The Walking Dead

 

 

I’m a big fan of the show The Walking Dead, but in a weird way. Most of the time I sit through it impatiently wishing the characters would shut up and do something or I’m barely watching and covering up the screen because it’s too gross for me to handle. They really don’t shy away from showing the zombies, oops I mean The Walkers, going to town on some poor person.

If you aren’t familiar with the show, it is about life after the zombie apocalypse. There is a comic book or graphic novel that the show is based on. So if you really want to know what happens next, you can just read those and not wait each week to see what happens. Although, I hear the show is straying from the comic quite a bit.

The show centers around a group of individuals from all stereotypical walks of life that exist in the south. There’s the 2 cops, former partners Rick and Shane – both wanting to be the hero but going about it in completely different ways. Before the Walkers came, Rick was in a coma after being shot on duty. When the Walkers took over the world, Shane tried to save Rick, but it was too chaotic to carry around a comatose person who is already half-dead, so he left him behind and told Rick’s wife and son (Lori and Carl) that Rick was dead and they should get out of there. He made it his responsibility to keep his best friend’s family alive. But, he soon fell for Lori and started thinking of Carl as his own. Lori took comfort in him and they lived as a family with a group of folks they met along the way (an old man in an RV, two dull sisters, an abusive husband and his timid wife and daughter, a racist redneck and his slightly racist brother, the black guy named T-Dawg, and the smart Asian guy who can figure out how to get out of any jam) …until Rick awoke from his coma and miraculously was able to find his wife and child and BFF in the vast expanse of Georgia’s deserted land. Needless to say, this made things very awkward for Shane and Lori.

The first season was only 6 episodes long and focused on the gang getting to the CDC where they had heard there was a refugee camp set up. They lost some people along the way and when they got to the CDC (SPOILER ALERT), there was no camp. Just one lone scientist holed up in a bunker trying to find the cure to this new disease.

The first half of the second season revolved around finding a missing character that no viewer actually cared about – but still the show spent about 7 or 8 episodes dedicated to searching for this person. The search lands the group on some farm where a family, that seems to have an ever growing amount of members with each passing episode, lives. A whole bunch of really dull conversations happen here. Seriously. Nothing happened in the first half of the second season. People talked and they looked for their missing group member. That’s it.

But the first half finale ended with a bang and the second half of the second season has started out really really well. It seems to be becoming the show it is supposed to be. The audience doesn’t need zombies every 30 seconds to make the show interesting. The show is only partially about that anyway. It’s really about the characters and how the world tries to go on after something like this happens. The problem with the earlier episodes is that the dialogue was so stunted and poorly written that you didn’t care for anyone because they all sounded so stupid. But the show seems to be picking up pace and the dialogue is vastly improved and the acting seems to be improving , as well. Maybe the poor acting from before was a case of Star Wars syndrome, where typically good actors are made to look terrible because of the words they are forced to speak.

The Walking Dead could still stand to weed out some of its characters though (I’m looking at you T-Dawg and Dale) and then flesh out the ones that remain. It seems they are going that way and the show has become the better for it.

So, check it out if you don’t mind a ton of gore. Because it gets pretty gross.