The following article
contains spoilers for the first 4 seasons of The Walking Dead.
The journey of The
Walking Dead has been a curious one. It is the most popular scripted show
on television, and has been for many years now. It could easily sit back and
focus solely on giving the audience the zombie action they clearly want and keep
the plots and themes simple and the characters as ciphers. But it hasn’t done
that. I would argue that no other show on TV is more committed to fixing its
problems than The Walking Dead. Yet,
for all its constant tinkering, and changing showrunners over “creative
differences,” it hasn’t actually gotten any better over the years. So as we
stand on the precipice of a new season, once again thinking that the show is on
the cusp of becoming the show it has always had potential to be, let’s reflect
on the journey of the show.
Season 1 arrived with a bang. I still consider the pilot of
the show to be one of the great pilots, if not the greatest pilot, of the last
5 years. It was perfectly paced, focusing on Rick’s slow realization that
something very wrong was going on. Its character interactions between Rick and
Morgan are to this day some of the best dialogue the show has produced. It has
an extremely touching moment after Rick leaves towards Atlanta, where Morgan
takes one of Rick’s guns and just mows down the zombies, trying to bring
himself to finally shoot his wife’s living corpse and let go of the fact that
she’s not coming back. It hit on the main theme of zombies; the dead are right
there in front of you, walking, symbolizing the idea of loss, and how when you
lose someone they never actually leave. They continue to stand outside your
door, haunting you. It made full use of the symbol of change, and the need to
let go the life you had that may seem better, the days gone bye, and instead
focus on the life that is in front of you. It looked like the start of a
classic show, possibly the start of the defining genre show of the era of
television.
That show never materialized. The rest of the first season
was concerned with the idea of lost hope and crushing any inkling that there is
still a chance things could be like they were, but never really fleshed out the
point. The characters introduced after the pilot were either bland, cartoonish,
or annoying, and not once was the show able to develop that same depth it found
with Morgan with any of the rest of the cast. The show stayed popular because
it was able to satisfy on a visceral level, there were people covering
themselves with zombie guts and shootouts between warring groups. There was an
attack on the survivor camp that led to deaths that should have had emotional
resonance but fell flat. There was a trip to the CDC and a scientist who lost
his wife searching for a cure. There was a theoretically interesting moral
conundrum of whether to keep living in a world that will never be the world
that was or to just let go, and let things end. And while the thematic material
was interesting on the surface, the show just never was able to generate the
character depth to bring emotional stakes to what was happening. And though the
show remained interesting and satisfying on a visceral zombie attack level,
though the direction and music choices were often great and though the show was
able to find its own voice and style, it was failing at the most important of
all aspects of a TV show: make interesting characters. Because for a TV show to
sustain itself, it needs to be able to slow down from time to time and focus on
the people in it. If there are no people that anyone cares about, it simply isn’t
going to fly.
The slowdown came in Season 2. Season 2 is the most reviled
of the seasons of The Walking Dead,
and I think that is an unfair evaluation. In fact, I would probably argue that
on the whole, Season 2 is the best season of the show. The problem is, that
unlike other seasons, the bad episodes are all centred in one spot, namely
episodes 4, 5 and 6. And even then, episode 4, “Cherokee Rose,” is the only one
that’s a complete disaster. The problem is that these episodes all had the same
major weakness: nothing was happening, and the characters weren’t developed
enough to make up for it. And three straight episodes of nothing happening on a
show that the pilot had primed people to expect to be great are enough to turn
people against the show.
This is where the showrunner switches start to come into
play. There is no evidence in the 1.5 seasons of The Walking Dead that Frank Darabont had any idea how to properly
structure a TV show. We know Darabont can create great movies. The Shawshank Redemption is considered
one of the great movies of all time and The
Green Mile is no slouch either. And the pilot of The Walking Dead basically acted as a movie with an hour and a half
running length. And it was great. The problem is that there are only two
episodes that Darabont was involved with afterwards that are top tier episodes
of the show, and they were both written by far and away the show’s best writer
(and soon to be showrunner), Scott M. Gimple. “Save the Last One” is the best
episode about Shane, portraying him as either the only character who realized
the type of things you need to do to survive, or a maniac obsessed with Rick’s
wife. The show would start to lean towards the latter with him in particular,
but since his attitude and actions started to become commonplace among more
sympathetic characters over the course of the series, the episode stands as a
landmark for the show. “Pretty Much Dead Already,” the last episode Darabont
was associated with the show for is great for one set piece. Shane and company
release the zombies Herschel kept in his barn while Rick’s group fires away at
them, killing the zombie who was Herschel’s wife and family in the process, when
out walks Sophia, the girl they had been searching for to that point. Watching
Herschel and then Carol’s grief was entrancing, and to this day is probably the
best setpiece the show has ever done.
The rest of Season 2 is decent, a fact which is often
forgotten when the season is evaluated in hindsight. It stays on the farm, yes,
but is centred around a growing resentment between the mercenary attitude of
Shane and the desire for civilization of Dale. In the end, both extremes are
eliminated, leaving the group at a crossroads. There’s no room in the world
that they live in for Dale’s, people who are wholly selfless and empathetic.
But do they need to become copies of Shane to survive? It’s a point that Darabont’s
successor, Glen Mazzara, is very concerned with in his term on the show.
In fact, Mazzara is so concerned with this and Rick’s moral
state that he adapts the Governor as a mirror of Rick rather than outright
making him the lunatic he is in the comics. He wants to make the Governor the
funhouse mirror version of Rick, someone who is initially so concerned with
protecting his people that he’s
willing to destroy anyone else’s people that get in the way. In fact, the point
made in the 3rd season, and why I was one of the few who found the
finale effective, is it presented the solution of the matter as Rick
discovering that there is no dividing line between “our people” and “your
people”. There are just people. The Governor wasn’t the real villain of Season
3, and that was why he wasn’t killed in the finale but instead revealed to be
the insane person he was. The possibility of Rick becoming the governor was the
real threat, and that threat was overcome.
It’s exciting thematic stuff, and that’s why ultimately I
point to the Mazzara era as my favourite section of the show. However, the show
clearly still had problems, and big ones at that. The characters still weren’t
there as people, they were there as ciphers of whatever thematic material the
show wanted to present at the time. Andrea was especially bad, because any
development she got in the first two seasons was basically thrown out the
window and she became a completely different person in Season 3. Similarly, I
could not tell you one notable thing about Glenn except that he liked Maggie,
because he tended to adapt to whatever character traits the show needed him to
have at the time. The plot remained exciting most of the time, though as the
Governor really started to wear thin at the end of Season 3 due to a lack of
complexity, the Rick-Governor plotline began to wear thin as well.
After Season 3, Mazzara quit the show because of creative
differences, and Scott M. Gimple took over. As previously mentioned, he was the
show’s best writer to this point, writing 3 of its top 5 episodes in the
aforementioned “Save the Last One” and “Pretty Much Dead Already,” as well as
the Season 3 standout, “Clear.” Gimple had two missions: Undo everything
Mazzara had done at the end of the third season, and actually get the
characters some development. The start of Season 4 was primarily concerned with
the former mission, and suffered as a result. At the end of Season 3, a busload
of people from the town that the Governor ruled over filed into the prison
where Rick and his group were staying. It was the proclamation that all humans
are equally important and care must be taken for all of them, even if they’ve
fallen into the thrall of an evil dictator. Well, at the beginning of Season 4
those humans were promptly all killed off. There was no one from Woodbury left
by the midpoint of the fourth season. Also, the Governor running away was an
indication that while the Governor may be gone, the ideals he represents could
always be lurking behind any corner. Well, the Governor was brought back for
three terrible episodes (though “Live Bait” and “Dead Weight” were only
terrible in hindsight, “Too Far Gone” is by far the worst episode the show has
ever done) and killed off real good this time. Then, after Rick had received
this epiphany that he can’t be the Governor, his season 4 arc is about spinning
him back towards the person who realizes he needs to kill and be animalistic at
times to survive in this world, basically rendering his season 3 arc worthless.
It was an unfortunate schizophrenic turn thematically for a show that had been
excellent on that front to that point.
But in character work, Gimple and crew did much better in
Season 4. Carol had an excellent arc in season 4, culminating in the divisive,
but for me, classic Gimple penned episode “The Grove.” Carl had a very nice
character episode in “After,” taking him from a character I was pretty lukewarm
on and making him to one of the ones I care most about. We got to actually
learn something about people like Beth, and Bob and Sasha. Tyreese had a very
nice season. Herschel probably had the best individual character episode in “Internment,”
a nice wrap up to his arc on the show before getting beheaded in the midseason
finale. The plot definitely suffered to try to get these characters depth and
to make them into real people, but it was a necessary suffering. And unlike the
plot-light arc at the beginning of Season 2, the time spent with them separated
and developing their own stories looks like it will be very beneficial to the
show long term.
So Season 5 in a way may be the last chance for The Walking Dead to actually become a
quality show. For the first time in the show’s history, we have a foundation
for all the characters. We have a showrunner already signed on to another
season after this, which means there is a clear vision of how the show is going
to proceed, and it is the vision of the show’s best writer. The leftovers from
the Mazzara era are cleared out, so there will be no more sudden turnarounds to
get rid of things that Gimple was unhappy with from Season 3. I do worry that
the show will suffer thematically, as Gimple doesn’t seem to have as good a
grasp of that aspect of this show, but better and more rounded characters more
than makes up for that. As soon as Gimple gets his plot train rolling, it’s
perfectly possible he can take this show to new heights.
Or maybe he won’t. This is The Walking Dead after all, a show that makes its living on
squashing the hopes and dreams of its characters over and over and over again.
It only makes sense that it keeps doing the same to the viewer as well.
