The Walking Dead

"I think it is important. From a narratological point of view, what Kirkman is pointing out here is that the zombie apocalypse becomes a genre in which we have a laboratory of human behaviour ramped up. We get a similar effect in war stories. What this scenario does is ratchet up our everyday normal human behaviour to force ten levels. It allows us to ask those really challenging questions about character in a much more rapid way. Character is important because both the comic and TV series are long-form narratives in which you have the chance to develop binding relationships with characters. That, actually, for me is the hardest thing about watching both The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones : you get attached to characters who then get killed off. Eventually I stopped reading The Walking Dead because I did not want to get my heart broken anymore! Yes. He starts out as a sort of proto-typical American Gary Cooper good guy—an ‘ah shucks’ lawman from a small sheriff’s department. Over the course of the story, he develops in response to the world of threat but also in response to the new responsibilities that he takes on. Some of those changes are positive, others less so. For example, fans often talk about an iteration of Rick whom they call the ‘Ricktator’. He is basically the pragmatic leader of the group willing to do violence or whatever is necessary to protect the group and keep them together. This is the version that we’ve seen mostly in recent seasons. “What this scenario does is ratchet up our everyday normal human behaviour to force ten levels – it allows us to ask those really challenging questions about character in a much more rapid way” In some ways, I really miss the naïve original Rick. There’s a moment in the beginning of The Walking Dead where he encounters one of the zombies—the first walkers—who has been so badly ravaged that she’s just lying helplessly in the grass making zombie noises. Rick takes her bike and rides back to his old home but before he leaves town, he comes back and kills her out of mercy. He was reacting to her helplessness and what he perceived as their shared humanity. Of course, this is still very early in his understanding of what the walkers are. Later on, such killings just become reflex. We come back here to what we were talking about with the early George A. Romero films. Actually, it’s a trope that extends throughout The Walking Dead : that we are like the walkers if we are not living mindful lives or if we are sunk into old ways of seeing or being. There’s another scene early in the series in which Rick encounters a family of evangelical Christians who have committed suicide. Basically, what has happened is that their faith could not accommodate the shock of the event. They had a very particular way of waiting for the second coming of Christ, and this was not the way the world should end. And if the Bible was wrong about that, then what else might it be wrong about? I think it’s entirely possible that these scenes are intended to be a social commentary on the unthinking kind of faith that some people have. But the lovely thing about the scene in the church is that Rick recognises the connection to the figure of Jesus. He comes back in after they have cleaned up the church and he says that he doesn’t know how to pray, but he knows that he can talk about how to do the right thing and how difficult that is as a leader."