The Walking Dead” amplifies brutality in compelling new season
As one of highest rated series on television enters breathlessly into its fifth season, 'The Walking Dead' picks up a lot of momentum. Coming off a season that featured the most graphic deaths and wrenching story arcs of the series, the show is picking up with the apocalyptic urgency that made the Frank Darabont-led first season so brilliant.
Season five's first episode, titled 'No Sanctuary,' begins with Rick and a few other key characters being dragged out of a bombed out railcar, gagged, bent over a trough and slowly beaten with a baseball bat before having their throats slit. Right as the man wielding the bat is about to take out Glenn, a bargain is made to retrieve a trove of valuable weapons from outside the walls of Terminus. The wheels are in motion, and the counter attack has begun.
What follows in the rest of the episode is truly explosive, as unexpected twists unleash zombie carnage on Terminus, gruesome discoveries are made, long-awaited reunions are had. The series is definitely heading in the right direction, and the momentum from the fourth season doesn't appear to be broken (yet). The gore and violence also reaches a new level; there's a copious helping of head-smashings and sloppy dismemberments in this season premiere.
Apocalyptic and dystopian stories, particularly of the undead variety, have seen a surge in popularity in the last decade or so, beginning around the time '28 Days Later' introduced running zombies to the horror movie landscape. Since then, the zombie trend has shown no signs of stopping, boosted by movies and video games alike. 'The Walking Dead' is just the most popular example of a deeply embedded cultural trope, also realized in shows like 'Z Nation' and 'The Strain,' films like 'Zombieland' and 'World War Z' and countless video game franchises where players gun down hundreds of reanimated corpses. Most people reading this now have likely given thought to what kind of weapon they would use in a zombie apocalypse, where they would hide, etc.
So why are the undead so popular? Practically, they are a great monster; you can supply as many as you want without explaining where they came from, the rules they work by are flexible, and they're just plain nasty. In the movies, the collective groans and snarls of the walking dead build unease and terror in the audience. Conceptually, zombies are interesting because they allow us to kill and destroy beings that aren't quite object or person. The condition of a zombie apocalypse puts simpler rules in place: kill or be killed.
That's why we love zombies. We get to kill people for a reason. We have a primal, survival-driven purpose in a chaotic world and the fantasy of this is complementary to the highly organized, jaded, media-saturated state most of us now inhabit.
We're living in a time when technology allows media to shift and change and its abilities to grow exponentially in just a few years. This just means the world is changing, big time, and it's not like it used to be. The environments humans survived and evolved in for thousands of years are now changed irreversibly, but our biology is not keeping up with our mental development. Humans beat out other species not entirely because we were smarter, but because we were more ruthless and willing to kill to make our claim. There has always been a tendency by some to scorn the conveniences of modern life and wish for a more simple, one of brutal existence defined by a never-ending armed conflict with nature. Much of the popularity of 'The Walking Dead' has to do with the glorification of guns, an obsession disguised as a hobby which also has its roots in survivalist escapism.
The previous season's overall arc dealt with the division between the settled life and a wandering life of survival. In the beginning, Rick is resistant to staying behind the fence and taking to farming, but Herschel (a wise man, also a deeply rooted archetype) persists. Rick finally coming to terms with living in a stable settlement is an allegory for human society transitioning from hunter-gatherers to an agriculture-based society. This is why there are flashbacks to the farming time in the season four finale, 'A.' Rick is confronted with brutal men who want to kill him and abuse his son, so he must commit brutal acts to protect himself and his family. In one truly chilling moment, he tears the flesh from a man's throat, resembling a walker for a fleeting second.
Season four itself is divided exactly between times when the group is together in a settlement and times when they are scattered in the world, not sure where their next meal is coming from or when death may be hiding around the corner. 'The Walking Dead' hit considerable weak spots in the second and third seasons, during which the action took place in only a handful of locations. It compensated for this money-saving device with plenty of blood and gore, as well as handful of interesting characters and a curiously shifting cast. Now, in the second half of the fourth season, there is more of the horrific urgency that made the short and sweet first season so good.
The current season looks to take the violence to new heights of brutality, the characters to new breaking points and their struggling group to the many possible horrors that could await them. Hopefully, the show can keep up its streak of compelling, boundary-pushing episodes in the coming weeks and not get pigeonholed in a predictable plotline as it has in the past.
As for the zombie obsession as a whole, it shows no signs of slowing. Zombie video games in particular continue to be popular, gun control remains a sensitive issue and Ebola continues to make headlines and instill panic in average citizens everywhere.
arts@dailynebraskan.com
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