‘Dead’ sees the Big Picture
Survival and zombies go only so far. After a meandering Season 5, a solid path emerges.
The sixth season of AMC’s monster hit “The Walking Dead” opens Sunday with exactly what the story line needs: a plan.
Having discovered a quarry filled with zombies, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and company have convinced the citizens of Alexandria that their best chance for survival is to shift the creatures, en masse, away from their still-untouched community.
They attempt to do so, via a complicated, and occasionally whimsical, series of tactics that lend the 90-minute premiere the wide-open, yet tensely meticulous feel of a good heist film.
Such collaboration is a long way from Season 5, in which Rick and his battlescarred gang attempted to settle into the suburban ways of Alexandria, only to realize that these people were fatally oblivious. Once again, Rick, and Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol
(Melissa McBride) and Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) had to take charge.
Zombie-relocation may not be the greatest plan ever — are there really no military bases in Georgia? Has no one considered building a series of super-great treehouses? — but it’s definitely a step in the right direction, widening the show’s scope in ways figurative and literal.
In the season opener, showrunner Scott Gimple and director Greg Nicotero deftly use black-and-white footage to flashback to the end of Season 5, adding visual depth and diversity to a story that has stayed, perhaps, a bit too long in the Georgian greenery.
More important, Rick’s plan promises a new level of narrative in which these characters start to think a bit more the Big Picture.
Season 5 started out Big Picture: Eugene (Josh McDermitt), the geeky scientist, would be brought to Washington where he could reverse the zombie plague. Ever since that went bust (he’s no scientist), it’s been difficult not to wish Daryl or someone would come across a real geek With Something Extra. Someone who knew something about spreadsheets, resource allocation and long-range planning. An executive office manager, or an actuary even. Someone who could treat zombies like any potentially fatal, yet still predictable, physical factor. Someone with Vision.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate all that Rick and company has done for us already. “The Walking Dead” has not only proved that basic cable can pull big numbers, and then transfer them to a spin-off, it has created a multi-generational fan base that will absolutely not be caught unawares by a zombie apocalypse.
And whether the Television Academy chooses to recognize it or not, “The Walking Dead” has been a key player in the recent, and long overdue, validation of fantasy, sci fi and horror as literary genres, a shift that affects virtually every aspect of popular culture.
As we head into an election year, there is certainly a disturbing political commentary to be found in a show in which tyranny, benevolent and otherwise, appears to trump democracy at every turn and personal brutality is a necessity.
But “The Walking Dead” has refused to get preachy in a bid to seem more “serious.” Instead, as with all good dramas, its heart belongs to its characters, the living and the dead. As the group struggles to survive, each character’s growth, transformation or, in some cases, moral decay lifts “The Walking Dead” from a who’s-gonna-die-next video game to an epic hero-quest.
Though it takes a lot of flack for its death toll, and makes it hard to see two new black men join the throng without thinking, “well at least one of you is a goner,” “The Walking Dead,” more than any other show, takes responsibility for its carnage. The characters who remain carry the burden of those who do not.
Six seasons in, however, “survival” is no longer enough. Entering Alexandria last season, Rick and his band looked like barbarians rediscovering civilization. But they knew, and we knew, that it was the other way around. Alexandria may have preserved the joy of fiddle playing, but Rome burned nonetheless.
Our heroes, however, still need a home. Head-skewering zombies and taking down human crazies isn’t enough to sustain either the characters or the audience.
At some point civilization must actually reboot, even on “The Walking Dead,” and for that you need a plan.