The Walking Dead and The Fascination With Societal Breakdown

So, I had been reading headlines that a religious group of Christians were convinced that the end of the world wasn’t only nigh but that it was yesterday, Wednesday, October 7th, 2015. Well yesterday came and went and for the majority of the population of the world they didn’t experience anything detrimental to their way of life. The world didn’t end as society powers on. Starbucks is still packed with patrons for their daily caffeine fix, the sun went down and came up this morning and nothing happened. While I won’t comment on the validity of the group of individuals who believed this was true I can however say that it just goes to show you that everyone is obsessed with the end of the world no matter who they are. AMC in celebration of their upcoming 6th season of The Walking Dead is giving everyone who hasn’t seen the show a chance to catch up, while established fans can experience the story from the beginning by running a marathon of episodes form the first to the most recent leading up to the premiere this coming Sunday. No better way to celebrate the month of ghouls and goblins than a zombie fueled apocalypse by binge watching The Walking Dead, right?

Okay, admittedly I can’t state that it’s a fact that everybody is a fan of the series. I can’t assume either that if they are that I know what all the reasons are. Some people like the internal drama and character development, there’s plenty of that. Maybe for some it’s the zombies, there’s plenty of those too. I do know for me that while yes I have some emotional involvement in the entertainment factor of both the character evolution and the zombies it’s the fascination I have with a post apocalyptic world. To me the zombies represent a danger in a changing society outside the story that make the series relatable. This absolute distrust that the “walkers” are anything more than the undead with an obsession for an insatiable appetite for the flesh of the living. That veil thinned very quickly after Season 2 when Hershel was forced to come to terms that the dead weren’t people anymore and is until then seemingly unfazed by the breakdown of the world around him and the reality of the dangers ahead. His farm was almost pristine while a big city like Atlanta is absolutely destroyed and abandoned.  Does it seem like a familiar calling with the way the public lacks any trust in our government, the way the characters in the story interact with other survivors outside the group seems to mimic well the way people seem to interact with strangers in our society in more ways than not. There is a  very distrusting tone that’s hard to argue.

While I will do my best to stay away from sounding like I am insinuating that the series which is purely entertainment is predicting a possible future for the rest of us minus the zombies, when even though one who is looking for such correlations can find them easily that this isn’t about that.

It’s hard to look at the way the world is, the way the country is and remain optimistic and patriotic or that we can all get along and world peace is attainable. I see many public opinions regarding human rights and politics that make me want to smack myself in the face with a cast iron skillet. It’s easily frustrating to see so many well spoken individuals put together thoughts so eloquently and still sound so misinformed and horribly outdated at the same time. What does all that mean in the face of society post apocalypse?

During Season 1 we were introduced to good ol’ redneck Merle. A stereotypical backwoods Georgian Southerner as racist as they come. Merle was not a favorite from the beginning but you do get to see a human side of him. A survivor with experience in the wilderness, was disconnected with the main group of the story and who chopped off his own hand and reemerged an enforcer in Season 3 for The Governor at Woodbury. His reconnection with little brother and fan favorite Daryl said a lot about what it means to be human even for someone as socially misguided as he is. The point made is that his way of life was something he took with him into the breakdown of society after the sudden apocalypse but had to eventually be quelled because of the necessity to survive. None of what he was mattered when it came to saving himself. I’m sure he was still as stereotypically racist as they come though.

My biggest take away with this is in The Walking Dead, Shane, Rick’s partner in the Sherriff’s Department before the apocalypse and later Rick’s wife Laurie’s lover after the apocalypse is portrayed as a villain. Rick survived came back and reclaimed his family and became the unspoken leader of the group. You love to hate Shane and hate to love how much sense he makes. He doesn’t believe the farm is any safer than being out on the road, that Hershel is dangerously misguided believing the walkers are still people. He uses his police training to rationalize the fact that missing little Sophia is more than likely a lunch for a zombie or worse where nobody else listens to him that the search puts the group in further danger. He was so right and you hated it. He was hot headed and did things that he wouldn’t normally do like sacrificing Otis at the school in Season 2 to make it back to the farmhouse to get the supplies needed to save Carl’s life. The one thing holding him together was his love for Laurie and his wanting to be a father figure to Carl and how all of that was interrupted when Rick seemingly rose from the dead, undead! Talk about one hell of an internal conflict. But he’s rash and headstrong and acts first and violently while Rick is more calculated with one foot in the pre apocalypse and the other in reality and trying to make sense of it all. There is no order in this apocalypse, there is simply no society. Your please and thank you is just meaningless banter at this point and Shane is willing to make more difficult and rash decisions to keep the group safe while Rick has other less violent and more civilized ideas and when Shane took it upon himself to lure his once bestfriend and partner out into a field and try to kill him, while wrong was only done with the intention of trying to keep the group safe the way he envisions safety is a clear example of desperation for survival because to him Rick is a threat and soft in a hardened world. He does have a little more experience in this world than Rick does.

Delve a little deeper into character development and evolution in post apocalyptic society here and realize that as soon as Rick kills Shane, he becomes Shane in the sense that he went form a no killing the living policy to killing two guys in a bar that threaten the safety of the group at the farmhouse but because we thought so rash of Shane and his villainous tone it seemed like an easy transition arguing it had to be done to keep his family and the group safe. It wasn’t an instant transition either. The biggest shock was Rick putting the bullet in the head of Sophia as she walks out of the barn now a zombie with no hesitation. I know what some of you fans are thinking, but didn’t Laurie really pit them against one another constantly leading Shane on from the sideline with her loyalty to Rick one minute and egging Shane on the next? Yes, but that to me is another example of imitating a life pre apocalypse in a world where none of this should matter anymore. If you think about the grand scheme of things she got into Rick’s head telling him Shane was a danger to her and the group by not letting go of their affair and insisting her baby was his but not telling Rick she was the one that convinced Shane to stay with the group. You would think that people rising form the dead to eat the living would make stringing along your side piece irrelevant but I think being on the farm away from the chaos of reality a bit is messing with their priorities a little. That all of course gets shattered when the cold hard truth comes with Carl putting a bullet in walker Shane’s head after coming back from the dead quickly after Rick stabbed him. Keeping in mind that Jenner during the end of season one tells the group that time frames of reanimation vary from three minutes to eight hours also verifying what he whispered to Rick before the group evacuated the CDC building’s explosion and he later admits to the group in the beginning of Season 3 that it doesn’t matter how you die everyone is infected and you become one of the walkers regardless of whether or not you were bitten by one. That event and the sound of the shot Carl fired brings a herd of zombies in route to the farmhouse and that’s when all hell breaks loose and the last bit of civilization this group was able to hold onto is slipping away with the loss of people and the farmhouse. With Laurie being pregnant and the group starting to question Rick’s leadership qualities he makes it abundantly clear that he is very well aware of the way the world is now and those who want to leave can but staying with him is not a matter of democracy anymore.

Shelter is grouped in the first tier on the pyramid of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and without it exposed to the elements and the walkers the group is in danger and rightfully as the leader of the group, Rick’s main focus above all else is to get them shelter. When they overcome the trials faced when taking refuge in the prison with Hershel having a leg amputated to stop the infection after being bit when raiding the cell blocks and the inmate survivors two of whom are violent and challenging the group it’s hard not to feel for Laurie in Season 3’s second episode Sick, when Rick and Laurie are talking on the fenced catwalk outside between buildings and he gives his gratitude for helping to keep Hershel alive when he stopped breathing and he put his hand on her shoulder and after he walks away she puts her head on her shoulder where his hand was. I mean that’s a powerful scene in itself because it’s part of the desire for normalcy and society the way it was. It was the break from the struggle to remind us as viewers that these people are still human with human desires for love and affection. Things are obviously strained between Rick and Laurie after Shane died. She admitted her part in the failure of things and their union by claiming to understand she wasn’t the best wife. Rick’s not saying anything said to me that he was clearly also disappointed in the way things ended up but was more focused on other things he saw more important to their survival. That time in gaining access to shelter allowed them to focus on other needs. The only difference is the not accepting of the ways things are and the constant attempting to build society the way they remembered it takes away from the reality they need to face. We saw this in Season 1 where Laurie and Carol attempted to emphasize on education with a little home schooling of Carl and Sophia. There isn’t much of that going forward when the group is in constant survival mode. Fast forward to Season 5 when the group moves into Alexandria and becomes frustrated with how naïve the Alexandrians are to the way the world is and how hard it has been on the group who have already lost so much with the constant moving because they were able to maintain order in the chaos by building walls to protect them form the elements and the walkers. Some are able to adapt and others are not but the notion of peace and civility and the strive for it is a staple in this series. The means to obtain it and direction the characters go for it is another story.

We see the desire to settle into a safe place time and time again throughout the series with the campsite in Season 1, the farm in Season 2, the prison and Woodbury in Seasons 3 and 4 and Terminus and Alexandria in Season 5. The necessity to survive in the face of such a harsh new world with threats from the living and the dead at every turn give this show a fascinating take on what life is like in an uncivilized society. You get the sense of it as the character development brings each character to making more difficult decisions and how each new phase of the story changes them more and more to survivalists and a little more feral and little less civilized. It’s easier to kill off any threats first with no questions where before people were hesitant. We see Rick doing and saying things that strongly contradict how he was portrayed in the beginning. The group has become experts at killing zombies but they aren’t even the biggest threat anymore. Other survivors are now the realest threat to their lives and we saw this with the Governor in Woodbury, and the cannibals of Terminus, the group that Daryl finds himself with after he is separated from Rick and the others and later from Beth, Dawn and her people at the hospital in Atlanta and the wolves of Alexandria.

I posted previously that Fear The Walking Dead was more terrifying because of how the transition from civilized society to apocalypse very quickly gave us a more in-depth look into how rapidly everything you took for granted before like running water and school is obsolete or unattainable in the face of crisis. You can’t seek help from the authorities or the military as the chain of command and order are broken beyond repair. The difference in pace as well for me is the location and the culture which significantly differs from Georgia where The Walking Dead has mainly taken place and now Virginia to Los Angeles where Fear The Walking Dead takes place. I think the larger the population and the closer people are to one another makes destabilization faster than as opposed to areas of smaller populations where people are more spread out. That coupled with differing attitudes and cultures where one society may be a little more laid back and conservative than the other is the reason why things are happening faster in Fear The Walking Dead than it did in The Walking Dead. It took Travis a matter of a few events to rethink his policy on guns for safety in the apocalypse going from refusing to look at one to holding one when they raided the makeshift military hospital in search of Nick and Griselda. He later wasted no time in shooting Liza when she revealed to them that she was going to turn into a zombie after being bitten and that everyone turns when they die. Madison was quicker on board to realize the dangers they were facing than Travis was to accept them when he stopped her from putting a hammer through next door neighbor, and now zombie, Susan’s head. Madison and later Liza’s reiterating that having to kill either of them would break Travis will be interesting to see how that changes him and his view of society.

There have been other portrayals in the media and in film and video games that detail post apocalyptic civilization but to me none that captures the essence of the actual breakdown and transition the way these series do. What can I say I’m a fan.

Why Fear The Walking Dead is More Terrifying Than The Walking Dead

Okay so, I’ve seen a lot of public flack concerning the direction and speed of the companion series to The Walking Dead, Fear The Walking Dead on AMC from the fans. I think we’ve become so addicted to the portrayal of the post apocalyptic fall of society in this series and have come to relate so much to the characters and we’re so used to shit hitting the fan at a moments notice that we forget a new series has to take the right amount of time to introduce the characters and build on their stories. The shock of having to run with the character build as in how The Walking Dead progressed was different for most viewers and catchy. Who is this Rick guy that just woke up from a coma in a hospital, and what happened from the time he was shot in the line of duty as Sheriff to the time we see the first chaotic scenes of abandoned society? The world is less the memory he knew and now more a primitive fight for survival.

In Fear The Walking Dead, as some opinions I have seen beg to differ, they got straight to the point from the first scene. An addict wakes in an abandoned church to the sight of chaos. Though different from the global chaos we see Rick get introduced too, Nick’s setting is limited to his immediate surroundings. Nick sees blood everywhere and a woman who was just not too long ago sleeping next to him now eating the face off of another man and seemingly incoherent as she now has her sights sets on him. Now he’s on a mission to make sense of what he saw at the same time the world is rapidly crumbling around him.

We the viewers know what’s going on so we’re looking for the characters to embody some sense of intense fight negating the flight aspect of sudden crisis. This universe doesn’t know what a zombie is like we do and these characters are just learning about what is happening to these people and to the world. In what should come as no big shock to anybody who’s been watching The Walking Dead since the beginning or caught up since then, at the end of the second season we learned the virus is in everyone, that was the secret Rick learned at the CDC and kept to himself for so long. You don’t become a member of the undead just from a bite like the lore of the zombie tells us. All you have to simply do is die, while the bite of an infected does still certainly mean a death sentence, or undead sentence if you will, and to put lightly everyone will become a walker if not for the double tap to the dome at the right time. We the viewers and fans know this from the five seasons aired but the characters in Fear The Walking Dead are going to have to discover this on a whole other level. We also have to understand that just because the characters we know of in The Walking Dead became privy to this information that not everyone in The Walking Dead series we come across will understand this. Especially if you look to see how distinctly different the residents of Alexandria handle their fates as opposed to our heroes who have battled the rough of an ugly new civilization in place of the world they once knew, filled with threats from not only the reanimated that desire to eat living flesh but also from survivors struggling to control resources. That same conflict comes to rise in the most recent fourth episode of Fear The Walking Dead where we see how much the military has control over the “safe zones” food rations, medicine and mobility. What we don’t know is how much does the military know about what’s happening and why are they targeting non infected citizens outside these militarized safe zones and where are they taking those sick people? If you had to ask me, I can only say that the “hospitals” where they promised the sick treatment are only attempts at controlling the spread of the “infection”, I feel like their actions foreshadow them knowing more about what it is and how it’s spreading to warrant such aggressive behavior.

The point I really mean to drive home here is that with this series, I think some are really missing the point. Yes it’s scary to think of the possibility of going toe to toe with a flesh hungry zombie and meeting the same fate, but we come to the series for entertainment, to indulge in the trials and tribulations of fictional characters in a fictional world overcoming impossible odds. It’s the escape from our own monotonous lives that keeps us coming back week after week. But what Fear The Walking Dead offers us what The Walking Dead doesn’t is the glimpse of possibility. The speed of the breakdown of civilization as we know it and the stages it goes through. (Anyone else see Tobias from the first couple episodes riding this whole thing out other than me by the way?) Some want more carnage and zombies and while yes the zombie apocalypse is the backbone of this universe in Fear The Walking Dead it’s only a fraction of what’s really going on here for right now.

Bottom line is, how prepared are you for the fall of civilization as you know it? There are so many things that make what these characters are experiencing a reality in some cases in current events today in some parts of the world and a great insight to the possibility of what you reading this could endure in the event of a global catastrophe like a natural disaster, or war, or even maybe wide-spread sudden incurable disease. Think about this for a second and I’m not kidding, many government agencies have protocols for this type of societal breakdown. So if they aren’t playing with odds betting against the likelihood of this kind of an apocalypse, should you? No food or water in the ways we manage to gather them, no medicine or other emergency services. How about a world where your neighbor next door is a rival for resources. As soon as communications break down so will the will and patience of the people around you. When information is limited and you have no idea what’s going on other than the gossip your ear has caught, expect to see an influx in paranoia and a great deal of very uncivilized behavior. We live in a society where riots can happen when your favorite sports team has lost… or won a championship, with civil unrest due to protests and political uprisings so there is no reason to see the events of World War Z, Zombieland or Fear The Walking Dead as just entertainment or fiction when it’s so much more of what you will actually pay attention to as opposed to current events and the actual state of our union. I’m also not implying that our current state of affairs is leading us to such a collapse but I won’t deny that there is always a possibility.

In the next breath I am also not saying go out there and become an extreme doomsday prepper, I’m also not saying to not. I’m just simply saying that for me there is a different level of fear in watching Fear The Walking Dead as opposed to its parent series because of how much more real the possibility is of experiencing the same circumstances. I’ve been on the edge of my seat a lot more often in four episodes of this series than I have been in five seasons of The Walking Dead and I am a huge fan.