaaaaaybe I could forgive the show for "explaining" the cause of the outbreak, if that frees it to go on to much greater things, it sounds like a dealbreaker for Belcher.  Here's hoping it doesn't come to that.  We'll know soon enough, I guess.

One last thing: as I bought this issue, the comic shop guy who rang me up shared a theory with me--that Rick is still in a coma, and everything's a dream.  I think it says something about earned trust that I regard that as impossible bullshit for the comic, but an unfortunate outside possibility for the show.