The Highs and Lows of The Walking Dead

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 3^rd 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.