Imagine it’s one year into a zombie apocalypse. Your wife just died giving birth to your daughter. You weren’t there to deliver the baby so your eleven-year-old son had to shoot his mom in the head to prevent her from turning into a zombie. The safest shelter you found is a prison, and there were still prisoners inside. A couple of members of the group you’re leading were kidnapped by another group of survivors. You managed to rescue them. But the leader of their group, “The Governor,” decides he wants revenge for the force you used to break into their camp. So what does he do? A: sends his own militia out to shoot at you; B: sends a large truck through the prison gates or C: leads a bunch of zombies right to your doorstep. If you guessed all of the above, congratulations! You successfully predicted the actions of a psychopath. The only difference is that the truck he used was essentially a zombie bomb designed to unload a hoard of “walkers” to attack your group. Due to all of the stress, you’ve also started to see hallucinations of your dead wife. Nobody wants to call you crazy, but they’re all thinking it.
This is currently Rick Grimes’s world on AMC’s The Walking Dead, which is currently in its third season. Although the idea of a zombie takeover seems cliché and overdone, The Walking Dead, more than any other zombie movie or book — with maybe the exception of Max Brooks’ World War Z and the original The Walking Dead comic books — immerses you into such a gruesome, apocalyptic landscape. The show, like nothing else before it, has created a prolonged and eventful plotline centered on a core group of survivors. Where most zombie movies merely focus on the threat of the undead, conflict with other survivors becomes the main concern for Rick and friends. The walkers are still a huge part of the series, but the social dynamics of the way groups and people act when faced with such horror becomes much more interesting than just the existence of zombies. In the third season, the show delves deep into the psychology of the survivors, as they now have to face a threat that can think and strategize as opposed to an enemy that grunts and wanders blindly toward them. Two unique characters are also introduced in the third season – Mishone, a kitanna-wielding, zombie-killing machine, and The Governor, the leader (or sometimes dictator) of a survivor town. The conflict between The Governor and Rick has brought the The Walking Dead from a melodramatic and soap-opera-like second season into an excellent action/thriller third season that only continues to get better.
Any commentary on The Walking Dead would be incomplete if it failed to mention how the show reaches levels of gore not seen since the Saw movies. The show, without a doubt, surpasses all other TV shows and most movies when it comes to portraying death and blood. The creators strive to portray the grim reality as genuinely as possible. Toward the end of the second season, a walker ripped open the abdomen of a survivor with its bare hands. And if you didn’t think The Governor was crazy already, in the earlier portion of the season he chained up his zombified daughter, fed her raw meat and proceeded to brush her hair. In the same room, he kept fish tanks full of decapitated human and zombie heads mindlessly gnawing away at the water.
While I don’t think that anyone would argue that the plot or acting for The Walking Dead surpasses the likes of Mad Men, Homeland or Breaking Bad, the show has come into its own as a series and continues to improve with every season.
