Dissecting The Walking Dead

One of the things that I enjoyed the most about The Walking Dead when it first aired was the way that it never failed to creep me out. I had my own ritual for the show every week. I would make sure I was all alone; turn off all the lights in the house, and then watch; just me and the eerie glow of the television. As much as I enjoyed following the survivors, the real stars of those early episodes were the zombies. The show had created some truly gruesome and scary zombies. The makeup and special effects were everything a zombie fan could have asked for. They crept the hell out of me every single time they were on screen, whether it was just a sole walker, or a much more menacing herd.

As I sat down to watch the second season finale last week, it occurred to me that although my ritual hadn’t changed one iota, I wasn’t really all that crept out by the zombies anymore; that particular enjoyment for me had lessened significantly. The show itself hadn’t done anything different to cause this; the makeup and effects were just as good and the zombies were as authentic as they’d ever been. Rather, I’d simply grown accustomed to seeing the zombies every week and a lot of the shock value was gone, In a way, I felt like I’d been robbed of the experience.

There’s an interesting parallel between my experience watching the show and the experience of the survivors living it. Just as I’d become desensitized to seeing zombies on my TV screen, the survivors of this zombie apocalypse have begun to become desensitized to death. Living with death as a constant companion, experiencing it so often amongst themselves, has taken its toll. Death, while still tragic, has become common place for this group of survivors. It was evident in Karl’s reaction to Shane’s death. The near witness of Shane’s death (and zombie resurrection), should have been paralyzing for a boy of Karl’s age. Yet, after a brief moment of shock, we see him quickly act on the danger it presented and then appear to emotionally move past the loss. Can this show really succeed on an emotional level going forward if the zombies are no longer as scary to the audience and death has such a diminished meaning to those experiencing it?

There’s an easy answer to both of these issues. While The Walking Dead is the best horror on TV, and horror will always remain an important element, the gruesomeness of the zombies can no longer carry the show by itself. For season three, the show needs to focus less on creating horror and more on creating suspense. The first and most important step that The Walking Dead needs to take to ensure real suspense is to create stakes, for both the survivors and the audience, by focusing on creating characters and relationships that are worth rooting for. I completely understand the idea of using this show to explore the human condition in an apocalyptic world where there is so little chance of survival. But, giving us characters we want to root for to survive in such a world is more important than the philosophical or artistic value associated with merely creating a group of survivors who are always so bleak and sad. There was no suspense in that final scene between Rick and Shane, because I knew Rick would survive it, and I frankly didn’t care if Shane did or not. In contrast, look at the scene between Glen and Maggie in the car shortly after they escaped the slaughter at the farm. The way the camera shot went back and forth between the two characters, each time focusing on the window behind each of them, just as much as it did on the character in the shot, had me involuntarily holding my breath, just waiting for something awful to happen. This was the tensest scene in the entire episode because I had a real emotional investment, not just in the two characters, but in their relationship as well…and it did it without including a single zombie. I’m looking forward to a lot more like it next fall.