Kim Dickens, Cliff Curtis, Alycia Debnam-Carey and Frank Dillane in 'Fear the Walking Dead'
On this day in the year 410, the Visigoths began their
sacking of Rome. The event is generally regarded as the beginning of the end for the Western Roman Empire and has fascinated historians and political philosophers for centuries, as well as being
remembered in art as a cultural milestone for human civilization. In the time since the Roman Empire became a memory, there have been other battles, other tragedies, and other empires that formed and fell, with the art of the respective time reflecting them in some significant way.
Over the past decade or so, almost every big-budget summer movie has depicted large scale destruction, where cities (usually New York and Los Angeles) and national landmarks are destroyed, with people running for their lives. Many have argued this is a sort of lingering cultural reaction to the September 11 attacks. In this way, it can be seen as both a reflection of fears and a fantasy of how people imagine themselves surviving against those fears. Films like Transformers, Man of Steel, and The Avengers have been criticized for "cinematic shock-and-awe," and the upcoming Batman v. Superman deliberately invokes 9/11, with a scene of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) running down the streets of Metropolis into the billowing smoke of collapsing skyscrapers. Many of the popular franchises based on young adult novels, like The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner, are post-apocalyptic in nature, examine the basics of human nature, and apply it to the creation of new flawed societies that have occurred after the end.
However, no genre other than superheroes and vampires has been as popular in recent years as zombies. And like superheroes and vampires, there have been many people wondering whether the public will eventually get burnt out on zombies? Last night saw the premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, a prequel to AMC's very popular The Walking Dead. Developed by Dave Erickson and Robert Kirkman, whose comic book is the basis for both series, Fear the Walking Dead is a logical consequence of a network and creative staff saying we're making a lot of money, so let's try to squeeze out some more. But Fear is a sloooowwww burn depicting the first stages of societal collapse as the zombie virus spreads. It also seems to have been made by people who are fans of Carl (Chandler Riggs) and think the best thing about The Walking Dead was teen angst and characters acting stupidly to move the plot along.
Continue below the fold for more.
Among the more popular ways to destroy Earth that have been depicted in fiction, which run the gamut between possible to highly "Sharknado" unlikely.
- War: Many different forms of war, but the most apocalyptic version usually has someone deciding to turn the key, launch the missiles and the world burns.
- Pandemic: A highly deadly and virulent antibiotic-resistant bacterium, antifungal-resistant fungus, genetic disease, prion, or antiviral-resistant virus destroys most human life on Earth. And, in reality, it wouldn't take much to disrupt the world. The Spanish Flu of 1918 is one of the biggest killers in human history and was responsible for the deaths of "only" about 3-5 percent of the world's population at its height. It infected around 500 million people and killed as many as 100 million. That's more people than the total dead of both world wars combined.
- Collapse of Earth's Habitability: Basically the worst parts of Soylent Green, not even counting the cannibalism. The effects of overpopulation, deforestation, and pollution cause extensive global climate change. The end result being rising sea levels, disruption of agricultural production, drought, extreme weather patterns, economic collapse, and the extinction of species throughout the food chain. The rise in temperature may also provide a better incubator for bacteria and viruses that threaten us.
- Impact Event: If a two-mile wide asteroid or comet should cross paths with Earth, the impact would likely destroy most life on the planet. Whether we could nuke an object out of the way is dependent on a number of variables, which do not include getting Bruce Willis and his deep sea drillers to help out while Aerosmith plays in the background.
- Supervolcano: A powerful type of volcano capable of spewing enough ash and soot into Earth's atmosphere to cause volcanic winter. It would also create acid rain and release noxious gases into the atmosphere, and then there's the lava bombs too. The Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park is thought to be a possible site of a supervolcano eruption. If it occurred, most animal and plant life near Yellowstone would likely be destroyed (i.e., covered and suffocated in ashes), with other species across the entire continent and world being affected. The eruption would likely cover most of the United States in ash, block out the Sun for a fair amount of time, and affect global weather as the ash spread.
- Alien Invasion: If the alien Invasion genre works for you, it does because it plays on our fears that some unknown might exist with the worst human qualities and may one day take everything away from us, just as we have taken away things from each other. Basically, it's the fear that a bigger kid may move in down the block and come steal our toys. H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was commentary on British Colonialism. The Martians do to the British what the British had been doing across their empire.
- Machine Revolt: A hunger to know things is a common theme in literature and mythology, but it's been balanced over thousands of years with messages that the pursuit of knowledge may destroy paradise. In a lot of stories, curiosity is treated as almost a "sin," since the pursuit of knowledge and the discovery of truth usually signifies the loss of innocence. The development of artificial intelligence is usually treated this way in most stories and follows the pattern of having a creation rebel against its creator and decide it's time to kill Sarah Connor.
- What If Reality Isn't Real?: I did say some of these would be Sharknado unlikely, albeit this is a metaphysical Sharknado. Philosophers have spent centuries trying to define the nature of reality. Can you prove that you really exist? "I think, therefore I am." Yeah, but what if you're just a brain in a vat thinking you're experiencing life? How do you know that you, me, and everything else isn't somebody's Sims game, and we're all programs inside a mainframe? One day that something might get tired of playing, shut the damn computer off, or reboot it. If that happened, humanity, Earth, and the rest of the Universe all go bye bye. There is a very real thought experiment called The Problem of Other Minds which argues there is no real way to prove that anything other than you exists.
Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming that I am a man. —Zhuangzi
All of this leads into talking about
The Walking Dead and the
zombie apocalypse. If an alien invasion story is about humanity confronting the unknown, a zombie apocalypse is usually more about humanity versus humanity. The zombies are merely a force of nature, no different than a hurricane or earthquake, that reveals deeper insight into an individual's true character. It also presents a scenario common to most video games, where violence is married to scavenging and one can become the "King" of their Super-Walmart in the aftermath. The stories more often than not revolve around how the human characters fail to work together to save one another as society crumbles. And
Fear the Walking Dead has plenty of flawed people to draw from in order to follow this particular trope.
However, the results so far are not good at all. As the love of my life and all-around Walking Dead superfan told me after watching the pilot for Fear the Walking Dead: "that was fuckin' stupid." And if the first hour is indicative of what's to come, the series exhibits some of the worst and most boring parts of its parent show.
Fear the Walking Dead is set in Los Angeles, with the events chronologically before most of what happens in The Walking Dead. The show will depict how the world fell apart while Rick (Andrew Lincoln) was sleeping. This time around the focus is on two teachers involved in a relationship, Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) and Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis). As the virus begins to spread, their sort of blended Brady Bunch family has to struggle to survive, with Madison's heroin addicted son, Nick (Frank Dillane), being one of the first to see a "walker."
While Curtis and Dickens are great actors, the problem with the pilot is that probably most people tuned in to watch zombies on a zombie show, and instead what they got was 90 minutes of teen angst and children acting stupidly. There's something about writers, TV writers especially, who think sulking adolescents are fascinating. Usually they're not. They're irritating. Whether it be Nick doing the dumbest things possible, his honor-student sister Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) displaying resentment against the new man in her mother's life, or Travis's whiny son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) being estranged from his dad, these particular tropes and story angles have been done to death. One can see what they were going for: a degree of normalcy to use as a personality contrast before the oncoming storm. This should be a point in the story where it starts building up these characters and gives the audience a reason to give a shit about them when a zombie comes to chomp into them. But what ends up on-screen with
Fear the Walking Dead does the opposite and can't put together an interesting story with those pieces or create something unique and fresh.
There's also the nature of the show itself. To the production's credit, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to just duplicate The Walking Dead and do a second show of another group somewhere else walking through the woods doing the same thing. They instead decided to go a different route and base it around the collapse of civilization. Since it's a prequel, we know things the characters don't. And we also have the dramatic irony of knowing how things are going to play out for society in general. So much of the tension is built upon the first "discoveries" about the walkers, and seeing the disbelief in people as they realize dead people aren't exactly dying. But the pacing for Fear the Walking Dead feels so lackadaisical that it might be season two or three before it can match The Walking Dead in getting to a place where we care about what's happening.
And there's fertile ground to be explored, especially on the larger scale of things. How did the government react as the crisis escalated? Why couldn't the military contain it? At what point did everyday people stop believing things were under control and the bottom fall out? They don't even have to reveal a definitive cause for the zombies, but it would be interesting to hear all of the commentary from different aspects of society as things become more and more dire. So far, the show doesn't seem all that interested in any of that. Like
The Walking Dead, the drama of
Fear the Walking Dead is still about the personal. It's more concerned about how being thrust into a new world of bashing in the heads of dead people connects to the personal troubles and inner psyche of disparate but connected individuals.
If I sound harsh with this review, I will admit maybe I'm being a bit unfair, since this is the first episode and there's still time to work out the kinks as they move forward (e.g., go back and watch the first season of The Walking Dead and it's not anything special either). It just seems like a strange and dull way to start a TV show.
- Biggest Premiere in Cable History: 10.1 million viewers watched last night's pilot episode. Although, it will be interesting to see how many return to watch episode two. I asked my "boo" and Walking Dead expert whether she will watch next week and her response was "probably not," but she might tune in for a "few minutes" to see if things are any better.
- Black Guy Dies First: After all the jokes about T-Dog (IronE Singleton), Tyrese (Chad Coleman) and Noah (Tyler James Williams), and whether there's a one black man at a time rule for The Walking Dead, is it all that surprising the first named character to die, Calvin (Keith Powers), is an African-American?
- A Car Accident Gets Out Of Control: Both iterations of The Walking Dead obey the George Romero zombie rules (i.e., whether someone dies from a walker bite or a heart attack in their sleep, they will become a zombie). It's also the simplest way to explain how a zombie apocalypse is impossible to control. Over 150,000 people die each and every day. If each one gets up and bites someone else, and everything proceeds at a near geometric rate, things become fucked up pretty quickly. And I thought the best sequence of the pilot was seeing how something as simple as a car accident becomes a horrific situation that would ripple through society as it became known. We see it spread through social media, as well as the first indication of the center beginning to give way, as school kids are sent home in the middle of the day.
- The Lessons Being Taught In School: Not the most subtle thing, but each time we see the inside of a classroom, the themes connect to the zombie apocalypse genre. Travis' literature class is discussing Jack London's Call of the Wild. And when the girls are watching the video of the walker taking a hail of cop bullets, the lecture is on chaos theory.
- They're "Infected," Not Walkers: One way to explain the character's stupidity is supposedly this is a world where no one knows what the hell a zombie is. Because if a corpse got up after being shot 15 times center mass, it wouldn't take a directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for someone in our world to figure out "shoot it in the head!" And no one in either Walking Dead series calls them "zombies." In The Walking Dead, they're "walkers," and for Fear the Walking Dead the term will be "infected."
- In Case You Were Wondering: There have been multiple academic attempts to model how a zombie apocalypse would play out in the real world, with the CDC even going so far as to put together a zombie preparedness guide, since the movement of any fictional zombie contagion usually mirrors how diseases spread and it was a way to use pop culture to get people thinking about emergency supplies. The good news is that it's unlikely any disease will reanimate the dead and most zombie apocalypses skirt over some of the problems with the scenario (e.g., why do the zombies not attack each other?). However, in case things ever go upside-down, the safest place to ride out the walking dead will be in the Rocky Mountains.