BRAINS
REVELLING IN THE WALKING DEAD’S STUPIDITY.
It happens halfway through the most recent episode of The Walking Dead: Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Daryl Dixon ( Norman Reedus), our heroes, have come into unlikely possession of a transport truck loaded with much-needed food and supplies. But they’ve also run afoul of a wily scavenger with designs on the bounty and no plans to share. A tussle ensues around the truck. Its emergency brake is unwittingly disengaged. And like that the truck and its happy windfall go rolling — as they might in a sitcom or cartoon — down a hill and straight into a river. The supply bonanza sinks. The audience groans. Millions of remote controls go sailing angrily into TV screens.
It is a moment of breathtaking idiocy. It may in fact be the most idiotic moment in the Walking Dead’s history, which is saying something. Where to begin?
It isn’t just the bewildering logic on display. It isn’t that the characters behave irrationally, flailing about as though suddenly brain- damaged, or that this perilous body of water seems to materialize out of nowhere, neither glimpsed nor alluded to once before a truck plunges into it. It’s that the truck itself is a ludicrous tease. A fortune in provisions appears like a godsend — and ten minutes later it’s snatched away. It might as well have been a cache of nuclear missiles or a Ferrari on a flatbed. It doesn’t matter. It was simply devised to be an exciting thing to lose.
This is hardly the first time the Walking Dead has privileged excitement over intelligence. Just last week its mid- season premiere aroused a caterwaul of fury over a handful of dim- witted gaffes: a small child left to be feasted upon by the undead when he could have been easily picked up and whisked from danger, an unexplained leap in time from mid-afternoon to nightfall, a deus ex machina by rocket launcher that seemed a pretty unsporting way for the writers to work themselves out of a bind. Reviews were alternately frustrated and flabbergasted. Twitter sounded the usual note of mild annoyance. I watched the episode in a fit of hilarity and disbelief, aghast at the new depths of mindlessness. And then naturally we all tuned in the next week for a similar experience.
People are quite sensibly vexed by this kind of chicanery. Idiocy is irritating: we tend to feel that characters we like ought to know better than they often do, which is why we scream at the young woman in the slasher film who hears a noise and decides to check the basement to investigate. Of course we also understand a little bit of indiscretion is what makes the genre entertaining. Idiocy—even a moment’s worth—is a convenient way to get somebody killed. And the Walking Dead has adopted this principle as a tactic. Its rash villains and foolhardy heroes often seem like little more than zombie fodder, true. But is there any doubt that it’s deliberate?
The Walking Dead isn’t just stupid. It relishes the stupidity we claim to resent.
Is it stupid when a character finds himself bitten by a zombie that he apparently didn’t see or hear until it was within biting distance? It isn’t plausible: the undead, the show has made perfectly clear, are a rather raucous bunch, incapable of holding in a growl even if it means sneaking up on their prey. But if nobody in The Walking Dead was eaten by surprise the show wouldn’t be shocking. People being eaten by surprise seems to me a pretty fundamental part of what a show like The Walking Dead must promise. Perhaps a zombie creeping up to a victim in utter silence is stupid. But it’s certainly dramatic. Isn’t that precisely what we want?
The Walking Dead has always been idiotic. Or, to put it another way: the Walking Dead has always enjoyed the fruits of its generous idiocy. It’s a matter of committing to a fault so completely that you begin to make the most of it. No doubt there are more sophisticated means to drama available to the prestigeTV writer; the series, however exciting it may be, will never boast the seriousness of, say, Breaking Bad — a show whose thrills were subordinate to its themes instead of the other way around.
What we find maddening about the Walking Dead is that its efforts to scare and exhilarate are so transparently trumped up and sensational. It has no use for subtlety. It’s a thrill- first enterprise, like an amusement park ride, and there’s no reason for us to demand of it a higher aspiration.
So, yes, the loss of the supply-loaded truck is profoundly moronic. But, it’s also unsurprising. The moment is drama manufactured for its own sake, free from any point or consequence. It’s preposterous. It’s weightless. It’s infuriating. And it’s totally, unmistakably The Walking Dead.