There was a time when I was a pretty big fan of The Walking Dead. It definitely
had problems, but I always found it interesting, and at the height of my
fandom, I saw it as an outright important piece of fiction for the modern world.
That may sound a bit dramatic for a zombie show, but like a lot of people, I
always thought the series was intelligently commenting on different
philosophies of life and simply using zombies as icing on the cake.
However, as the years went by and I reflected on the show's themes and
overall message, I found myself frustrated with just how
tired and meaningless it had become. I'm not the only one who thinks so either as
the show is suffering from low ratings, cast members jumping ship, and people
generally just watching out of obligation or boredom. The show has
definitely devolved into a shadow of its former self and I couldn't help but try
to find the reason. So, this video is going to be an examination, an autopsy if
you will, to determine just why The Walking Dead is wasting your time. Part
One: "It just raises too many questions." Parallel to how we all live in the real
world, the survivors in The Walking Dead face a landscape of horror and
uncertainty. Like us, they don't know if they live to see tomorrow.
Like us, they'll have to make choices they may regret and along the way they'll
lose people close to them or maybe even their own humanity. If you ask me, all
Robert Kirkman is doing here is adding zombies to real-world problems like
death, corruption, and loss; aspects of life humanity have always pondered. On
the surface, there's nothing wrong with that. "Art imitates life" as they say. The
problem lies in the fact that in order for a story like this to really say
something about any of those topics, it has to answer the questions it raises.
Otherwise, it's just remaining ambiguous; putting forth dilemmas and not taking
the chance on answering them definitively. Throughout the series, our
characters are constantly put in situations where they have to make
difficult moral decisions. Generally, characters either stick to their
principles or do anything they have to to survive. Looking further into these
choices the heart of The Walking Dead can be boiled down to one central moral
dilemma, which is something like this: "Is it better to act righteously and keep
your humanity knowing you or the people around you will likely suffer as a
result?" OR "Is it better to act only in the interest of survival, losing your
humanity, but remaining 'alive'?" To Robert Kirkman's credit, this is an
interesting philosophical dilemma. However, depending on the situations
presented in the show, both approaches are considered valid. This ambiguity is
where the Walking Dead gets confusing with it's overall message. Everything seems
to be in a cloud of moral relativism. According to the logic of the show, even
the most barbaric acts are justified in the right context. This isn't to say that
characters can't change, but later when they change their entire outlook back
and forth multiple times it's hard to find a solid through line. It's this lack
of clarity that makes me think the show is doing nothing but raising questions
without answering them. This is fine if your only goal is to make an
intentionally ambiguous story where the audience makes up their own minds. "You be
the judge." But, being that the show keeps going it indicates that there is some
greater message to be discovered. However, after watching season after season of
the same moral conundrum play out, I think it's safe to say that this is all
The Walking Dead has to offer. Which brings me to my next point...
Part Two: Beating A Dead Horse Throughout the entire series, the same moral dilemma I mentioned earlier
has just been recycled in different situations ad nauseam. It got so bad that
a character's arc could be determined ahead of time. If a character was being
too pragmatic and cold-hearted, you could predict that in their next arc, they'd all of a
sudden want to be moral and just. This would last until the next horrible event
happened and then they'd go through the whole thing again. To give you a better
idea of what I'm talking about, let's go through some examples. We don't kill the
living.
We all can change. There's still people we should bring 'em in. There's only one
person who has to die today and I will kill him myself
I will. We're not gonna kill you, We're not gonna hurt you. You're good man
Rick. I hope you find your wife and son.
I don't know anyone anymore! You don't clear! ...but all life is precious.
I do miss my Maytag.
Characters constantly alternate between two different philosophies and it feels
like artificial conflict to pad out the story. It's things like this that are
making people less and less interested. If characters acted consistently, it
would be more tolerable if for when they made a moral choice because we would
know that that's how THEY'RE specifically prone to react. It's
confusing when Rick offers peace to the Governor, brutally murders Gareth for
trying to eat him, and yet doesn't kill Negan; the guy who smashed two of his
friends heads in and killed other members of his group. If you want a
characters arc and more importantly the themes of your story to progress you
need to end somewhere different than where you started. Our survivors can
either end up maintaining their values and suffering the consequences or
forever be slaves to animalistic survival. The problem is that we've seen
the peak of each of these philosophies in most of the characters so it's played
out. Unless a character has some new lesson to learn that's not the same
exact lesson as last time, they should be phased out or killed off. All the show
can hope to do is have old characters relearn old lessons or introduce new
characters that will go through the same thing in a slightly different way. But, I
think it's obvious why people are naturally getting tired of that. As a
result of this repetition, I think the biggest reason the show isn't connecting
with people as much anymore is because when your protagonists flip-flop between
moral extremes, the viewers traditional sense of how a story is told is broken.
Which brings me to my next point. Part Three: Tell Me Something Good As humans, we like stories that
confirm our natural biases about the world. One of our most fundamental biases
is the concept of deserving something. The general idea is that if someone acts
in the proper way, they deserve good fortune, and if they act in the improper
way, they deserve punishment. To put this in the context of storytelling, we
generally want our protagonist to win because they aren't being an asshole and
we think they deserve to succeed. In the case of The Walking Dead, we ultimately
want the same thing. We follow Rick in the gang and we like them...ok maybe not
all of them, but we want them to overcome whatever evil they encounter and live
happily because we feel they've made the right decisions and deserve to. The
problem is that they don't always make the right decisions. After season 5, I
started to lose sympathy for Rick in particular because he wanted to
stop helping people. He was okay with leaving allies behind "...but they can't
keep up you keep going" and started stabbing people in their sleep before
any conflict had even started. This morally gray approach only dilutes the
viewer's perception of who they should be rooting for and more importantly why.
Another big problem is that it seems like no matter how our characters choose
to act in this world they always end up suffering intensely anyway. So, even if a
character is conducting themselves in a genuinely moral fashion they too will
suffer a gruesome death. The expectation of inevitable punishment makes the
audience feel like a battered housewife that keeps coming back for more.
"Hit me again Ike and this time put some stank on it!" The idea of good people winning the day
is as old as storytelling itself and if you mess with that the audience becomes
disoriented. Sure there can be compelling stories about flawed or even bad people,
but these stories generally show how destructive being that way is. In The
Walking Dead, this is essentially what is happening when we see characters go to
their lowest, animalistic points. They feel like they lost their soul and it
makes them question if living that way is even worth it. However, in the show,
being a savage sure does come in handy in a lot of situations. So, again the
overall message is very ambiguous. This sense of inevitable suffering regardless
of how characters conduct themselves makes the audience ask "What's the point?"
So, let's find out. Part Four: What is the Point? There must be some greater meaning
to all of this struggling right? The way I see it, there are only about three
messages I think Robert Kirkman could really be getting at with The Walking
Dead and they are as follows: Number one: Right and wrong are only a matter of
perspective. This message is a bleak one, but I think given the show's proclivity
for inevitable suffering and characters doing questionable things to survive, it
makes a lot of sense. We have been exposed to many characters in this world
that are at various stages of being completely reprehensible. With the
exception of a few, we are almost always shown aside to them that might still be
human. The idea is often presented that if we were following Negan or the
Governor since the beginning, we'd be rooting for them. If this were
the case, the story would conceivably end with Rick and the gang doing something
so horrible that we are left wondering why we liked them in the first place.
Ultimately resulting in the viewer questioning the concepts of pure good or
pure evil Number Two: Good and evil need to be
balanced in every person. Basically, every character in The Walking Dead swings
violently between the two moral extremes I mentioned earlier. The conflict comes
from them being too far to one side or the other. If this were the overall
message, maybe the ultimate goal of the show would be having our characters get
to the point where they find the perfect balance between doing what they have to
to survive and still feeling like good people. I can't really think of how this
would ever result in a very satisfying ending but "...there it is" Number Three: The
righteous are the ones who truly live life. For me, this message is the most
likely and would tie things up in a nice hopeful bow even if most or all of our
characters died in the end. It would basically say that being a good person
regardless of the consequences is all that matters in life. Sure maybe your
chances of staying alive would be higher if you went full-on savage, but you
wouldn't really be living anymore. You would just be this thoughtless, wandering
animal; hence the walking dead. It's a shame because the show had multiple
opportunities to end this way, most notably, in Season 4. If this were the
overall message, then in my opinion, the Season 4 mid-season finale was the
perfect point at which to end the series. Rick started out good, went bad, and
then came back in the end as 'officer friendly' and offered peace to
the Governor. Sure everything went to shit, but the smile that Hershel gave
Rick indicated that if everyone died, at least they'd die trying to do the right
thing. It could have bookended visually too if
they had ended that episode with the aerial shot of the tank from the episode
'After'. It would have been a nice complement to the ending in the first
episode of the series. Unfortunately they kept blurring this to
the point where I don't think an ending like this would even work anymore.
Part Five: Is he a secret asshole? I am acutely aware that I could just be
reading way too far into this. For all I know,
Robert Kirkman could just really like zombies and moral dilemmas and might not
even have an actual thematic through line in mind. Sometimes it's quite
difficult to tell what the true intentions of an artist are. Although, the
fact that Robert Kirkman avoids plot points like where the zombie plague came
from and whether or not will ever be solved seems to indicate that we are
going to get more of the same. This leaves us with questions like: "Is Robert
Kirkman a secret asshole?" "Has all this just been a ploy to tune in
next time with no possibility for a satisfying conclusion?" "Would ANY ending
make this long and brutal series worth it?"
"You be the judge." Conclusion: At one time The Walking Dead was a pretty good show.
Unfortunately, after eight seasons and a ninth on the way at the time of this
recording, it has definitely overstayed it's welcome. Even though the show always
had issues, as a viewer, you wanted to see where all this suffering was going to
lead. However, after years of wheel spinning with no clear end in sight, the
show loses more meaning with each new episode. There is a point in storytelling
where you have to know when to stop in order to preserve your message. For The
Walking Dead, I think that ship sailed a long time ago. So, if you're tuning into
the show because you feel like you have to or you're just looking for something
to do with your Sunday nights that's fine. But, if you're looking for a
captivating story that will have a meaningful message
I think the Walking Dead is wasting your time.
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