A Tale of Two Zombie Tales

When it comes to a television series, a project will sink or swim based on how a pilot goes over. As a consequence, pilots are typically a place where creators try to put their best foot forward. When a series is approved, that pilot will almost always be the first ep aired, the one that will have a bigger built-in audience than anything that will come later, the one that will hook an audience or lead viewers to black-book it. The pilots for THE WALKING DEAD and Z NATION, tv's ongoing zombie apocalypses, offer an interesting contrast. TWD's pilot was great; after 56 episodes over 5 seasons, it's still the best ep of TWD ever produced and by a fairly substantial margin. Z NATION's pilot, on the other hand, was exceptionally weak. Of the first 9 eps of that series, it remains the worst of the run. TWD's pilot set viewing records and established what became the biggest show on cable. ZN's pilot, drawing a relatively small audience on SyFy, probably left many with a poor impression of the series and didn't inspire them to continue with it.

Too bad for them.

One could almost see ZN's pilot as a metatextual commentary. It started out looking way too much like standard-issue Asylum product, undercooked and underfunded yet trying to be way too big and taking itself way too seriously. Then in its last few minutes, Hammond, the order-barking prick of a soldier on an Ever So Important and Solemn Mission To Save Humanity, was eaten by a zombiefied baby and it fell to the much more entertaining and personable b-team to carry out this essential task. Hammond isn't THE WALKING DEAD--his amusing shout of "God, I hate moral dilemmas!" sets him apart, if only for a moment--but he is a personification of the utterly humorless, tight-assed, overblown way TWD approaches everything, and the passing of his mission, particularly in such an amusing way, is like a passing of a torch to a new approach to zombie apocalypses on television.

At the core of that new approach is humor, and subsequent episodes poured it on. The second installment easily topped the first and the next topped it. The plotting and characterization began to improve and the scale of the production began to more closely match the available budget. The series continued topping itself and something interesting began to happen: Somewhere in the process, it managed to come to terms with what it was, stand upright and develop into a great, scrappy little horror show.

Though ZN is a very different critter, comparisons to TWD were inevitable (and further begged by the fact that it sometimes clips elements of TWD). In a cultural environment in which fans of such entertainments like to treat them as competitors and divide up into warring clans over the question of which is best, a necessary preface to any effort to weigh their respective merits is that there's plenty of room in the world for both shows and no reason one must annihilate the other. TWD fanboys do themselves no more credit by mass-flooding ZN's listing on the Internet Movie Database with ratings of 1 in an effort to drive down the show's overall rankings than they do by complaining that many people on IMDb give TWD the rating of 1 it so richly deserves.[1] There's nothing wrong with having two zombie shows--diversity is a good thing--and no harm in liking just one or both or neither.

ZN's humor is its heavy left hook. Doc (the most excellent Russell Hodgkinson) is chucked down an airshaft by a crazed military commander angry that the amateur pharmacologist can't treat his zombie-bitten leg.[2] Doc ends up snared in a tangle of cables and tubes suspended over a long drop only inches away from the similarly ensnared zombie of the previous doctor who couldn't treat the leg. Desperate and with no way to dispose of the creature, which is intently trying to eat him, Doc fires up a joint and starts blowing smoke its way, hoping to get the snapping ghoul second-hand stoned.

Definitely not a scenario one would see on TWD, a series from which the writers have so relentlessly drained any trace of humor that in a recent episode when they suddenly threw in a little joke about Glenn tripping over some boxes, it came off as utterly bizarre and out of place. Fans started threads.

The lack of humor in TWD is only one manifestation of its general lack of humanity. My own soap-box has been worn down to splinters by all the times I've mounted it to sermonize against TWD's creators treating it as soap melodrama yet it persists in being a show in which people stand around and trade anti-naturalistic speeches about their humanity and whether they're losing it rather than just living their lives as they are and letting the audience figure it out. A show from which mundane conversation is banished, where there's no effort to conceptualize characters as real human beings and in which the characterizations are constantly being altered to suit the temporary needs of the plot. There must, it's true, be a certain gravity for the horror elements of any such story to work. Humor that endears one to the characters can be an important part of that. It makes one care about what happens to them. It's particularly conspicuous by its almost complete absence from TWD because, like ZN, TWD doesn't present a typical narrative wherein people are thrust into a horrifying situation, said situation works itself out then is resolved before the end-credits. What we see, instead, is the open-ended playing out of the day-to-day lives of the characters, day-to-day lives that, in the case of TWD, include virtually no humor and very little love or any other ordinary human sentiment.

How this works out in practice: When TWD's writers feel it's convenient to milk the point, the Greene family is shown to be very close-knit but when Hershel, the patriarch, loses a leg in season 3, neither of his daughters make any effort to find the prison infirmary containing the medical supplies he'll require if he's to have any chance of living through the ordeal nor do they demand action toward this end by anyone else. Instead, Maggie, serving up the melodrama, offers Hershel a teary-eyed goodbye! In season 4, Maggie, her boyfriend Glenn and her sister Beth are separated after the fall of the prison but while entire episodes are built around the efforts of Maggie and Glenn to find one another--lots of melodrama to milk there--neither of them make any effort to find Beth. Maggie even goes so far as to leave signs along a railroad track instructing Glenn to follow it to the end to find her but including nary a mention of Beth. In the current season, Beth has been kidnapped by an unknown person or group but rather than staying in the area and making any effort to find her, Maggie and Glenn have just left with another group going to Washington D.C. (for metatextual reasons we're likely to get in the next ep). From any logical or human perspective, none of this makes any sense at all but each is an example of the TWD writers' practice of making that series' characterizations subservient to the temporary needs of the plot, usually its need to generate melodrama. There are, as a consequence, no human beings on TWD, just a series of arbitrary characterizations that are, with some regularity, arbitrarily changed. Strung together over an extended period, none of them represent a record of a life, with one part evolving into the next; they are, instead, just a disorganized and contradictory mishmash, illustrative only of the varying moods the writers wanted to invoke from week to week.[3]

This lack of humanity means the "characters" offer the conscientious viewer nothing interesting or relatable. They don't sound or feel or ever remotely act like real people (or the fantasies of real people), they're made breathtakingly stupid in the service of poorly constructed plots, we learn virtually nothing about them and there's neither humor nor anything else to endear them to the audience.[4]

On this score, ZN couldn't be more different. It features an increasingly vibrant cast of living, breathing characters and it definitely wants you to know them.[5] That "increasingly" is a significant point. ZN's characterizations are doled out over the course of its various adventures. We get a teenage sniper who has dubbed himself "10k" because, in the kind of mission a kid would give himself, he intends to kill 10,000 zombies. 10k was fairly young and inexperienced in the world when the zombie apocalypse hit, and we see the older characters explaining to him things like ROCKY and porn. We get flashbacks dealing with how he'd had to dispose of his own father when the fellow had been zombified. We see him become smitten, likely for the first time, a flash infatuation with a pretty, cross-eyed Asian girl who can shoot as well as he. And 10k is a very good shot--sharp shooting, sharp-eyed and plain sharp--always looking for potential danger, always trying to keep ahead of it (and usually succeeding). We learn about 10k, as with all the others, over time, by watching him do things, showing how he acts and reacts to different situations. ZN understands the first rule of screenwritng: "Show, Don't Tell."

That is, unfortunately, a rule most of TWD's writers never learned. Nothing on TWD is ever allowed to speak for itself. When, in season 4, the still-healthy Hershel, a physician, is intent on entering an isolated cell-block full of his sick comrades in an effort to treat them, it can't just be something he does because of the kind of person he is in light of the situation. Instead, everything must be brought to a halt in order for him to give a lengthy speech justifying his actions as a profound act of humanitarianism in a harsh world. That's how the series handles everything. As mentioned earlier, it features, as a recurring theme, the question of the characters' humanity and whether they can hold on to it in this savage, zombiefied world, but its creators don't handle the matter by writing stories showing situations that challenge their humanity, showing how they react to those situations and showing what effect it has. Rather, in pursuit of melodrama, the writers have the characters overtly state the question--"Am I losing my humanity?"--then talk about it. And talk about it. And talk about it. Never a serious, adult conversation, mind you, just stilted, overblown soap opera angst.

Far more interesting than all of TWD's many silly speeches about humanity is ZN's Murphy, a guy who is actually in the process of losing his. Murphy is ZN's resident mouthy asshole, always on hand to offer some obnoxious, inappropriate, self-centered comment. He'd been one of three imprisoned criminals who were "volunteered" to take part in an experiment aimed at creating a serum capable of overcoming the zombie virus. The other two died but Murphy made it and now, apparently immune, he may hold in his blood the key to defeating zombieism. But over time, the serum is changing him, making him more zombie-like. Initially terrified by the shuffling ghouls, a natural reaction to having been nearly eaten alive by a pack of them, he begins to view them with something more akin to sympathy. Eventually, he discovers they no longer try to attack him. As his physical appearance deteriorates, his worsening condition frightens him. He's not always in control of himself, his behavior becoming less human, more predatory, potentially even dangerous to the rest of the group. All of this conveyed, extraordinarily enough, without any of TWD's pompous speeches (or, indeed, much commentary at all).

Storywise, ZN tends to embrace a lot of wilder, more creative ideas, even when it sometimes clips them from elsewhere. It's a crazy blender and you never quite know what will come out. Sometimes, whatever does works, other times not so much. Its most recent experiment was a bottle episode wherein one of the characters experiences a series of dreams (they take place on the same industrial set as most of episode 2) revolving around a repressed traumatic memory. A bit much, perhaps, for not much of a payoff. More interesting was an installment wherein Citizen Z, trapped at the North Pole, was visited by a Russian cosmonaut who crash-landed near his facility. Nothing of that scenario should be quite what it seems and in the end, it wasn't. TWD, being an adaptation of an existing property, is at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to this sort of thing. Under current showrunner Scott Gimple, it's staying much closer to the comic on which it's based than it had before but the book's best material has already been squandered. Though for much of its pre-Gimple run it departed rather radically from the book, its departures weren't in the direction of anything terribly creative--it remained basically just a soap that pillaged elements of the book to create a series that was far less interesting than the book (and that, in general, sucked).[6]

ZN is much better paced than TWD. While both shows employ a similar amount of raw plot, ZN resolves its individual chapters in a single episode, whereas TWD tends to drag out that same amount of plot to cover many. Sometimes, many, many, stretching tales so far beyond their natural lifespan that it would be comical if TWD allowed for any humor. By the end of its first 13-episode season, ZN will likely have covered as much ground as TWD has in its 56 to date. It would be nice to see ZN get into some longer tales. There's much to be said for well-executed multi-episode storytelling. There's much less to be said for how TWD has handled that format.

In most of its technical departments, on the other hand, TWD is definitely superior to ZN. With a few notable exceptions, TWD's cinematography tends to be flat and uninspired but it's unquestionably richer and prettier. ZN follows many contemporary b-pictures in employing a restricted color palette, which I think is a poor fit for the series; as I've noted here before, the tone of the series would favor a more vivid, expressionistic use of color. TWD features the make-up effects wizardry of Greg Nicotero and his team; even with his working on a tv budget, it's hard to top that. ZN's production design is unquestionably cheap. TWD has better access to better locations and gets better coverage of them.

Those are just about the only things it does better than ZN though, and those are merely a product of its larger budget. In my initial review of the first eps of ZN, I wrote that "its efforts at 'drama' remain fairly low-grade--nothing of any real seriousness is handled very well." Some of the other problems I identified then have remained but the series has definitely overcome that one.[7] And I'm willing to let slide some of the things I'd normally consider shortcomings because, warts and all, ZN works. It isn't perfect but with a reported budget of less than $700,000/ep, it's an enthusiastic little b-movie in multiple installments and, understood as that, a series that, whatever else may be said of it, delivers the goods. TWD, with a budget floating around $3 million/ep, has been, for much of its run, essentially a daytime soap, the world's most expensive version of one of the world's lowest-grade entertainments, one that, preposterously, wanted more than anything to be taken seriously. Its current showrunner has a much more relaxed notion of TWD's place in the world and has significantly improved it but he just can't seem to exorcise the old, bad habits of his predecessor and TWD will never be great because of it. While ZN is a good show that is constantly improving itself, TWD is an uneven mess, with the good work choked by the bad and any investment a viewer makes in it is almost immediately met by a slap in the face.

I'm glad I didn't let ZN's pilot turn me off the series, as I'm sure happened with many. With it, I have a show in which I can invest my attention and not be constantly made to feel insulted. I wish I had a TWD like that.

--j

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[1] Hey, if I don't point out that's a joke somewhere, a lot of people will not get it.

[2] Said crazed commander played, in a great piece fo casting, by the most excellent Bill Moseley.

[3] I've dealt with this problem at often ridiculous lengths in my TWD articles over the years. "A Melodrama Problem" offers a good, compact treatment of the subject. It covers, among other things, the many contradictory, often awful versions of Rick Grimes TWD has thrown at its audience. The Z NATION gang, by contrast, is led by Roberta Warren. As leaders go, you can't do much better than a deity and Kellita Smith, who plays Roberta, is an absolute goddess of a woman.

[4] Most of these problems, introduced when, for season 2, TWD was converted into a soap melodrama during the regime of showrunner Glen Mazzara, have persisted long after Mazzara's departure. Subsequent showrunner Scott Gimple has introduced many radical reforms that significantly improved the series but rather than eschewing the soap melodrama approach he tries to straddle the gaping chasm between it and proper character-driven drama. It isn't a line that can be straddled though, and TWD has been left a remarkably uneven mess by the effort.

[5] On the long list of things ZN does better than TWD, perhaps the most extraordinary is its characters. TWD has had 4 full seasons and counting to establish theirs yet TWD's random, ever-shifting characterizations make it impossible for any reasonably intelligent viewer to even care if any of its characters live or die. ZN, by contrast, has only had 9 episodes but a death among its central cast as it now stands would definitely be felt as a serious loss.

[6] The existence of the book actually makes this worse because it shows the vastly superior template the series creators abandoned in order to churn out the muck they've so often delivered through TWD's run.

[7] A rather spectacular moment that jumps immediately to mind is a scene in ep. 7 ("Welcome To The Fu-Bar") wherein a somewhat sloshed Roberta has a moment of surreal serenity in a monologue with a zombie who, minutes earlier, had been her bartender. She'd just lost a man she'd silently loved for years--he was killed just when she'd started to express it to him--and pouring forth from her in this scene comes all the feelings she'd bottled up in her head for all the years she'd known him and had never gotten to say to him. Perversely, it comes out through a great deal of anger she has for his giving her hope and then dying. It's a brilliantly-written and executed emotional roller-coaster that lets you see into her soul--character drama done right, something entirely alien to the uninspired, anti-human soap melodrama over on TWD (and almost entirely absent from it since the tale of Morgan and his wife in its pilot).

50 Articles of THE WALKING DEAD & I

"Four Walls and a Roof," this week's aggressively mediocre, watered-down installment of THE WALKING DEAD, didn't inspire me to write anything about it. Except that. Rather, I thought I'd do something a little different (and probably a lot less interesting!). This is an anniversary of sorts: my 50th article about TWD. As good a time as any, I suppose, to devote a little space to my prolific relationship with this particular subject.

It's a relationship that's been the subject of a great deal of commentary over the years, from both friends and admirers and (mostly) detractors. The former often seem to think it a waste of my time, attention and whatever talent they judge me to have, while the latter dislike my criticism of the series and like to raise the caricature of some odd, obsessive fellow writing so much about a series he hates (that I also praise TWD when it warrants it never seems to figure in this criticism).[1]

I came to THE WALKING DEAD through the comics. A lifelong fan of horror and of zombie tales, I'd read the book for years before the series had appeared; back when it was fairly obscure. I'd been cautiously optimistic about the series when it had been announced; interested to see what would become of the adaptation but skeptical of how faithful it could be given the restrictions that would be imposed upon it. Though the creators had promised it wouldn't necessarily follow the events of the comic, Frank Darabont's pilot film was almost slavish in its adaptation of the first few issues of the book and I was hooked. None of the subsequent episodes, which departed radically from the book, even came close to living up to that first ep and they had other problems too, but they weren't bad and often had very good moments. A good series could grow from them. A good friend of mine, a fellow horror and zombie fan, fell in love with it. He didn't have AMC or, at the time, even a tv, and having no other way of seeing it, he'd come over and watch it with me every week.

Unfortunately, it was during that first short season that events in my own life took a turn for the worse. I've alluded to it here but haven't written much on it (and won't). The short version is that someone who had become very special to me very dramatically left me. The fallout from this nearly killed me and that isn't hyperbole. Almost 4 years later and in spite of some efforts to mend the mess, it continues to affect me every day. One of the things it took from me was my writing. I am a writer; born with it stamped on my DNA. I started doing it before most kids my age could even recognize all of their letters and leading into this particular cataclysm, my love was my muse and I'd been in a particularly prolific period.

After, I couldn't do anything. I progressively fell into a rather nightmarish hole in myself and very soon, there was no question of writing. After a very long time, I began, little by little, to return to life but the writing didn't. It wouldn't and I couldn't make it--it was like it had been robbed out of me. For a writer, this was like being dead.

Eventually, I tried to make myself write some things, mostly on political subjects, a few on others. For the most part, I didn't like the results very much.[2]  It was some time shortly before the season 2 opener of TWD that I began to lurk on the Walking Dead board at the Internet Movie Database. I read posts there, learned some of the personalities and as the season got underway, I began occasionally posting short comments. Nothing major. Probably nothing terribly insightful. I wasn't pleased with the radical change in direction the series had undergone but it was still hard to muster up enough interest to care about it or much of anything, really. Still, my friend was turning up to watch it with me and I watched it every week as its problems continued to grow. I started to write about it on the board more and more often, sometimes setting off heated debates.

It was during TWD's midseason break that year that I finally sat down and began to bang out a more comprehensive article dealing with my thoughts on the show to date. It was, to clip a cliche, like a dam had burst. For the first time in a very long time, the words flowed with ease. That first piece, "Pretty Much Walking Dead Already," became and to this day continues to be the longest article I've written on TWD or on any subject on this blog. And the article proved a hit. People flocked to it, complimented me on it, excoriated me for it--it proved a tremendous source of controversy and debate.

Unfortunately, my success with that article didn't translate into any sort of general return of my authorial mojo. It was over a month before I wrote anything else and when I was able to write again, it was another article about TWD. Then another. Then another. I'd been a big fan of Lina Romay, and when she died right around this time, I gave her what felt like an entirely inadequate send-off here. Mostly, though, it was just TWD. For a long time, it was practically the only subject about which I could write with any skill (or with what I felt was skill). The articles emerged fairly easily. The depths to which the series had fallen were appalling and the early articles after the original were mostly matter-of-fact laundry-lists of grievances (a straightforwardness that may have contributed to their popularity). They didn't have a lot of overt humor, which, given the subject, is probably a glaring omission (one that no doubt played into the series' fans caricatures of me) but I wasn't feeling particularly humorous at the time.

The articles developed an insatiable audience, people who told me they enjoyed my articles far more than the show, people who said they only continued to watch it so they could read my reaction to it, fans of the series who despised me and delighted in pointing it out at every opportunity, chiding me for continually watching and repeatedly writing about something I hated. Points I raised were debated at lengths that seemed absurd,[3] and I jumped into the fray with vigor. I seemed to have tapped into a vein of growing dissatisfaction with the popular show, saying things a lot of people had been thinking but hadn't articulated. By writing what I thought, I became a chief exponent of and spokesman for their views, or was so perceived. I became notorious within the online TWD fan community.

Along the way, though, I'd lost the point of it, which isn't terribly surprising. Were it not for my pal wanting to see it and depending on me for his fix, I would have stopped watching TWD fairly early in the 2nd season and probably would have never written anything about it. Long before that second season had ended, I felt as if I'd said all I had to say about tv TWD. I even began to get the idea that I may have covered everything in my first article and that the subsequent ones were merely redundant appendices. I was repeating myself in a way that paralleled the way the show was so mind-numbingly repeating itself at the time. Noting the obvious, I began to do this intentionally, as a sort of private joke, and found some amusement in how often the series' fans would, short my own sense of the obvious, slam me for it. That some little bit of glee was no doubt some small part of why I stayed with it. As depressing a subject as it could be, I was happy to finally have my mind on something other than my own troubles. As I had also become essentially a captive audience because of my friend, I used the articles and the arguments to vent why I disliked the series and there was a certain stubbornness to it. "If I have to watch this shit," I'd tell myself, "I'm damn well going to write about why its shit." More importantly, though, I was also clinging to TWD. It was the only thing I could write, my weekly proof that I hadn't entirely lost the most important part of me.

I was still stuck with watching the series--in addition to my friend, my parents had since taken to watching it and were likewise dependent upon me to provide it (I record it for them)--but I really didn't want to continue writing of TWD into its third season. There had been more personal tragedy between the seasons that threatened, for a time, to overwhelm me.[4] There wasn't any big epiphany that led me to continue; I mostly did so for the same reasons I'd continued through to the end of season 2. The third season was to concern itself with the story of the prison our heroes make their home, which was the high point of the comics, and I had a certain curiosity about how TWD's creators would handle it. I expected they'd so so badly (and said so, and was proven far more correct that I'd ever care to have been). I was still somewhat on the fence about continuing my articles until I saw the opener, "Seed." It's a regular practice for fanboys of various pop entertainment franchises to dub a "hater" any critic of their beloved Precious, a practice intended to dismiss a criticism as the product of the malevolent nature of the critic in order to avoid addressing it. Contrary to this epithet so frequently hurled my way, I've always held out some little glimmer of hope that TWD could right itself and become something worthy of the source material. Being stuck with watching it, I'd certainly prefer it did so. "Seed" fed into that. Not by being great or even particularly good but by being something significantly more than just downright godawful. Having seen it, I determined to write of it, and though still assuming the worst for the season to come, I gave it a cautiously positive review.

It only took one more episode for TWD to destroy the good will I'd extended it. The season that followed wasn't just awful, it was tragic, in that it raped, pillaged and wasted the best story arc from the comic, which was also one of the great tales in all of zombie fiction. In the course of it, I fell into a routine when it came to my articles. My mood had lightened a bit and I started to have a lot more fun with them and to branch out, covering the series' visual continuity errors, creating a map of TWD's Georgia, imagining a behind-the-scenes look at the TWD writers' room. The season was horrible but at the end of it, Glen Mazzara, the showrunner who had driven TWD to ruin, was fired. Reportedly, he'd been so terminally underwriting the series--a complaint prominently featured here week after week--that production had to be repeatedly shut down for lack of material to shoot. I didn't sing "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" at that point but I did think it offered a chance to significantly improve the show.[5] Scott Gimple, the fellow chosen to replace Mazzara, had been the writer of record for the only relatively good episode of season 3 ("Clear") and another that, though it featured an incredibly bad decision by the writers (the death of Merle), was significantly less than awful ("This Sorrowful Life"). I'd almost certainly be watching the next season and I was curious to see what he could do with it.

Gimple significantly improved the show. His gang turned out the first great eps of TWD since the 1st season, several of them. I appreciated Gimple's efforts to refute and demean Mazzara's work but I thought he took that much too far when he devoted multiple episodes to creating Woodbury v.2.0 and trying to prove he could pull off the end of season 3 better than Mazzara. Watching TWD also became a very frustrating exercise for me during season 4. When Mazzara was running the show, one simply expected every ep to be shit and one was virtually never disappointed. When, under Gimple, there were suddenly good-to-great episodes appearing, one wanted this to continue but rubbing shoulders with the keepers were also multiple eps in which, utterly unnecessarily, the show fell back into the very bad habits of the Mazzara years, brainless and awful. This, it seems, is going to continue into the new season. A killer opening ep, followed by a shitty sequel, followed by a mediocre third installment. "Fear the Hunters," the comic tale adapted by the last two episodes, could, absent the material that was drawn from it and put to use in the previous season,[6] have been covered in a single episode. Instead, it was stretched to two, packed with filler and the brutal payoff watered down[7] until the point is entirely lost, then the whole thing was paved over with a string of clichés and Lifetime For Women demographics-servicing faux tenderness regarding Bob's imminent demise. Just a waste.

My articles for season 4 reflect both the unevenness of its eps and my changing perspective on the series. A shift in them I note is that I don't just catalog the inanities of the weaker installments but, instead, begin to try to diagnose, at greater length, the basic nature of the series' problems and to suggest ways it could be improved--treating it as something worthy of those sorts of considerations. Toward the end of the season, by contrast, the series began to wear on me and my articles sometimes became quite cursory. For at least one ep, I didn't even write one (and heard an earful from my readers for it). I don't like writing the kind of reviews one finds all over the internet where most of the text is consumed by a mere recap of the ep's events. If I'm going to write about an ep, I need to have something to say about it. The eps on which I skimped are a mixed bag of mediocre-with-good elements that didn't particularly inspire me. My short take on "The Grove," on the other hand, represented a judgment that it was a great tale, one I thought spoke for itself.

For a time, Gimple actually had me looking forward to the next week's ep. That's quite a feat and he managed it on multiple occasions. And then he managed to drub that out of me. After the last two eps of this new season, I'm not looking forward to any more TWD. I doubt I ever will again. I'm sure there will be some more good eps sprinkled throughout this season and through the series for however long it continues. I'll probably even write about it. It isn't something in which I can reliably invest any enthusiasm though. I don't understand why Gimple doesn't just kick free from Mazzara-ism entirely and allow TWD to soar but he won't. He's had every chance. For all his TWD's seeming criticism of it, he lets it continue to drag down the show and it's likely he always will, dooming TWD to remain no more than what it is now--a wildly uneven series that offers up an alternating mix of impressive episodes that raise one's expectations and eps of mindless Mazzara-ist garbage that relentlessly grind down the same enthusiasm the former inspires. That's unfortunate but it is what it is, and though some of my readers have suggested it looks as if Gimple, based on some of his reforms, had been reading some of my criticism, changing it isn't really in my power.

I'm no longer clinging to the series as a subject; I came away from that slowly and over time and last season removed any doubts that may have lingered. My writing hasn't entirely recovered from my personal traumas and maybe it never will but it's better. Between the TWD seasons, I wrote a few articles here on various unrelated subjects about which I had much more enthusiasm. I didn't think they were bad. I was somewhat disappointed by the minimal reaction to them. Now, TWD is back and my readers want to see my analysis of it; still stuck with watching it, I'll probably keep writing about it, if for them alone.  I may be, as some insist, a moron for writing about it so much; people will just have to judge that for themselves. To aid them in those weighty considerations, I'll go ahead and confess a certain disappointment with myself in writing so much on a subject that is so often so unworthy of that much attention while giving short shrift or failing entirely to write about much better movies and series. For the record, though, I'm not some crazed obsessive when it come to TWD. I'm not a "hater." Nore am I Paul Sheldon in "Misery," perpetually driven by commercial concerns to write of a subject I hate--I don't make a dime from my writing on the subject. And that's where things are with TWD and I.

Postscript: I should, in closing, offer a few words regarding my friend, the fellow who doesn't always like TWD but hasn't disliked it enough to stop watching it; the one whose desire to look at it has, in turn, kept me watching it. Given how little I've said about him here, I fear some readers could have been left with the impression that being forced to keep up with TWD on his behalf is, at best, some sort of resented chore and at worst, some hellish torture. It's neither. The friend in question is a good one and has been with me for many years now. He can watch TWD with me any day. I dedicate this article to him:

To Darren. A jolly good fellow.

--j.

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[1] I'm not sure why anyone thinks, caricature aside, that's a legitimate criticism anyway. On what planet are critics expected to write only about things they really like?

[2] The pieces in question were typically political commentary written in response to something I'd read somewhere and in retrospect some of them aren't bad but my real-time impression was that they more often came out quite poorly. They are, for me, very clinical, impersonal, matter-of-fact--at the time, I thought most of them rubbish and maybe more importantly, they were on subjects I didn't enjoy.

[3] On the IMDb board, which was my main haunt, the fights would go on for thousands of posts; frequently, I, rather than TWD, seemed the #1 topic of discussion for the day.

[4] An ex of mine, a fine lady with whom I'd remained very close, killed herself that Summer.

[5] I wrote an evaluation of the Mazzara seasons for the IMDb board. Which was best? Well...

On one hand, S3 had one good episode ("Clear") and two eps that, while problematic at times, still managed to rise above the series' usual rock-bottom standard ("Seed" and "This Sorrowful Life"). This compares to no good episodes in S2. Every episode that year, without exception, was a complete waste of space. Purely on a scorecard, season 3 wins that way.

On the other hand, the IQ of the series, which plummeted in season 2, hit a new low in season 3--TWD S3 is a much dumber show than S2. "Sick" and "Killer Within" were basically full-episode extensions of Lori taking the car to fetch Rick and Glenn, and were a series low when it came to this. If you prize intelligence, you're going to despise both, but if you can appreciate one being a bit smarter than the other, S2 wins. If, on the flip-side, you actually prize abject idiocy and find it one of TWD's endearing traits, S3 is definitely for you.

On a third hand, the second half of S3 was like the first half of S2, in that nearly everything we were shown was simply filler. TWD, in both seasons, has been mostly filler, but those two "eras"--to the extent that they can be cleanly divided (important caveat)--featured the greatest amount of padding. The S2 filler era lasted 7 eps, while the S3 filler era lasted 8. At the same time, though, the padding in the S2 era was far more repetitious--the same scenes and conversations being repeated dozens of times with barely an altered word.

On a fourth hand, S2 is as dull as dishwater. If you prize any sense of pace, there's nothing for you there. S3 doesn't move any faster but it throws in lots and lots of action to confound bumpkins into mistaking it for superior. The special effects in S2 (and, particularly, S1) were excellent; in S3--probably as a consequence of that greater demand for action--a lot of them looked like the effects from a Troma flick. There are exceptions and still some great work here and there, but often you'll find better work in a Toxic Avenger movie.

And on and on. When it comes  to judging such things, lot of it just depends on what you prize. The bottom line about Mazzara TWD is that no matter how many hands you may have, comparing the seasons is like saying this pile here stinks a bit less than that pile over there--it may be true, but you don't want to step in either.

[6] The excellent episode "The Grove" was a significantly altered version of a subplot from"Fear the Hunters."

[7] As I've written here before, attenuating the material for a middle-American whitebread audience has been a problem for TWD from the beginning. In this case, the incredible brutality of the climax of "Fear the Hunters"--our heroes, appalled by the cannibals, spend all night torturing them to death in the same way the cannibals have tortured others to death--is, as always with tv TWD, eliminated. Heaven forbid middle America ever be exposed to brutality in a horror show about the end of the world coming at the hands of flesh-eating monsters. That doing this eliminates the entire point of the story no more occurred to the writers than the fact that cannibalism didn't make any sense in the first place in the the sanitized world they've created in the tv version wherein food is plentiful and never really much of a problem (in the comic, it's nearly always a problem).

Pace and Consistency Strangers To THE WALKING DEAD

Series television is written by committee. An individual script will usually only have one writer's name on it, but the final filmed version of it will be the product of a large number of people, from the showrunner and the writer's room down to even the individual actors (in series that don't insist on overly rigid recitation of the written word). One of the things that has long puzzled me about THE WALKING DEAD is how Robert Kirkman, who is a talented writer I've read for many years, always ends up as the author of record on so many godawful episodes. If his name appears on a script, it's guaranteed to be a stinker, and tonight's installment, "Strangers," was his sixth turd in a row, a turd that, like the previous five, shows no trace of his influence, much less of his authorship. Not a single Kirmanesque moment, line of dialogue, anything. This simply isn't how Kirkman writes.[1] Are his scripts being dragged down by too much influence from others? Is he choking when it comes time to write a tv script? Is someone of lesser talent ghostwriting for him?[2] It's a mystery I've pondered for a few years now, one that's likely to remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. For our purposes here at the moment, it's enough to note that, tonight, TWD squandered the good will it had earned via its great season 5 opener with yet another Mazzara-esque filler episode.

Once again, we're back to the soap melodrama dialogue wherein no one has a normal conversation about a mundane subject; every exchange involves some preposterous, overblown speech about some Very Important Things that are mostly repetitions of things we're heard a million times already. Let's wallow in how Troubled a character is about something bad in their past by having them repeatedly tell us--regulation hangdog look in place--they Don't Want To Talk About It. The other 9,999 times clearly weren't enough, so let's have Rick give his 10,000th repetition of his speech to Carl about how he must be exceptionally careful in this zombified world. Let's have another speech from Abraham about how we must get Eugene to D.C. so we can save the world.

Other bad habits returned. Bob is suddenly given lots of dialogue, the home of which he's long dreamed, and a romance with Sasha. Longtime viewers of TWD know what that means; he's being set up for a gruesome fate. He isn't dead by the end of the ep, but only, one suspects, because this is a filler episode in which virtually nothing happens. He appears to have been bitten by a zombie on  mission to find food--something at which the episode only hinted[3]--and was then snatched by the remnants of the Terminusians. When they weren't killed, you just knew they'd be back, right? The subject of a Terminusian shish ka-Bob--yes, you may roll your eyes at that--he seems to have been designated by the creators to meet Dale's fate from the comics.[4] Meanwhile, Carol apparently decides to leave the group near the end; she treks to a broken-down car she and Daryl had encountered earlier, gets it running, and is just about to leave when Daryl stumbles upon her. Not satisfied with one such remarkable coincidence, the ep immediately throws us another--at that very moment, the car of whomever kidnapped Beth goes speeding up the road right in front of the car Carol just got running! She and Daryl jump in and take off in pursuit, but, again, this being a filler ep, whatever becomes of that will have to wait until next week.

The pace of the ep is wretched, little of any substance happens, it brings the momentum established by the previous ep to a standstill--overall, "Strangers" was a disappointing fallback to Mazzara-esque crap, an exercise that deepens the mystery of Robert Kirkman's substandard scripts but is otherwise a complete waste of an episode.

--j.

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[1] Kirkman's first ep, "Vatos," is very Kirkmanesque, a great script with lots of Kirkman touches and great moments, including the best ever last line of a TWD ep, but the big twist toward its end--the "gangsters" who turn out to be guarding a nursing home--was so bad, so ill-advised, and left such a bad taste in viewers' mouths that its merits tend to be ignored and it often ends up listed among the all-time worst TWD eps.

[2] Certainly a possible scenario. Though Kirkman has always described himself as intimately involved in the creative end of the show, he made numerous public comments in interviews during its 2nd and 3rd seasons that were wildly inaccurate and suggest he was only minimally aware of what was happening with it and was merely trying to fudge his way through questions regarding it to which he didn't know the answers.

[3] He's attacked by a zombie during one of TWD's patented ridiculous zombie setpieces. The group wants to collect food from the lower level of a building that is waist-deep in water. There's a hole in the floor above it; the flooded lower level is teeming with zombies. Instead of simply spearing the zombies from above, which could be done with no risk, the team descends to the lower level to battle the zombies in the waist-deep water. At one point, one of the creatures grabs Bob and drags him under. When he's rescued, he claims to be all right, but something is clearly bothering him, and later, after the group returns to home base--a church--he's shown standing outside alone crying, perhaps over being bittern, perhaps only to make viewers familiar with the comics think he was bitten.

[4] It wouldn't surprise me if Tara eventually ends up wanting to marry Glenn and Maggie either. As sometimes happened last year, Gimple likes to try to mine some of the material from the comics that Mazzara pissed away during his reign as showrunner.

Ze State of Z NATION

Just watched the first three eps of Z NATION, the new SyFy zombie series. Given the perpetually duplicative complexion of television, I assumed that, in the wake of the remarkable ratings success of THE WALKING DEAD, everyone in the biz would soon be purloining its premise and delivering up a plethora of living dead-plagued landscapes populated by bands of ragged roustabouts just trying to survive. As TWD sank into the baleful depths of Mazzara dullardism, I even fantasized that someone would build a better zombie-trap, throw it against TWD and bury that series, which I'd really come to hate, beneath its own premise. For whatever reason, this hasn't materialized, neither the trend nor the fantasy. A tv adaptation of ZOMBIELAND made it as far as a pilot film but it apparently went over poorly and was dropped. Only this year--5 seasons into TWD--did SyFy partner with the Asylum to produce the next ongoing televised zombie apocalypse. I'm only a little late to that party but last night I did finally get around to taking in the first three eps of its fruit, Z NATION.

Z NATION is a bit of a party. Karl Schaeffer, its showrunner, tells us that "every week, you’re going to see our zombies doing something different, that you haven’t seen zombies do before. Our goal was to put the fun back into zombies." A clearer focus on that goal would have certainly aided "Puppies & Kittens," the series pilot. It delivers some humor along the way, mostly toward the end, but overall, it takes itself way too seriously and this combined with its other sins almost led me to forgo the rest of the series. It indulges in one of my least favorite tropes of genre productions in having characters spout faux-"futuristic" language. Zombies are called "Zs," killing them is called "granting them mercy," dates are recorded as "A.Z." (After Zombies), there's militaristic techno-babble ("Delta-Xray-Delta, this is Northern Light. Operation Bite Mark, do you copy?") and so on. In one of the early scenes, a group of people are throwing a going-away party for their sick grandmother, who is then given "mercy" via an "eight sacrament"--ritually shot by one of our heroes. This is treated as a joyous event.[1] In my view, such tropes are the waste-products of feverish nerdish circle-jerking and they only tend to alienate viewers from material that, set in a world only divorced from our own by three years, shouldn't be so alien to them. Following contemporary b-movie trends for better or worse, the cinematography favors the hand-held and a fairly restricted color palette. The latter is a huge mistake; while the pilot is often fairly dull, the tone adopted by the subsequent episodes would be much better served by a vibrant, even over-the-top expressionistic use of color. The production design is dirt-cheap and it often combines with the scale of the piece to give the impression of simply trying to do too much with too little.

Much of this is emblematic of the work of the company that produced Z NATION. I'm an ordained minister in the Church of the B-Movie but it's exceedingly rare that I've felt compelled to preach a sermon on behalf of a product of the Asylum. Over the years, I've slogged through more of its execrable filmography than I'd care to recall  The company's bread-and-butter is grinding out "mockbusters"--dirt-cheap knock-offs of whatever huge-budget blockbuster Hollywood is currently pimping. Hollywood makes TRANSFORMERS, the Asylum has TRANSMORPHERS; Hollywood remakes THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL; the Asylum counters with THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED. Hollywood offers THE HOBBIT: the Asylum gives us AGE OF THE HOBBITS.[2] The company makes its money by using such titles to separate credulous Redbox renters from their entertainment dollars by making them think they're getting the current upbudget Hollywood schlock.[3] One can admire their initiative. Admiring their schlock is more difficult. A lot of schlock can be endearing; the Asylum's schlock one more typically finds oneself enduring. Their movies aren't so bad they're good; they're mostly just bad. There have, in my experience, been a few exceptions. SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S SHERLOCK HOLMES--released to ape the Robert Downey Jr. SHERLOCK HOLMES--had a good b-movie take on Holmes and was entertaining enough. It fell on its face only insofar as it, like so many other Asylum projects, simply tried to do too much with too little. SIX GUNS, the Asylum's rip on JONAH HEX, ended up being a better Jonah Hex movie than the one that bore the name. And of course, the Asylum's biggest catch--and likely its biggest hit--was SHARKNADO. A riff on Roger Corman's weird critter movies for SyFy, the flick about a tornado full of sharks is schlock done right, and--no other way to put it--an absolute blast.[4] These bright spots are definitely the exception. That the Asylum was behind Z NATION is one of the reasons I was initially disinterested in the series.

I finally looked into it because I kept coming across internet chatter from the following it has developed, raves about it being a fun little show. The clincher was when a comrade from the Internet Movie Database boards threw some kind words its way and said she hoped I was going to be checking it out (thanks, Helen).

As I sank into the couch and started watching, a lot of the pilot fed my own initial prejudices. A lot of it looked and felt a lot like the Asylum. There was borrowing from THE WALKING DEAD. The central plot of the entire series, in fact, is a straight lift from the previous season of TWD: a "package"--a fellow with a potential cure for zombie-ism--must be delivered to a lab across a long, dangerous stretch of the zombiefied U.S. Initially, the "characters" barely qualify for the word. In the pilot, only Citizen Z (DJ Qualls) and, in particular, Doc (Russell Hodgkinson) bring any real life to the proceedings.[5] While most of the others were just presences, Harold Perrineau was terribly unlikable as Hammond, the needlessly prickish, order-barking soldier assigned to escort the "package." Thankfully, he ends up as Zombie Chow before the end of that first episode and the way ZN handles the events surrounding his demise is what made me, rather unimpressed up to that point, decide to give it another shot and continue to the next one. Our heroes find a cute baby in a wrecked vehicle and suddenly the show finds its sense of humor. Holding the child at arms length as if horrified by it: "Whoa, it's a real live baby--I haven't seen one of these in years... What do I do?" The characters have just shot several zombies but when the baby cries, "Somebody better shut that kid up before he attracts Z's like flies." And another character agrees. There follows the usual argument over what they're going to do with an infant in a zombie apocalypse. Rather than reveling in the angst, TWD-style, though, Hammond dramatically declares "God, I hate moral dilemmas!" Which made me laugh. Shortly after, the proceedings are interrupted when the baby itself abruptly turns into a zombie. Not a helpless baby zombie. No, the hellish tyke gets up out of his carrier like a little gremlin and chases our heroes out of the building, angrily pounding at the door as they slam it in his face. The "moral dilemma" talk then shifts to how we can't possibly leave it running around like that--it would be inhumane. Hammond volunteers to go inside and kill it and instead ends up being eaten by it and another zombie. Z-Baby is too small to even have any teeth but there he is, chewing big, meaty chunks out of Hammond.

As Z NATION continues beyond this initial outing, its efforts at "drama" remain fairly low-grade--nothing of any real seriousness is handled very well. It has little in the way of internal logic--zombies sprint or shuffle at a glacial place depending solely on the momentary needs of the plot; they're driven by a ravenous lust for flesh yet ignore live humans within arms reach in order to follow distant sounds. A lot of it doesn't make a lick of sense--Citizen Z is able to remotely tap into cameras, tvs, phones, radios everywhere in spite of their being no power; the other characters go into a large city like Philadelphia that's swarming with millions of zombies yet are able to walk around the open streets while talking, yelling and even shooting with minimal attempted molestation or even interest by the flesh-lusting corpses. But what ZN does deliver after that initial mixed bag of a pilot is a typically black sense of humor, which takes center stage and becomes its saving grace. This is a show wherein a guy driving a truck pulls over thinking he has a flat and it turns out he has a ground-up zombie stuck in the wheel-well. "Well, I guess that explains the pull to the left." Some of the laughs are as cheap as the production design, others more pricey, a lot of them may not even be intentional, but together they do work, and while they don't make Z NATION great and may not make it any more than disposable entertainment, they do make it a goofy, gory, fast-paced bite of fun. An amusing diversion I'm going to continue following for a while.

--j.

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[1] The soon-to-be-deceased is toasted while a chorus sings "Shall We Gather At The River" and it's possible the entire scenario was meant as a joke but if it was, it really falls flat.

[2] The Asylum was sued over that one and lost.

[3] Exploitation flicks have always knocked off popular Hollywood product. The Asylum takes that practice to a whole 'nother level.

[4] A sequel was recently released; haven't seen it yet.

[5] Thankfully, this improves with the subsequent episodes. Doc finds a worthy foil in "10,000," a cocky young sniper, and Cassandra (Pisay Pao, one of the most beautiful women on television) begins to get some moments (both characters appear in the pilot but are given virtually nothing to do there).

No Sanctuary From THE WALKING DEAD 2.0

Not much to say about tonight's WALKING DEAD season 5 opener.[1] Featuring some very welcome brutality and ugliness, it was a very solid episode--by TWD standards, outright great.

There were a few problems. The exposition between Carol and Tasha Yar was very poorly executed--Carol is on a rescue mission where every second may count and she stops right in the middle of it to listen to Yar fill her in on the backstory of those at Terminus. Rick wanted to go back and kill the rest of the Terminus gang but everyone else balked, ham-handedly setting this up as something that will return to bite the group in the future.

My major regret regarding "No Sanctuary" is about something really obvious that the writers didn't quite sew up. The episode is bookended by flashbacks showing what happened to the Terminusians in the past, the subject of that ill-placed exposition. Their story is that a group with guns once took over the Terminus and raped and brutalized them, but they were eventually able to take it back. And then, of course, they became monsters themselves, going so far as to take up cannibalism, mirroring the living dead monsters outside. In the flashbacks, their conquerors are raping women, and we hear the victims screaming in the distance. Back in the present, one of the same women chosen for rape is, at one point, shot by Rick, and we see zombies devouring her in a moment very reminiscent of a rape, as her screams echo those we heard in the flashback earlier. There are, in fact, multiple zombie attacks on women in the "present-day" portions of the ep, and the staging always echoes rape. A stronger association between all of this would have been welcome--I suspect the point will be lost on most TWD watchers--but it would be stupid to complain; this kind of complex, multi-layered, even--gasp--subtle storytelling is light-years ahead of anything TWD has ever managed. Considering the source, I was very impressed. All of this brings me to my regret though. The story of the Terminusians is, in part, a cautionary one, a glimpse of the depths of barbarism to which people can descend in such trying circumstances unless there is serious commitment to retaining their humanity. In the course of tonight's ep, Rick and co. free one of the prisoners the Terminusians had taken, probably a remnant of the renegade band that had captured the complex and had so tormented them. As he's released, he dances around maniacally changing "we're all just alike now!" When the Terminusians captured Rick and co. at the end of season 4, Rick's final line, after he and the others had been locked in a train car, was something like "they don't know who they're screwing with." In the final flashback showing the tormented Terminusians also confined to a train car--maybe even the same one--their final line (and the one that closes out the ep) should have also been, "They don't know who they're screwing with." That would have been as good an ending as it could have had.

While this was definitely one of the best episodes of TWD ever produced one would like to receive it as an avatar of things to come, some caution is advisable. Last season also began with two great eps, also among the best TWD, and it still fell back on the bad old Mazzara habits as it went along, becoming very uneven. Hope for the best, I suppose.

--j.

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[1] My initial comments were maybe a bit too brief, so I've expanded them slightly.

ADDENDUM (13 Oct., 2014) - Lebeau points out something really obvious--this ep should have been the season 4 ender. It's what half of season 4 built toward, and everything about it would have worked better as a finale. In any event, this quick disposal of the Terminus storyline is a tribute to the Gimple Gang too and another example of how far TWD has come. Is there any doubt that, if Glen Mazzara was still showrunner, the same story we got from this one episode would have been made to fill more than 8 and would have concluded only after the mid-season break? If then?

It's WALKING DEAD Time Yet Again

One of the most popular items on this blog is a piece I wrote nearly 2 1/2 years ago regarding timeline issues with THE WALKING DEAD. It ended up being updated so much that the appended material was significantly longer than the initial article, and TWD's continued problems in this vein eventually spawned a sequel. Since TWD's sophomore year, a new season has always been accompanied by the release of a series of webisodes, and season 4, concluded earlier this year, offered up a three-parter entitled "The Oath" which touches on some of the timeline issues I outlined in those previous articles. It must be acknowledged, of course, that webisodes are generally not considered canonical, which may render this a pointless exercise, but an ongoing discussion over on the "Walking Dead" board at the Internet Movie Database has conspired with a rather slow Sunday afternoon and a shortage of content for the blog of late to entice me to hash out the matter here.

In the "Walking Dead" comic, Rick, after being shot, was in a coma for about four weeks. Frank Darabont's TWD pilot film virtually replicates the first few issues of the comic--it's about as close an adaptation as one ever sees--and when it was written, this is probably the amount of time the creators had in mind for how long Rick spent in a coma. As covered in my original article, both Glen Mazzara, the TV showrunner for season 2 and 3, and Robert Kirkman, creator of the comic and listed as an "executive producer" of the series, said Rick's coma had lasted "3-4 weeks."

Here's where things get tricky.

In the comic, Lori, Carl and Shane packed up and left for Atlanta about a week or so before the hospital fell. When creating the TV pilot, it was probably Darabont's original intention to replicate this. The pilot suggests the survivors in the camp outside Atlanta where Lori and co. landed have been there for a while. There's a scene in which Lori says "I've been saying for a week we ought to put up signs" on the freeways going into the city to warn people. Even allowing for some hyperbole, that does imply they've been at the camp something near a week or more, at least. The series has also repeatedly implied the Lori/Shane affair, which only began after Lori believed Rick had died, had been going on for at least a while, not just some quick thing of a day or two.

And all of this would have worked if they had left for Atlanta a week or so before the hospital fell, but the writers then came along and created a flashback scene in the 6th episode that placed Shane at the hospital at the very moment it was being overrun. It is, of course, impossible that Rick slept in an untended coma for a week or more after this. He was in a sealed room without air-conditioning in the midst of the Georgia Summer--he'd be dead from loss of liquid in 2 or 3 days and virtually unable to move from same before that. There's no more room in the timeline. Rick had to awaken within a few hours of the hospital's fall, a day at the absolute most. He went home, met and spent the night with Morgan, then went to Atlanta the next day and was reunited with his family.

And there are other problems. The series establishes that the entire zombie apocalypse has happened while Rick was asleep. He knows nothing of it. Morgan has to walk him through what's happened. So when did it start? The clues have been all over the board. Rick is, as noted, supposed to have been in his coma for 3-4 weeks, but Morgan tells Rick "[The] gas line's been down for maybe a month," implying the zombie problem had been going on longer than that.[1] Three days after Rick awakens, the scientist Jenner at the CDC records a video log stating it had been 6 1/2 months since zombie-ism had appeared and been identified and 63 days since it went global. Seven days after Rick awakens--5 weeks, at the most, since he was shot--he and the other survivors encounter a traffic snarl made up of cars full of mummified corpses, dried up husks that would have required months to degrade to such a state. And so on. Nothing can be made to match anything else.

These problems have been outlined, argued over, wrung out at great length across the internet. I've written about them for years, and my own observations have traveled far and wide. Having far too much time on my hands a few years ago, I fought a series of pitched battles over them with TWD apologists, battles that became legendary. As "legendary" as something can get on the IMDb's "Walking Dead" board anyway.

My most persistent critic--or, more to the point, TWD's most uncritical apologist--was, throughout those little wars, perpetually pestering me with the notion that Rick could have had a "mystery caretaker" at the hospital who looked over him after the facility fell. The source of this moronic midrash was, of course, my opponent's own ass. Nothing in the series even suggested it--it was merely his means of trying to get TWD out of the mess its writers had made of it. And while I joke about the "legendary" status achieved by our battles, it seems someone beyond the regular gang of nuts at IMDb may have been paying some attention. In my view, TWD's creators now owe my prolific foe a royalty--"The Oath" webisodes are built around his idea. They tell the story of a lone lady doctor (Gale Macones) who remained at her post at Rick's hospital after its fall. She tells another character it has "been a few months" since the facility was overrun. The implication is that she cared for Rick and therefore a long period elapsed between the fall of the hospital and Rick's awakening. We know Rick comes around after the events in "The Oath" because its last installment provides the origin of the warning-sign painted on the doors of the hospital cafeteria, one of the first things Rick sees after he awakens.

If this is to be accepted as canonical, it only creates more problems.

We know Rick was in the hospital for some time before it was overrun. Shane brought him flowers at some point. In the flashback wherein Shane tries to remove him, still comatose, from the facility, he's sporting maybe 2 weeks growth of beard. While the hospital was fully operational, Rick would have been regularly shaved; the beard growth implies the increasing chaos of the zombie uprising has led to some neglect when it comes to such non-essentials.[2] When he awakens, though, he's sporting the same growth of beard. Acknowledging the absolute impossibility of Rick remaining in a coma absent food and water for anywhere near long enough to grow that much beard, are we to accept that he'd remained in a coma for months under Dr. Macones' care and that she'd been regularly shaving him for all that time but had inexplicably stopped doing so about two weeks prior to his awakening while continuing to otherwise care for him so that, by some mad coincidence, he could grow exactly the same length of beard for his awakening that he had when the hospital was overrun?

The idea is as bad as that sentence.[3]

It is, of course, entirely impossible that Rick had been in a coma for "a few months," as Dr. Macones would have it (and that's "a few months" plus however long he was there before the hospital fell). The idea he would have been in a coma for more than 6 1/2 months, as Jenner would have it, is a non-starter. Apologists for the series have, based on nothing, suggested zombie-ism could have somehow been kept secret after it first appeared, only becoming known to most of the world when it "went global," as Jenner put it, but that strains credulity beyond all reason, and when it comes to Rick, even a coma of 2+ months post-"global" is entirely out of the question. Dr. Macones' "a few months" implies three or more, and is, likewise, impossible. When Rick awakened, his wound was still open and his bandage "rank" (Morgan's description). He had to continue to keep it covered right into season 2. This suggests he'd been asleep for less than 2 weeks. Had he been out for four, the wound would have been closed and mostly healed, as it was in the comic, so even buying the 3-4 week coma requires viewers to grant some major leeway. If he'd been asleep for over 2 months, the wound would be closed, healed and not even a factor. And it wouldn't need to be because after 2 months, Rick would have been a dried-up stick, showing massive weight-loss, sores, and he would have been unable to even get out of bed on his own, much less walk and perform so complex a physical task as riding a bicycle (which he does in the pilot). Rick's condition when he awakens absolutely precludes a total hospital stay of any more than a few weeks.

The first rule of holes is that, when stuck in one, stop digging. It's a rule the creators of TWD should, at some point, start to heed.

--j.

---

[1] If it was Darabont's intention to have Rick's coma be about four weeks, as in the comic, it's possible this was lost in the scripting shuffle at some point, as has often happened with TWD.

[2] When, in "18 Miles Out," Shane explains how the zombie outbreak began, he says it happened, from the first stories in the press to a dire situation, in about 2 weeks, which suits that 2 weeks of beard just fine. And entirely coincidentally.

[3] When Rick awakened in the pilot, there was a gurney against the door of his room. The season 1 flashback shows Shane putting it there, so apparently Dr. Macones also made a regular (and utterly inexplicable) practice of removing then replacing it too.

Revisiting BATMAN BEGINS And Ends

Shared in various internet forums, my article on "Comic Book Movies & What Ails 'Em" drew a variety of responses. One item of marginal significance to the overall piece that nevertheless persistently elicited a strong reaction was my identification of BATMAN BEGINS as one of the stinkers in the current comic movie boom. This wasn't any surprise, of course. The cult of the Christopher Nolan bat-flicks has always been strong and I've been the subject of its criticism ever since I first suggested that the original film is significantly less than the greatest thing since sliced bread and that its director doesn't walk on water. Every time I've ever raised the issue I've gotten pushback and looking over it now, my original article on BATMAN BEGINS is rather sketchy, more like a series of impressions of the film assembled immediately after having watched it the first time. I've seen it again since then. The subsequent viewing only hardened my initial impression of it--I think I was originally too kind to it. I've also seen most of the third Nolan bat-flick, which is even worse than BEGINS.[1] The reaction to the comic movie article seems an opportune moment to revisit and expand upon my original evaluation.

Adam West's uber-campy '60s television Batman casts a very long shadow over both the character and comic-based productions in general. Its popularity catapulted it from an amusingly stupid diversion to a thing that, in far too many quarters, defined a screen adaptation of a comic book as some cheap, way-over-the-top, insultingly stupid piece of shit that was not to be treated seriously as drama or, indeed, regarded as anything more than dumb, shallow, entirely disposable fun for those who find such things fun--a coffin-shaped box for the genre. Even the appearance, years later, of quality items like SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE and the INCREDIBLE HULK tv series couldn't exorcise this particular demon, which stood as an obstacle to quality comic adaptations--to comic adaptations, period--for decades and in fact continues to haunt them to this day.

The Batman was particularly haunted by it. Tim Burton's BATMAN (1989), which was based on the original Golden Age comics, was very good, still the definitive live-action treatment of the character, but the franchise it touched off immediately collapsed into full-blown, full groan Adam West-ism with BATMAN RETURNS and never looked back. Every entry went further in this direction than the last, every entry was far worse than the last. I've always believed a lot of the accolades poured over BATMAN BEGINS were a consequence of its moving away from this. It didn't quite move as far from it as its fans pretend though.

Conceptually speaking, Marvel's major characters have always been much stronger than those of DC Comics. The Batman is the exception. As a child, Bruce Wayne sees his parents gunned down by a mugger in a bad section of town and from that moment forward dedicates his life to an endless crusade against crime. He is the avatar of vengeance--crime had created what would become its greatest scourge. His years to adulthood are spent singlemindedly honing his mind and body to the task. To strike fear into his enemies, he becomes a bat and the bat, rather than Bruce Wayne, is his true identity. With the fortune inherited from his parents, he launches his private war. From here, his tale takes a new turn. Over the years, he encounters an entire rogue's gallery of villains who are like twisted reflections of himself, also obsessively devoted to making over the world in their own image. The question is raised as to how much their appearances are a consequence of his own. It's simple and brilliant; a powerful modern myth and a goldmine for any storyteller.[2]

And, of course, BATMAN BEGINS pretty much abandons all of it. The film is as entirely uninterested in and unengaged with the source material as was the later (and also dreadful) MAN OF STEEL. BEGINS was released after the first two SPIDER-MAN films had become successful and it tried to ape those pictures by making Bruce himself somewhat responsible for his parents' death and having him blame himself rather than the criminal element. Instead of dedicating his life to a crusade, Bruce seems to entirely waste his youth. He's directionless, overly emotional and goofs off enough to be kicked out of half a dozen colleges. In the comics, the murderer of his parents was unknown until years into his crusade as the Batman, which was a significant part of the myth--the murderer's anonymity meant that crime, rather than just a man, had killed them. In BEGINS, the killer--a hood named Joe Chill--is apprehended immediately after the murder and sent to prison. He's killed in a mob hit when Bruce is 23, at a time before Bruce has even started down the path that will lead him to becoming the Batman. The film's central character is entirely severed from his origin myth by that point--it's a completely different story about a completely different character, not the Batman. For five years, Bruce takes to wandering around the world, lost and without purpose, studying crime and "fear" for reasons he, himself, says he doesn't even understand. In my original piece, I wrote that the babbling about "fear" never comes across as overly pretentious; upon rewatch, I feel as if I understated the pretension factor, but my real objection to it, then as now, was that it's used to fill the vacuum created by abandoning the character's backstory. If one can come up with something better, one can sort of justify this kind of thing. The creators of BEGINS couldn't come up with anything better--they just abandoned the story of the Batman and threw out a cloud of pretentious squid's ink to try to cover that fact. The result is a new "Batman" with no core, lost in a production as unfocused as the character.

In the film, the nomadic Bruce is eventually recruited into the League of Shadows, a secret society of ninja with a hazy anti-city ideology headed by the mysterious Ra's Al Ghul. He spends two years in extremely rigorous training with the League without, apparently, ever even bothering to ask what the League is all about. His time with it abruptly ends when the man he takes to be Ra's Al Ghul looks him in the face and says the order's goal is to "destroy" Gotham and other cities. The reason offered is that cities are "corrupt," which is, of course, no real motive at all. The real reason is because those in the League are the designated villains in the film and designated villains need something villainous to do, whether it makes any sense or not. Delivered deadpan, this big "reveal"--if it can be called that--is the sort of thing one immediately expects to be followed by one of the dramatic "shock" music cues from the old Adam West Batman. Upon first watch, I laughed and shook my head in utter disbelief that the film had gone in this direction. It didn't improve upon rewatch.

As with a lot of old films of camp value, BEGINS wasn't in on the joke--it presented that moment as something we're supposed to take entirely seriously. In explaining the film before its release, Nolan was ever so serious about how ever so serious his movie was to be. From Variety (8 Feb., 2004):

"Batman will be more realistic and less cartoonish. There are no campy villains... Humanity and realism, says Nolan, is the crux of the new pic. 'The world of Batman is that of grounded reality,' he says... 'Ours will be a recognizable, contemporary reality against which an extraordinary heroic figure arises.'"

After the film's release, this sentiment was dutifully picked up and parroted by many reviewers (which can't help but make one wonder if they ever even saw the picture). Holding to this as a goal is another way in which Nolan's project was fundamentally misguided and had the director rigorously pursued that path one could legitimately say it was yet another way in which the film is fundamentally at odds with the source material. The Batman is a blatantly romantic fantasy awash in heaping helpings of glorious expressionism. What Nolan actually did, though, was, as I noted in my original review, try to paste together two diametrically opposed strains of story, great and solidly grounded Batman material like Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" and the sort of shallow, overcooked and silly kid's stuff one got from DC comics--and Adam West Batman--decades ago. The two destroy one another; every element of the latter in the film is ludicrous, yet it's treated with the same humorless gravity as the rest of the story.

"Year One" had presented a dark and utterly corrupt Gotham. Throughout, there was the theme that this was a town that badly needed a Batman. In its first act, BEGINS taps into that again and again. The film is missing a Bruce that needs to be a Batman though. After leaving the League, Bruce doesn't really have any reason for becoming the Batman. Rather than following an urgent psychological need to wage a war on crime after a childhood trauma led to a lifetime spent preparing for it, BEGINS' Bruce takes up the fight idealistically, simply deciding Gotham needs him. That this radical change renders extraneous and irrelevant everything leading up to that point never seemed to occur to the filmmakers. Following "Year One" and "The Long Halloween" (another tale of the early Batman), the film sets up Carmine "The Roman" Falcone as Gotham's biggest crime boss, a guy with a massive criminal empire, with his fingers in every crooked pie and protected on all sides by corrupt officialdom. Invincible to everyone but a costumed vigilante who doesn't play by the rules. Unfortunately, having spent a lot of time setting up Falcone in this way, the film immediately disposes of him. The Batman roughs up some thugs (in an exceptionally poorly directed action sequence),[3] chains up Falcone, hands over to officialdom some evidence that wouldn't be admissible in any court in the U.S., and that's the end of the Roman. It takes only a few minutes of screentime. So much for Gotham's profound corruption and its need for a Batman.

This, of course, entirely discredits what little motive there was behind the big villain plot, to which the film then returns. Gotham was said to be irretrievably corrupt, yet the Batman decimates its central crime figure with near-effortless ease (Falcone is only ever seen again in one brief scene). As that central villain plot plays out, it proves to be an incredibly elaborate, impossible, completely ridiculous motive-free scheme--a meaner, more dour version of the sorts of things the giggling no-goodniks of the Adam West Batman used to do twice a week.

Ra's Al Ghul's plan to "destroy" Gotham is to fill the city's water supply with a chemical that, whenever vaporized, drives people insane and makes them kill one another. He isn't introducing it by poisoning the reservoirs; he's having it poured from drums into a pipe leading into the city. No, that's not a joke. Not an intentional one, that is. His henchmen have been pouring it in for weeks. To note the obvious, water in such a system doesn't sit in a pipe; it's constantly rushing into the city in the way we're shown because it's being used. New York, the comic model for Gotham, uses a billion gallons of water a day. Even if some idiot could introduce enough of a chemical into the system in this way to matter--and he couldn't--everyone who has a hot shower or who boils water should have been going insane for weeks. To activate the chemical, which has magically stayed in the lines all that time, the villains have stolen a microwave device that, when placed on a hijacked train, will, we're told, vaporize the city's entire water supply. No one apparently informed BEGINS' creators what makes up most of the human body. No one apparently informed Ra's Al Ghul that the easiest way to destroy a city would be to simply set off a big bomb or a few big bombs.

BEGINS, like so many other comic adaptations, suffers from epic-itis. The Batman has been through as many versions and permutations as any character in comics but while in various forms he's certainly tackled his share of population-threatening menaces, his finest moments tend to come as a street-level crimefighter. It's hardwired into the character by virtue of his origin and reinforced by most of his rogue's gallery. In that respect--as in so many other respects--the BEGINS project was fundamentally at odds with the nature of the character. The Batman isn't just some ninja. He's a scientist, a criminologist, a master detective, among the many core facets of the character entirely excluded from BEGINS. To the others in his world, he's a very mysterious figure, which is impossible to portray on film if, as happens with BEGINS, we're constantly following his every move, in on his every trick. And for all the talk of "fear" in BEGINS, we're never allowed any sense that the criminal underworld ever develops any real fear of him, the point of his becoming a bat in the first place.[4]

As a Batman film, BEGINS is an utter failure. As a standalone film, it's insultingly idiotic. Like the event that makes up its climax, it's a train-wreck. Like MAN OF STEEL, it's a film whose creators had no real interest in the character or his world and who didn't show the material any respect. And like train-wrecks, MAN OF STEEL and most adaptations-in-name-only, it sucks.

--j.

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[1] I still haven't seen THE DARK KNIGHT, the most hyped film of the run. The first film left me with no desire to see it, and the third did absolutely nothing to spur my interest either.

[2] It must be said that DC Comics, the Batman's owners, have often been terrible stewards of this myth. In the Batman's earliest days, he was entirely unconcerned with preserving the lives of the scum with which he tangled. As his primary readers were children, DC editorially imposed a mandate that the character wouldn't kill anyone anymore (the same as happened with Superman). Initially, this was carried out by simply not putting the character in a position where such a thing was necessary. Later writers, unfortunately, grafted the no-killing parameter on to the personality of the character itself, which simply can't be done in any logical manner. Worse, they made the Batman very self-righteous about this, then made a regular practice of rubbing readers' noses in it in such a way as to make a joke of the character. Several years ago, there was a story in "Action Comics" (#719, "Hazard's Choice") about the Joker poisoning Lois Lane. She's dying. Superman and Batman go to see the Joker and ask how they can save her and he tells them that they can inject him with a chemical that will mix with one already in his blood and provide an antidote. The rub? Injecting him will kill him. Back in the good ol' days of the early Golden Age, the only question that would arise next is whether the two of them would have injected the Joker before they killed him. The meek, pathetic characters DC has made of them, though, won't even consider it--they simply slink away, returning to Metropolis to watch Lois (Superman's wife at the time) slowly die while mouthing self-righteous platitudes. The writer then chose a cop-out ending wherein the Joker's joke was that the poison wouldn't kill Lois after all, but even that helps make the point. Characters who think that decision amounts to a "moral" one are pathetic and useless, and bereft of any real sense of morality.

A Batman who, when placed in such situations, becomes a principled advocate of the health-and-safety-at-all-costs of mass-murdering animals like the Joker and self-righteously denounces anyone who doesn't share his enthusiasm for their continued-existence-at-all-costs--and this happens all the time in the books--is violating one of the most basic rules of the archetype. Given the circumstances of his creation, it's literally impossible to imagine the Batman making the argument that the lives of Thomas and Martha Wayne (his parents) are no more valuable than that of the thug who shot them down in cold blood. If he really believed that, he wouldn't be the Batman. Yet that's exactly the argument his writers routinely have him make.

[3] All of the action sequences in the film are poorly shot.

[4] Underscoring the terribly unfocused nature of the production, the film, as noted, spends a great deal of time on the theme of "fear," includes the Scarecrow, a villain primarily associated with fear, then does basically nothing with him. He's given almost no screentime and no opportunity to do much of anything.