[Editors' Note: Check out Part I of the TVGA Roudtable conversation about The Walking Dead here.]
Dear everybody,
I totally agree that this show was amazing. It's been almost two whole days since I watched it, and I keep getting these lingering creepy feelings. Since I'm also reading a zombie-themed book right now, this is not surprising, but it's not the book I'm thinking of: it's the show and its gorgeous treatement of really gross things. Is it weird to say it's lovingly done? But it is. The camera lingers on the dead bodies and the not-quite-dead bodies as much as it lingers on the living ones. The use of silence is perfect -- when the show was recording, I was in the other room finishing up dayjob work, and I could only hear gunshots for the most of it. In a world mostly devoid of people, the silence really would be deafening, a force of nature, an object in every space, and that's how it was depicted and used here.
Most of the episode reminded me of that beautiful first half of 28 Days Later, when the tension is ramping up and there's no one around. It was the best part of the movie. Have you ever been out after a hurricane, when most people are still locked away where it's safe? Or out very early in the morning when the late people have gone to bed and the early people haven't gotten up yet? It was like that, only creepier. Much, much creepier. The creepiness was pervasive; even things that seemed normal and should have been less tense were saturated with it. Through the whole watching, I kept thinking "Oh God, what horrible thing is going to happen next??" with a mix of real fear and morbid anticipation... But the parts that lingered with me were the parts that were because of the zombies, not the zombies themselves: The farmer and his wife, who killed themselves before they could be turned. A horse alone in a field. That whole line of cars, empty and abandoned, leaving Atlanta, and not a single one going toward it. The way the bodies wrapped up outside the hospital started in orderly lines, and became more and more random, more of a pile, as the camera zoomed out. Chilling, in the best way.
The hopelessness hasn't reached the level of, say, The Road, but it's there, and it's something they all have to deal with, which makes for great drama as they all find their own ways to handle and work around and get past it. Hopelessness is one of the hardest things to combat; zombies seem easy in comparison.
And the zombis! As noted in the previous Roundtable post, the effects are fantastic. They look expensive, cinematic -- and that's what we'd expect from a movie channel. And they're handled in such a way that there's little glimmers of their previous lives, echoes of their conscious minds in some of them. The little girl picks up a stuffed animal and carries it around. The mother creeps up on the porch and tries to open the door. That one in Atlanta looks like he's trying to figure out a plan. How far will that idea go? Will they have to face the fact that zombies remember who they were? Will zombies have an inner life? Are they just horrible because the reality of what they are drives them mad because they can remember but can't control it? It's too soon to say, but I, for one, really want to see how it goes.
From the cold open to the cliffhanger end, the whole show pulled no punches. Shooting a little girl in the head? No problem. eating a living horse with your bare, zombie-fied hands? This show can handle it. And I hope it stays that way. Cable TV can get away with not pulling punches, and a zombie show needs to be brutal. Deadly, visciously, terrifyingly brutal. Because that's what it would really be like. The reality of this show makes it sort of like watching the Colony: we can learn from what these basically ordinary people have to do to survive. We can ask the creepy questions-- could I kill the love of my life, whether before or after they've become zombiefied? Could I kill myself? Could I keep going and keep hoping and keep fighting? And, you know, if anything like this actually happens, we'd all now have a frame of reference to base our own survival on.
Six episodes seems so short, but cable TV frequently has short seasons, and it's a proven way to literally leave people wanting more. Even if there's nothing groundshattering to the overall mythos and zombie lore, it's being told brilliantly. It's a clear, dark, scary, violent look at how the whole thing works. It's relentlessly normal people stuck in this horrible nightmare. The quality of the storytelling, if it holds up, might be enough to take it to the top of the zombie-story charts. I'm already sold.
Samantha
