Since season 2 of The Walking Dead started, I’ve compared it to a soap opera. After watching Sunday’s mid-season premiere, I finally realized what it really reminded me of and that’s Star Trek: Voyager. That is not a compliment. I can only assume that the writers of The Walking Dead learned their craft by watching Voyager creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga decide that melodrama was an acceptable substitute for action and adventure. If you’ve ever read The Elements of Style, you know about a rule called “Show, Don’t Tell”. Instead of having your characters simply tell you what they’re thinking and feeling, those thoughts and feelings should be expressed through action. Berman and Braga, however, must have run out of toilet paper one day and used The Elements of Style to wipe their asses before reading it because when they took over the Star Trek franchise, no thought went unexpressed and no feeling went unexplained. More proof that they never read Elements of Style is that it also says to use simple words and not fancy ones yet solutions on Star Trek always involved things like chronoton particles.
Walking Dead season 2 has seen characters who live in a world infested with flesh eating zombies spend the majority of their time arguing over property rights, keeping vigil at a sick boy’s bedside and, worst of all, participating in a “Who’s the daddy” storyline. While all this has been going on, they’ve been ruminating on the grand importance of everything they’re doing and How It All Means So Much. One of the best moments from last year was when Shane shot Otis and left him to die so Shane could get away. The best part after that is that Shane could NOT talk about what he had done. Instead, the writers have had to SHOW us the aftermath of those events which is Shane becoming increasingly selfish and belligerent as he tries to deal with his conscience instead of having Shane TELL us what he’s doing and why over and over again.
If you watched the fan oriented talk show The Talking Dead that airs at midnight on AMC, you saw musician Dave Navarro struggling to remain friendly and polite as he berated the show’s producer to add some more damn zombies to this zombie show. I never thought I would find myself encouraging people to base their lives on the teachings and philosophy of the Jane’s Addiction guy but he was absolutely right. People who watch The Walking Dead should be terrified during much of it and tense during the downtime between action scenes knowing that peaceful times could end at any moment and three minutes of zombie action plus a few badass Daryl moments out of a whole hour don’t do that. I’m still watching The Walking Dead because I know it could and hope that it will get better.
But I won’t wait around forever.
