This?
This is the big thing?
This is the second coming of zombie horror? I don’t think so.
I just finished watching the final episode of AMC’s widely acclaimed TV series, The Walking Dead, and I have to say I was…underwhelmed. It’s not that the show was exactly bad. It was even brilliant in places. But by the time I got to the end there was just so much wrong.
[Spoiler Warning Thingy]
The main bone I have to pick is with the final episode, TS-19 in which the group of survivors retreat to the CDC and meet the last scientist left alive there.
Why is he the last guy left?
Because in the face of the zombie apocalypse everyone else, either ran away or committed suicide.
Really? You really expect me to believe that people are that pathetically weak? I mean sure, there are bound to be some people who can’t take the pressure, but we’re talking about a group of people who have been entrusted with the task of finding a cure for a world that is slipping into madness, and all but one of them just say, “Meh, screw it. I’m going home. Life’s not worth living”?
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
Suspension of belief only goes so far, and I refuse to believe that people as a whole are that pathetic. Do the writers of the show realize what humankind has been through? We’ve survived plagues, and famines and wars, all kinds of atrocities from within and without, and we’re still kicking.
We are not weak. We are not quitters. We are not sitting around waiting for some hardship to give us an excuse to give up.
Again, I’m sure that certain individuals might crack under the strain, but a whole enclave of intelligent people who have been charged with a mission not only to save themselves, but to save the world, their countries, their families? All of them gave up?
No. That is not how people work. In fact I found the whole notion so outlandish, I was seriously expecting a subplot where it turned out that the one remaining scientist had actually killed them all.
And then, then at the culmination of the episode, the single remaining scientist reveals to the survivors that they’re locked in with him, and that the entire building will undergo an explosive decontamination cycle that will destroy them all in a matter of seconds (This is a really, really stupid and inefficient way to prevent some kind of contamination, but we’ll just chalk that up to movie logic). He reasons it would be better for them to die this way, than to face the certainty of being devoured by the zombie hoards.
It makes sense for all of about five seconds. And then you remember that three episodes previous we met the Vatos, a group of young men stationed in the center of the zombie outbreak who are running a nursing home. And that’s not counting any number of other minor characters who are ostensibly still out in world the surviving perfectly well, thank you very much.
Civilization may be gone, but the entire human race? There’s plenty of them still out there and kicking. Plenty of people who didn’t give up.
I know, I know. It’s just a show. It doesn’t really matter. And I probably shouldn’t even be wasting your time with this But hey, it’s Saturday, which means I get to talk about whatever, and this has just really been bugging me.
Plot holes I can handle. Out of character moments I can deal with. But when you give an out of character moment to the entire human race, that’s when you’ve crossed the line.
%99 of our existence as a species has been marked by endless poverty, hardships and death. From the modern perspective most of the history of mankind was the apocalypse. No electricity, no running water, uncertain food supply. For millenia people survived day to day in conditions that most of us would find utterly horrific. And yet somehow they did survive.
And if, God forbid, humankind should ever have to return to fighting and clawing for our very existence for whatever reason we will survive still.
So there. I got it out of my system. On Monday, we will recommence with our regularly scheduled rant-free broadcast.
Same zombie time. Same zombie station.
