‘The Walking Dead’ has never evolved
Characters are uninteresting, repetitive and cause problems
The stupidest humans in the world battle the worst zombies to ever exist in AMC’s television show “The Walking Dead.”
Since the departure of showrunner Frank Darabont, who was fired after the first season, this show has seen a downturn in quality so dramatic it’s baffling that it wasn’t cancelled years ago.
The subsequent seasons’ episodes have been poorly paced. The show is based on a comic series and follows its events, with a few additions and changes.
The seasons are structured as follows — they start with a big moment from the comics or pick up from the big moment where the last season left off, then the following episodes are boring and slow, with little or no plot development. Nothing really happens until midseason, when they do another big event from the comics. The season will end with a final big moment.
Rinse and repeat.
This certainly makes the premiere, mid-season and finale episodes entertaining, but then you have 13 45-minute episodes where nothing happens, it feels like they are stalling until the next big event.
Honestly, you could just watch those specific episodes and be able to follow the events just as well.
I know this, because I did that exact thing when watching season eight for the first time. I skipped 12 episodes and wasn’t confused in the slightest. If you can skip all of those episodes and still get all the information, there is a major problem.
The characters on this show are terrible. There really isn’t anywhere to take characters in a zombie apocalypse other than having them react to the world and deal with its changes. That is all well and good in a movie setting with a two-hour runtime, but there isn’t enough weight to this concept for eight seasons of television.
It makes the show repetitive. Every week the characters continuously talk about how different they and the world are — of course you’re different now, there are millions of flesheating monsters around.
Do you need to keep telling us this for eight seasons?
Zombie universes are limited in terms of what you can do with the characters. Not that there is much to do with these characters, their development is a huge problem.
Each character makes the worst decisions possible. Having characters make mistakes is fine, it shows they have flaws. But when every single character is constantly making the worst decision possible, it’s hard to stay invested in them. They’ll decide to split up when exploring a new environment and be attacked by zombies or someone will make a rash or ignorant decision that contradicts their character.
For example, Rick, played by Andrew Lincoln, will lecture people about working together and acting logically. Then fly off the handle, kill someone, and proclaim that he’s in charge.
It’s difficult to relate to a character who constantly makes decisions that no one watching would make.
Another example is when one character is searching a house, hears a zombie, sees the door to the room it is in is closed, opens the door only to be eaten by the same zombie.
These characters are uninteresting, repetitive and only cause problems, now I’ll discuss other characters that are uninteresting, repetitive and only cause problems — the zombies.
The zombies on “The Walking Dead” are the slow-moving type, that growl, groan and gurgle. But for no reason the zombies always sneak up on the characters. Everything will be quiet and then a zombie will pop out of nowhere and attack.
These are mindless monsters, yet they possess the ability to hide and be quiet until someone is right next to them. This plot hole is just another reflection of the poor writing that has plagued this show since its second season.
This show has run past its prime, if it ever really had one. It simultaneously jumps the shark and nukes the fridge as it falls on its face each week.
What were they thinking by firing a showrunner who directed “The Shawshank Redemption” (one of my favourite movies)? But the biggest problem with this show overall, is that it never evolved.
In the comic series, the threat of zombies soon became manageable and the story evolved to new and different places, moving away from zombie apocalypse and towards a Mad Max-style post apocalypse, where people are the real threat.
In the TV show, it is week after week of boring, unintelligent characters being snuck up on by zombies. Zombie apocalypses don’t work in a TV format.
If you’d like to see some quality zombie material, check out movies like “28 Days Later,” “Shaun of the Dead” and the George A. Romero zombie films.
As for “The Walking Dead,” it has become as stale and uninteresting as the shambling corpses that walk across the screen.
“It’s difficult to relate to a character who constantly makes decisions that no one watching would make.”