This season, THE WALKING DEAD has a theme, or, more accurately, a Theme. A Theme is a theme but handled in a noisy,
sometimes clunky, ham-handed sort of way. Mere themes are written into a
story in ways that don't necessarily call attention to themselves.
Often, the creator isn't even conscious of them; they're present in the
work because they're present in his head. A Theme, on the other hand, is
usually pretentious, always intentional and always loud--always making
its audience aware of itself. Whereas themes are often many and
recurring throughout a work, a Theme tends to be singular--it's there to
be explored, brought to a conclusion, then more-or-less dropped.
Episodic television series often adopt a Theme and build an entire
season around it. The results of this approach can be quite good or quite bad, always depending on the talent of those telling the tale. The Theme of the present season of TWD was spelled out in Rick's little adventure in the season opener. It's a question: can people come back from the awful things this zombified world has made them do to survive?
Astute viewers of TWD will immediately recognize the problem
inherent in having this as its Theme: very few of the characters on the
television iteration of TWD have done anything particularly bad from
which they need to "come back." In a misguided effort to make TWD more
palatable to a "mainstream" audience, the source material has,
throughout the run of the series, been relentlessly sanitized. I've
written about this many times. From, for example, my commentary on the season 2 ep "Better Angels":
"In my original review of TWD,
I wrote that the story is 'set in a bleak, unforgiving, relentlessly
dangerous world that, on a regular basis, forces tough decisions on its
characters, the kind that could utterly alienate a mainstream
television audience.' This, I argued, made TWD a tough sell for tv
treatment. The writers of the series, this season, certainly agreed, and
Shane has been their way around this. Whenever a problem has arisen
this season that doesn't have an easy answer, Shane has been given the
duty of dealing with it. As the designated cartoon villain, he can do
so, and spare the rest of the group from having to make any tough--and
potentially audience-alienating--calls."
From the fate of Sophia to what to do about the zombies in the
barn to what to do about Randall, Shane resolved all of the dilemmas
that consumed season 2, keeping any blood that had to be spilled off the
hands of our heroes. Rick then disposed of him. As I've covered here
many times, the series didn't just avoid having its heroes make any
tough choices; it was, under Mazzara, openly hostile to survivalist
sentiment, and made a regular practice of presenting such sentiment in
contexts designed to make it seem entirely inappropriate.
Examples of this are legion. In season 2, after the search for Sophia had dragged on
too long and Daryl had been hurt, the idea of calling it off needed
to be given some kind of hearing. Instead, the TWD writers put that
sentiment in Shane's mouth, thus writing it off as the selfish view of a heartless villain. In "Home"
from season 3, a strikeforce from Woodbury is probably bearing down on
the prison.
With Rick out of his mind and everyone else just standing
around with thumbs in orifices (as they so often did on Mazzara's TWD),
Glenn tries to get the group prepared for the imminent war; for his
efforts, he's presented as
being a dangerously stupid jerk. Hershel gives him a speech about how
his attitude is going to get him killed. Maggie, angry that he's angry
that she was threatened with rape, even refuses to help him
shore up the perimeter.
Later still, in "Welcome To The Tombs," Carl offers a great little speech to Rick about
how failing to responsibly deal with problems that arise results in
people being killed. As I wrote at the time, "he failed to kill the
walker that killed Dale; Rick failed to kill Andrew, which resulted in
Lori and T-Dog dying; Rick didn't shoot GINO when he had the chance,
resulting in the attack that had just happened." It was something that, by then, desperately
needed to be said, but, again, the writers presented it as the
self-serving words of a brat kid who had just gunned down a surrendering
teenager, then presented Rick as refuting it by taking in the survivors of Woodbury. And on into infinity.
Upon the inauguration of this season's Theme, Rick was set up as
someone who wondered if he could "come back" from the bad things he's
had to do. As the season opened, he'd virtually retired from action and
became a farmer, because, as he described it, he'd started down the road
of making those tough calls one has to make to survive and, as a
consequence, almost lost himself and his son. This certainly comes as
news to regular viewers of TWD. Rick has never made a tough call with
regard to a matter of survival. Any time he's been put in a position to
do so, he's punted. It's true he allowed a backpacker to be devoured by
the dead in "Clear",
but that was a virtually random thing that happened when he was out of
his mind. He later decided to hand Michonne over to GINO, but he changed
his mind (as always), and, in one of the all-time low-points of TWD,
Michonne told him he was right to consider that offer, and even thanked
him for taking her in. Read in light of the season's Theme, the idea
that Rick has anything from which to "come back" is just arbitrary
melodrama.
More broadly, none of the regular characters on TWD have had to
make any tough choices from which to "come back." The sanitization
process has been too thorough. And that, of course, is why the writers
suddenly had Carol go radically out-of-character this season and
pointlessly kill two people; it's done in the service of the Theme, the usual plot-dictating-characterization approach
of melodrama. Carol now has something from which to "come back," and
the writers can milk it, but it required arbitrarily dictating that she
commit cold-blooded murder, which assassinated her character. Carol had,
for the first time in TWD's run, become a genuinely interesting
character with an interesting dynamic to contribute; now, she's the
perpetrator of an atrocity and has, for the moment, been written out of
the series. The writers failed to learn what should be the lesson of
their own work.
Hold that thought. It will return soon.
Unlike most of the other characters, GINO is a villain, and as such has done lots of terrible things. But GINO, as GINO, sucked. He stopped being GINO this week
and became "Brian Heriot." It was a big step in the right direction, if
any direction at all was to be taken with this character. Heriot's
initial tale was a good one, but it ended where it began, and now,
Heriot is apparently going to have to confront his GINO-ness in the name
of the Theme.
Can he "come back"?
The lesson the creators should have taken from their own work
this week is that this is actually one of the least interesting
questions one can ask, not only of this character but of any of the
others. As GINO, this character didn't work at all; as Heriot, he did.
His previous incarnation was a poorly-constructed, unspeakably silly
cartoon villain. Shucking that and making it some troubling things that
happened in his past worked well, while revisiting it in a head-on way
may befoul the character's progress and end up reinvoking all the
reasons he should have never returned in the first place. Why not just
forget the Theme and go with what works?
Our heroes, as I've noted, haven't done anything from which to "come back." And where, exactly, are they supposed to "come back" to? The world has ended. It's over. It isn't coming back. What's left is harsh, brutal, unforgiving, and, when competently written, will rarely get any easier. In my essay on TWD's melodrama problem, I argued
that a character study must be a central feature of TWD but can't within
the soap melodrama framework wherein characterizations are arbitrary
and dictated by the needs of temporary plots aimed only at doing an
end-run around thought and invoking a string of emotional responses. TWD
has a Theme this season. What it needs, though, is to ditch the soap
melodrama approach, offer up some conceptually strong characters for a change, and give us a thoughtful look at how such a world as theirs may affect them. That's all a TWD can offer. And from that, the themes would flow.
--j.
The SLIDERS episode 'Sole Survivors' is better zombie show then all of the walking dead. Just had to throw that out there
ReplyDeleteWell, the R.E is what i really love. But was really disappointed with the movie. So my best pick is TWD.
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