The Walking Dead has been with us for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when zombies weren’t staggering, swiping and shambling their way through the TV schedules.
Robert Kirkman’s and AMC’s success allowed zombies to eat their way into the TV mainstream. The Walking Dead naturally spawned would-be rivals, masses of imitators and latterly a child of its own, while simultaneously emboldening producers and networks to green-light ever-quirkier spins on the undead phenomenon.
But – much like its titular ambulatory corpses – the longer The Walking Dead has remained in motion, the more thoroughly the rot has set in.
Over the years, as the characters in the show quickly became inured to, even bored of, the zombies, so too did the audience. When the show tried to counter this slackening of grip upon the audience’s attention by sidelining the zombies and positioning mankind itself as the series’ major threat and obstacle, people said they were bored, and demanded more zombies.
Let’s call that a Scratch-22.
Of course, the blame doesn’t rest solely with the poor, put-upon zombies or the audience’s fickle nature. The show undeniably suffered when it shifted focus away from its core unit of characters to service a multitude of old and new faces across multiple locations. It’s a narrative balancing act that Game of Thrones handles with aplomb, but which The Walking Dead has always struggled to pull off without dropping threads, circumventing reality or stalling momentum – sometimes all three at once.
Over the last handful of seasons The Walking Dead’s characters, even those like Carol whom the show has occasionally serviced very well, have started to feel less like actual people with their own drives, wants, needs, vulnerabilities, and complex motivations, and more like walking plot-putty, there to be moulded to fit whatever shape best suits the story.
So earlier this year, when the closing moments of The Walking Dead’s eighth season appeared to be setting up a civil war between Maggie and Daryl on the one side, and Rick and Michonne on the other, I baulked.
Maggie’s grief and Daryl’s pride may be incredibly powerful forces, but were they really strong enough to over-ride everything that the core group had suffered through together? Somehow, it didn’t ring true. I wrote it off as yet another narrative sleight-of-hand designed to magically generate conflict out of thin air, at the eleventh hour, again at the expense of character.
While season eight was a vast improvement upon the plodding, tepid and occasionally ridiculous season seven, for the first time ever I found that I wasn’t excited about – or even really that interested in – the prospect of The Walking Dead’s return.
But then I started thinking about it.
Really thinking about it: the season; where the show was heading; where it had come from. Everything. I felt I owed The Walking Dead a degree of analysis and introspection before I cast it aside. If only for old times’ sake.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that two things had happened/were happening inside my head:
One: I’d performed a nuance-ectomy upon the show, and reduced the two-seasons-long conflict to a classic ‘The forces of good triumph over the forces of evil’ narrative, a la Return of the Jedi, or a children’s fairy-tale (you might argue that the two aren’t mutually exclusive).
The baddies are vanquished, the goodies cheer, and everyone moves on to have a happy, hassle-free time. Cartoonish, yet undeniably cathartic. Obviously, framing the story in this way leaves no room for ambiguity or the possibility of future struggles along ideological fault-lines.
Two: while the show has certainly dipped in terms of quality and consistency over recent years, maybe over-exposure to the critical consensus was prejudicing my enjoyment; perhaps by expecting disappointment at every turn, I was actually inviting it. Was the bitter cocktail of cynicism and apathy that burbled in my gut as I watched latter-day seasons of The Walking Dead preventing me from giving the show-runners and the writers the benefit of the doubt?
While I stopped far short of venturing into ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ territory, I’d convinced myself that it was time to cut The Walking Dead a break. I let the ebbs, flows, highs and lows of season eight continue to tumble and percolate inside my brain; I held everything in there until the jumble made sense; or at least until it made more sense.
I still felt that the plot seeds leading up to the impending civil war had been peppered rather too clumsily throughout the eighth season, but I was beginning to see how (and why) betrayal, and its bedfellow war, might erupt around Negan’s prison-cell in the wake of the territory’s uncertain and unexpected freedom.
The process of interrogating history helped give an anchor to my thoughts; history helped not only to illuminate the fractured and ever-fracturing tribal loyalties of the post-Negan apocalypse, but also to give a rich and fruitful context to the show’s evolution from ‘Days Gone Bye’ to ‘Wrath’.
By drawing on some of the defining epochs of human civilisation I was able to re-frame and re-interpret the world of The Walking Dead, and in the process ignite some excitement for the ruckus (or should that be Rickus?) to come.
In the end, the beginning; in the beginning, the end
While it’s true that people in the West today are generally less inclined towards violent protest when times are tough or rulers are corrupt (except for the French, who would gladly burn the country to the ground rather than allow the passing of even one mildly disagreeable traffic bye-law) this shift can’t solely be attributed to our new-found civility.
There’s also the matter of our (comparative) richness, in both time and wealth, and access to a wider range of leisure pursuits and luxury goods than at any other point in our history. And, perhaps most crucially, the sheer might of the state which, thanks to the development of ever-more destructive and invasive technologies, has never had so much deadly power at its disposal.
If a group of angry artists and artisans tried to take a leaf out of Robespierre’s book and rush towards 10 Downing Street with rakes and rifles held aloft they’d be a puddle of blood on the street before the first of them managed to get within spitting distance of the rather bored-looking policeman guarding the front door.
If by some miracle they managed to break into the building unchallenged, it wouldn’t be long before tanks rolled down the street. Before they rolled down every street in the city.
This highlights one of the main reasons that The Walking Dead has always been so enduring and intriguing: it takes all of that away – states, nations, bureaus, satellites, nuclear weapons, stock-piled wealth, an inter-connected planet – and levels the playing field again.
The show allows us to travel back to a more violent and uncertain age, and show us what might have happened at various critical junctures of human development if we’d had access to modern weapons, vehicles and modes of thought.
The Walking Dead essentially forces a hard-reboot upon the human race, and then re-runs key events in the evolution of human society on a hyper-accelerated timescale.
When Rick wakes up in the hospital in ‘Days Gone Bye’ he’s a man taking his first steps upright in a new and terrible world, with only one rule: survive. Rick is early man, charting an alien environment with a million hungry mouths waiting round every corner.
In the early days of the show the members of Rick’s group huddle together in the darkness, terrified of the horror and death that surrounds them on the fringes.
Over time their suffering teaches them the tricks and tools they need to survive. They drift across the landscape as nomads, wanderers, hunter-gatherers, but as they become faster, braver and bolder they form tribes. They meet other tribes, but only in battle. They rise, they fall, they rise again, each time stronger than they were before.
As their dreams get bigger, so too does the world around them and their place within it. Before long, they’re sending emissaries and quasi-diplomats to other colonies and proto-nations to trade goods, ideas and arms; their ingenuity, adaptability and resolve bring them stability, which in turn allows them to talk about things like the future, families and farming; and debate concepts like freedom, justice and worth, instead of constantly fretting and obsessing about the mere fact of survival.
In the short space of (in-show) time between season one and season nine the new human race has crawled from the swamp, got to its feet and rushed headlong into its first ideological conflict: its first war. It’s raw progress, but it’s progress none-the-less.
It’s tempting to view the conflict that follows the arrival of the Saviours through the prism of the American Civil War: to imagine the Alexandrian north taking up arms against the Saviours in the south, to oppose and destroy the forces of slavery and corruption. To my mind, though, the French Revolution is a much better fit, because the battle between Rick and Negan is really, at its heart, a battle between democracy and dictatorship; a showdown between the downtrodden masses and their King.
Hail to the King, Baby
Supporters of the UK’s monarchy see in the Queen and her sprawling web of dependents a reflection of everything that is refined, restrained, civilised and genteel in the world (with the possible exception of Fergie), overlooking the fact that in a different time Queen Elizabeth would almost certainly have played football with the axed heads of her political enemies.
Status of this magnitude isn’t bestowed upon ordinary men and women as a reward for good manners or having impeccable taste in cardigans. Whatever may sustain or shape power once its attained, it’s nearly always taken. The truth is that all bloodlines must have begun with one male realising he had greater strength and better resources than all of the other males in his territory, and deciding to use that imbalance as a basis to establish dominance over everyone and everything else. There’s nothing noble or worthy about that. It’s disgusting, immoral, and sadly all-too-universal.
Negan, of course, is the show’s true King, in deed if not in name. While Ezekiel is a show-man and a politician, Negan is a tyrant who rules with a switching mixture of vanity, brutality and cruelty; a righteous cloak of benevolence billowing around his bloodied bat that’s invisible to all but him. Like other famous sociopaths – Manson, Hitler, Thanos – Negan is all the more chilling for believing himself the good guy.
If The Walking Dead has any enduring theme beyond ‘Ha ha! Life’s a bitch!’ it probably lies somewhere in the ethics and limits of killing and survival.
Most would-be revolutionaries in our world – save for the most impassioned and anarchic – try to respect the rule of law. They want change, but they won’t turn their backs on civilisation in order to get it. They’ll wave banners, sign petitions, sing songs, set up websites, organise media interviews and try to cause minimal disruption to traffic (think of them as Dale, Hershel or early season 4 Rick). What they probably won’t do is storm parliament and summarily execute the entire cabinet. I guess the reasoning goes that if you have to become a barbarian in order to effect positive change, then the change might not be worth it.
Except that France, and arguably most of Europe, might still be ruled by the unclenching fist of absolute monarchy if not for a bit of storming, burning, rioting, beheading and massacring back in the eighteenth century.
The Walking Dead makes the dichotomy between war and peace its stock-in-trade. OK, Rick, we get that Negan is a murderous oppressor, but does that really make it okay for you to run people over with your car in cold blood, or stab scores of people to death in their beds? OK, Morgan, killing people probably does lead to madness and disgrace, but is it a good idea to abstain from it when someone’s running towards your best pal with a steak knife? Same question to you, King Ezekiel. Should you appease a maniac when your own people might eventually starve?
In the end, Rick led and won his revolution against The Walking Dead’s ruling class, but in contrast to this revolution’s real-life ‘inspiration’, the King escaped with his head. The decision to let Negan live may well have put a target and a ticking clock above Rick’s head.
The architects of the French Revolution achieved a feat that no-one thought possible, the aftershocks of which are still felt today. Their revolution helped to spread democratic ideas around the globe, and provided direct inspiration for the American Revolution.
Did they revel in this spectacular, epoch-altering achievement? Did they all join hands and whoop and cheer like the crowds at the end of Return of the Jedi, their friendships and alliances stronger than ever, their fates and spirits bonded for eternity?
No. No they did not.
They’re human, after all.
They all died, pretty much to a man and a woman. And mostly at each other’s hands, through a combination of paranoia, mistrust, skullduggery and cruelty. They tore each other apart on points of principle, for things they did leading up to and during the revolution, and for the things they envisioned for the future. Ironically, some of them were put to death for being considered too blood-thirsty.
Liberty? Equality? Fraternity?
Betrayal. Murder. Death.
The Walking Dead has demonstrated that it’s ready to give us a war that will finally make us feel something. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but a war between friends and allies, sisters and brothers. Maggie’s and Daryl’s hateful sneers in the closing moments of season eight now seem all the more explicable, not to mention auspicious.
The end of season eight now feels like a new beginning, a chance for the show to evolve again and … possibly… hopefully… endure. Especially now that the show is beginning to detach itself from the canon of the comics.
So what happens next?
Will the post-Negan era usher in freedom or pave the way for wholesale destruction? How will the differences between and within the disparate groups be reconciled? Can humanity get it right this time, or will utopia always remain a pipe-dream? Will the cycle of death and revenge and greed and violence simply repeat itself, ad infinitum, until the end of time itself, in the manner posited by Battle Star Galactica? Will we forget all about the zombies? (Or will we meet something that isn’t quite zombie and isn’t quite human? Shhhh. Keep that to a whisper.)
But do you know what?
When I really start to think about it…
I’m looking forward to finding out.
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I know what you’re thinking. Does this review of The Walking Dead S09 E05 contain one spoiler? Two spoilers? Three? Go on, punk. Click. Make my day. 
I guess it was technically Rick’s final episode. They never said ‘dead’. I assumed ‘dead’. But what else is there but ‘dead’ on The Walking Dead? In my defence: why else would a character leave? What other possible, plausible reason could they have for exiting the show? The chance of a modelling career in Paris, perhaps? A new job teaching community college in Mississippi? Mind you, Morgan left ‘The Walking Dead’ alive, but he immediately went on to join the spin-off show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’. So is that the future for Rick? Another spin-off show? ‘Fear We Go Again’?
Nothing. It taught us nothing. Nothing that we didn’t already know, and in any case nothing of any real interest or consequence. We were reminded that Rick is a weird, kaleidoscopic chameleon of a character; a conveyor-belt of mixed bags and action archetypes spinning round and around on the carousel of plot; a man with no discernible qualities outwith his own exquisite ‘Rickness’.
It was awesome to see Shane again, ditto Hershel, whose appearance was all the more poignant for being actor Scott Greene’s final time on screen. It was good to see Sasha, too, but ever-so-slightly mystifying, since I can’t remember Rick and Sasha ever even saying ‘hello’ to each other, much less having an actual conversation. I guess the production team’s rule was, ‘If they say yes to reprising their roles, then they’re in. Even if it’s the Bike Zombie from the pilot episode – we’ll find a way to make it work.’
