As I turned on last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, my roommate asked me who the villain was this season. “The flu,” I said.
He gave me a look. "I know," I said. "I know."
Five episodes into the season – and only three more to go before the mid-season finale – and it is frankly amazing how little has happened, and how little it means. Aside from Carol driving off into the sunset (and possibly the Walking Dead spin-off) almost nothing of narrative value has taken place, besides the arrival – and by the end of this episode, seeming cure -- of a disease that is somehow only fatal to people whose names we barely know.
Nor has the forward momentum been sacrificed in the name of character development; aside from Carl and the now-exiled Carol, we’ve seen very little change in our perpetually miserable crew of survivors. Unlike the comic book series, which moved on to greener pastures after the Governor’s siege on the prison, we have returned yet again to the West Georgia Correctional Facility to watch established characters deal with well-established problems in what could barely be called new ways. It’s like the show has progressed to the next level of its video game, where the same enemies with the same abilities attack you in slightly different configurations.
(Actually, that’s a pretty unfair comparison, given that the excellent Walking Dead video game has a far more compelling and engaging story than the show -- one where conflicts and death occur because people make tough choices that have no right answers, not because they continually make unsympathetically stupid decisions.)
The conceit of The Walking Dead has always been that in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, people actually pose a far bigger threat to themselves than the undead ever could. Over and over again, we’ve seen the truth of that; more often than not, the undead aren’t the primary antagonists so much as they are the weapons that people deploy against each other, the lions they toss each other to, the natural disasters they build levees against. Think of the zombies as Noah’s flood, covering the Earth, and the little pockets of survivors as arks that somehow found a way to keep bobbing on the surface. But if you live in leaky boat and refuse to patch the holes, can you really say the water is what kills you?
The unwillingness of the characters to act in their own self-interest has always been an endemic problem of the show, and so many of the deaths in this episode and throughout the season aren’t inevitable tragedies so much as they are systems failures. Zombies don’t kill people; people kill people, by being too stupid to stop them. Take Hershel, who manages to turn the quarantine cell block (Death Row, natch) into the site of even more deaths in this episode, thanks to his insistence that optimism and pragmatism are somehow mutually exclusive.
As we learned from the CDC researcher in Season One, there’s a pretty fluid range where zombie reanimation can take place after death: anywhere from three minutes to eight hours, though it often seems to happen faster. Which is to say that after someone dies, they could turn into a killing machine at any time, with no warning. And yet, whenever someone in quarantine expires from the virulent flu, Hershel takes the time to load the corpse onto a gurney, cover it in a sheet and move it to the other room before stabbing it in head -- sometimes even pausing to have conversations about literature with little girls while the corpse sits behind him like a ticking time bomb. Not only that, but he actually waits for the corpse to turn into a zombie before he stabs it, ensuring that he faces maximum danger in those interactions.
As both Glenn and the doctor point out, this requires energy and human resources at a time when both are in short supply and better allocated elsewhere. And despite an extremely pointed speech from the doctor, who insists that Hershel get it together and start dealing with the epidemic as a triage situation – helping the people who can be helped, preparing for the worst with the rest – Hershel dismisses his basic survival tips (and even more insanely, his guns) so he can focus on the inexplicably contradictory tasks of “holding on” and “not giving up.”
Yes, Hershel has decided to fend off the plagues both new and old through a powerful combination of platitudes and folksiness, as though the best defense against zombies were showering them in bromides rather than bullets. “Just make sure everyone’s doors are shut,” begs the doctor. Naturally, this is the first time Hershel has considered this idea, despite the fact that the last sick person who wasn’t contained in a cell caused a massacre a mere three episodes ago. And so history repeats itself, as multiple (nameless) characters die and turn into walkers, shamble out of their cells and kill people.
There are good reasons to tend to people’s hearts and minds as well as their bodies, particularly when you’re thinking about survival in more extended terms. In the short-term, however, if you don’t have at least one pragmatist in the room more inclined to lock doors than recite inspirational Steinbeck quotes, then people die. And so they die.
But really, what did anyone expect? When we met Hershel, he was keeping a menagerie of walkers alive in his barn because he believed the same childish fantasy that Lizzie believed: that zombies weren’t dead, that they were still people, that they could be saved. If there’s a better metaphor for the delusional impulses that plague the leadership of this group like borderline death wishes, it’s hard to imagine it.
And then, in the final two seconds of the episode: the Governor. It only took you five episodes to do anything of substance, show, and even then it was only foreshadowing. It’s also worth noting that Michonne finally leaves for Macon, which not only happens to be the locale of the *Walking Dead *video game, but her destination before the gunshots from the massacre lured her back. When exciting things start happening in the next episode, let’s all try not to think about the fact almost everything that happened in between her attempted and actual departure was essentially wasted time, and that we just spent five episodes treading water rather than telling the story of what happens next.
Previous Walking Dead recaps:
Season 4, Episode 1
Season 4, Episode 2
Season 4, Episode 3
Season 4, Episode 4
