The Walking Dead - Review

“You can breathe, you can blink, you can cry. Hell, you're all gonna be doing that.” – A review of The Walking Dead. 

I’ve never been a huge fan of zombie media. I often find it cheap, easy horror, with little thought to it. Imagine my surprise then when I started The Walking Dead and I didn’t just like it – I loved it. I quote Rick Grimes daily, and I even once cosplayed as Negan at a comic con.

Based on a comic book series, The Walking Dead began in 2010, spanned eleven seasons and became nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. The show follows a set of survivors who are initially led by Rick Grimes, a former sheriff’s deputy, as they try to survive a world which has been devastated by zombies known as “walkers”. From farms to devastated cities, prisons and even self-contained communities, the show follows the group through a bleak world as they try to survive against living and dead foes.

Rick is one of my favourite protagonists ever. He’s decent, trying to live by his own moral code even at the end of the world, he’s protective of those he loves, has a true sense of responsibility and he’s a natural born leader. Over the course of the show, Rick slowly transforms from a perhaps naïve but hopeful leader into a much more cynical survivor, echoing the realities of the world he is surviving in. The character development in The Walking Dead is genuinely brilliant; Daryl, Carol and Michonne all also grow and develop over time. This is the type of show, however, where caution is to be advised; if you fall in love with a character, prepare yourself for heartbreak.

Of course, you can’t have the good without the bad, so enter the villains of The Walking Dead. Often, the threats Rick and his group face doesn’t come from walkers but from other survivors, such as the genuinely chilling Governor. My favourite of all the villains in The Walking Dead is, I think unsurprisingly, the ruthless Negan, a man who is capable of the most heinous crimes but also once made Rick’s son spaghetti. What can I say, a good villain is complicated.

It's fair to say the messaging is quite obvious – the living are even more dangerous than the undead. Something I really love about the villains of the show though is that they don’t just serve as obstacles or plot devices. Each villain has their own, often devastating, backstory, as well as their own motives. They’re living in a near dead world and doing what they feel they must to survive and thrive, and they force Rick and his group to take a long, hard look at their own moral boundaries. The tension and drama between surviving groups makes for truly fun, compelling, and often heartbreaking viewing, which all in all makes for properly addictive entertainment.

Sure, The Walking Dead is about walkers and survival, but it’s also about more than that. It’s about humanity. The Walking Dead forces you to look at humanity critically, examining its capacity for kindness and cruelty, looking at what people will do in the name of survival, and what happens when innocence is lost.

It truly pains me to say that I didn’t love The Walking Dead all the way through until the end. Without spoiling anything, there was a moment for me which felt like the perfect moment for a villain to die, a moment of poetic justice which would have been so satisfying….and then it just didn’t happen. Instead, the storyline began to drag, and I’d started to fall out of love with the show long before my favourite characters started vanishing.

I don’t mind the occasional shocking character death – I am a Game of Thrones fan, after all – but I do feel like The Walking Dead occasionally relied way too heavily on shock value which started to become somewhat repetitive.

These are minor criticisms, though. I really did love The Walking Dead, and I think I always will. I love the drama, the horror, and the atmosphere. I love the instantly recognisable music, and I love the writing. The Walking Dead serves as a reminder that whatever is going on in the world, you can decide to be a good person. After all, “the world we knew is gone, but keeping our humanity? That's a choice.”

Written by Tam Page

Posted by Mr. Tomney

Share Article: