The Walking Dead

Last night I watched the premiere episode of AMC’s new show, “The Walking Dead,” (which I keep calling the Waking Dead... which totally still fits, right?) which had been advertised for the past few weeks through super-creepy trailers that aired during episodes of Mad Men. After seeing a few trailers – one that had a man in a hospital gown walking down the abandoned and destroyed hospital halls and seeing locked doors at the end with DON’T OPEN DEAD INSIDE written on them, I wasn’t sure I could watch this show. Horror movies and I don’t mix. I saw Carrie when I was far too young (a babysitter showed my brother and I the movie when he was 6 and I was 8) and when I was 12 I watched a ridiculous movie called Sleepaway Camp at a sleepover that gave me nightmares for a year. I mostly stayed away from horror movies (save anything by Stephen King, because those weren’t about gore but were about the psychological horror that fascinates me much more) until I saw The Ring a few years ago and was traumatized by it.

So yeah. I don’t like scary stuff that much. I think my husband likes it even less. But it was AMC... I was at least going to check it out. And WOW, am I glad I did.

This past season Mad Men has been firing on all cylinders and was my favourite thing to watch in the second half of the year. With The Walking Dead, AMC has officially surpassed Showtime to rival HBO in my opinion. And, now that I think about it, is rivalling HBO.

Now, first, I’ll just say I haven’t actually read the graphic novels it’s based on, so I can’t speak to its success as an adaptation. There were moments in there that reminded me of other literature – the graphic novel of 28 Days Later (obvs), Day of the Triffids, and Stephen King’s The Stand (that scene where Rick is going down the stairwell in utter darkness reminded me of the Lincoln Tunnel scene. I was CONVINCED he was going to step on something, or someone). But it still felt remarkably original to me.

Yes, this is a zombie show, and yes, there’s a lot of gore, but it’s not really about the zombies or escaping them as much as what something like that does to a person. There’s a lot of humanity in this show that I wasn’t expecting. I won’t go into details, so if you’ve seen it, you already know what happened, and if you haven’t seen it, PLEASE stop reading now, go watch it, and then come back.

There were two scenes that stuck with me in particular. The first is where the protagonist, Rick, is holed up in a house with a father and his son. Just when you begin to wonder, “Hey, where is the boy’s moth—” a woman with hollowed-out eyes, a dragging shuffle, and a dead stare slowly lumbers up the porch steps. The boy screams, and you know there’s an immense amount of pain in him – his mother didn’t just die: she’s still walking around, but would kill him in a heartbeat if she saw him. That rotting corpse once housed his mother’s soul, and now it’s brain-dead but deadly. Rick goes to the door, and she seems to see him through the eyehole in the door. He stares at her, and she stares right back at him, and begins to jiggle the door handle. It’s frightening, but sad on such a deep level, as the little boy buries his sobs into a pillow while his father rubs his son’s back and looks like he’s experiencing his own emotional agony. This scene found its sequel later in the episode when the father perches himself in an upstairs window, shooting the zombies in an effort to bring his wife to the street (the zombies will follow noises) and when he sees her, he sets her up in the rifle’s crosshairs, and she stops and stares at him with an utter lack of familiarity. He’s taped a picture of her – alive and beautiful – to the window frame in an effort to remind himself that that creature down below is not the vivacious mother of his child, but he still can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. He stops shooting and breaks down in tears, and she, bewildered, turns and slowly lumbers back to wherever she came from. It’s a heartbreaking moment.

And yet, there was another moment that moved me even more, and took me by surprise by just how much it moved me. When Rick first leaves the hospital after waking up to a zombie apocalypse, he finds a bicycle and a body of a person that had been ripped in half suddenly rolls over with a disgusting cracking noise (presumably her lower half had been devoured by zombies, who then abandoned the corpse but she came back to “life” as a zombie and now is only half a creature). The face is mostly gone and it appears to be a black and yellowing skull with some long, wispy blonde hair, and with a long, bony arm, it reaches out to him and growls as he grabs the bike. He jumps on the bike, horrified (this is the first zombie he’s seen) and races to his house. When he gets his wits back about him and cleans up and heads out of town, he first remembers that thing in the park that growled at him, so he returns to the scene and walks out into the park. Sure enough, a few hundred feet away, the half-creature is dragging itself along the ground with its arms, and he walks up behind it, not scared because it’s not like this thing can actually jump up and attack him in any way. He stands beside it, and the creature, sensing living flesh, stops and looks up at him in all its horrific goriness. Echoing the words of Jacob to Locke, Rick squats and looks at the creature that is now peering up at him and says, “I’m sorry this happened to you.” He cocks the gun, but hesitates for a moment, and in that moment the creature pathetically extends an arm to him. There’s this half-second where the viewer can’t help but feel immense sympathy for this thing. She was human once, she was perhaps quite beautiful, had a family and friends, and has been reduced to half a body, dragging itself through a field and slowly starving to death while rotting. Perhaps there is still a consciousness in there of some kind, and the extension of the arm was as much a plea as a menacing gesture. Either way, when he pulls the trigger, you feel relief – not for him and his safety, but that he put that poor creature out of its misery. I couldn’t believe the director had taken this disgusting thing and made me feel sorry for it. It was an absolutely brilliant television moment.

A friend of mine was excitedly telling me about the episode on Monday and saying he couldn’t wait for me to see it, and he said the only way a show like this will survive is if it’s not about zombies but transcends that. And I think that if Mad Men is a show that isn’t about advertising as much as it’s about the people who are trying to survive in a dog-eat-dog world, and The Sopranos wasn’t about the mafia but about a man’s personal demons, then this show can easily transcend the zombie genre if it keeps up this level of storytelling.

I’m interested to keep watching and learn some answers. When the protagonist, Rick, first woke up, I was actually thinking it was all a figment of his imagination, that what we were seeing were the fever-dreams of a man drifting in and out of consciousness. But the moment we saw the other group – Rick’s wife and son with his partner and some others – it moved the action away from Rick’s point of view and to a new one, so I don’t think that can be the case. So I can focus on the other questions raised in the episode: Will that man ever shoot his wife? (Will we ever see him again or was that a one-off appearance of the father and son?) Was Rick’s wife having an affair with his partner before the zombie apocalypse or did it happen after when they were thrown together in the midst of all of this? (Since it’s pretty damn harsh to leave your husband behind in all of that, I would think it was already happening when the two cops were chatting in the car.) What caused the zombie apocalypse in the first place? And how was Rick’s life spared when he was in the hospital? Who’s the guy on the other end of the radio at the end of the episode? How the hell is Rick gonna get out of THIS one?

Needless to say, I can’t wait for next week’s episode.