So Living in an Apocalyptic Wasteland Makes You Stupider: A Review of the Return of The Walking Dead, Season 4

(SPOILER WARNING)

At the outset, I'd like to point out that I have been a fan of The Walking Dead television series since Season 1. I'm one of the many people who went out and bought "Volume 1: Days Gone Bye" of the comic book series because of it. I only missed it when we lost cable for a few months after we moved house and quickly started following it again when Season 4 began. I was quite eager for the series to resume after it went on a break late last year.

I didn't really count on being as disappointed as I was, though.

The first two episodes of the return of season 4 depict the various survivors, Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Carl (Chandler Riggs), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Daryl (Norman Reedus), Glenn (Steven Yeun), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Beth (Emily Kinney), and several of the characters introduced in Season 3 like Tyrese (Chad L. Coleman), Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Bob (Laurence Gilliard, Jr.) as they cope with the fallout of the psychotic assault launched by the governor (David Morrisey) and several of his cohorts on the prison which has left many of them dead, including former series mainstay Hershel (Scott Wilson) has rendered it useless as a sanctuary against the walkers.  The attack on the prison has left them scattered, some of them wounded, almost all of them feeling desolate after the destruction of their home.

I'll just get straight to it, really: it irritates me that two of the series mainstays, Carl and Glenn apparently took a healthy dose of stupid pills while the series was on break.

Now, Carl and Glenn have been separated. Carl, who escaped the prison with his father Rick, wanders from the house where the two of them have holed up while Rick recovers from the severe beating he received from the governor in the final episode before the season break, while Glenn, who was knocked out by an explosion during the attack on the prison, wakes up to find the place overrun by zombies (while conveniently perched just out of their reach).  Carl appears in the first episode while Glenn appears in the second. Their acts of stupidity, however, seem remarkably similar.

In the first episode, "After" Carl explores a seemingly abandoned house while his father is out cold. He is careful, and armed not only with a pistol but with a stabbing weapon in case he encounters a walker, which he does when opening a door to a room upstairs. For some reason, he is taken completely by surprise to the extent that he misses what is effectively a point-blank shot and completely misplaces the aforementioned stabbing weapon. He escapes by locking the walker in another room, but not before the walker has claimed his shoe. He then proudly inscribes on the door the words "walker inside, got my shoe, didn't get me" then proceeds to eat a can of chocolate pudding on the roof of the same house, with the same trapped walker reaching helplessly through a window which is only very slightly ajar.

In the second episode, "Inmates," Glenn, realizing he is alone, gathers up his gear, which includes a riot police outfit salvaged from the prison's stock, and in a sheer display of bravado ventures out amid the zombies clad in the full riot gear and manages to fight his way through them without getting bitten. He discovers that Tara (Alanna Masterson) one of the governor's cohorts, has survived and is holed up in a cage, safe from the walkers, and together, the two of them leave the prison, killing walkers left and right. When they are some distance away, they are followed by a relatively smaller group of walkers. Glenn puts down his machine gun and decides to take them out with a knife, only to encounter a rather difficult time after killing just one zombie. Fortunately, Tara helps him out but shortly thereafter Glenn collapses in a heap, wheezing. New survivors then appear to rescue them both and the episode ends on a cliffhanger.

Now, in Glenn's case I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, earlier in the season he almost died from a respiratory affliction that killed several residents of the prison who almost immediately reanimated as walkers and really messed things up. He was most likely not in the best of shape and it's possible he overextended himself, which was why he ended up collapsing. Still, I cannot say I completely buy it; if Glenn was feeling out of sorts, he could have used his machine gun to handle the zombies instead of clumsily hacking away at them.

Carl's stupidity, however borders on unforgivable.

Both characters, it is worth pointing out, are season 1 veterans. If the series took place in real time, this would mean they have been killing zombies for five years now. Given that Chandler Riggs' has aged in real time, the show's time cannot be that far off. Both of them have had more than enough exposure to zombies by now to know what makes them tick. For Pete's sake, in season 3 Glenn killed a zombie when he was tied to a chair! It's also been firmly established that the zombies here are not the amped-up athletes that terrorized Brad Pitt in World War Z; they are, all of them, slow and lumbering, and their strength lies almost exclusively in their numbers and little else, which makes Carl's titanic struggle with a walker he had actually been LOOKING FOR look pretty idiotic.

In both cases, the makers of the show clearly wanted to remind viewers of how closely death looms over every single character in the show, including the ones audiences think are safe. In short, everyone's fair game, whether as walker food or the casualty of an inter-survivor war. I understand this imperative, but I'm really not fond of the writers and directors using the tired old Hollywood formula of characters acting stupidly just to generate tension.

I have enjoyed this show (and still do) because unlike so many other Hollywood products, it generally does not condescend to its audience, therefore when the writers start pulling cheap tricks just to get viewers' attention, I have to take exception.

Deadpool vs. Zombies: Night of the Living Deadpool #1 and #2

(writer) Cullen Bunn
(artist) Ramon Rosanas

The four issue miniseries titled "Night of the Living Deadpool" is summarized simply enough: Marvel's favorite disfigured, fourth-wall breaking, merc with a mouth wakes up from a chimichanga-induced food coma, only to discover that the world has been overrun by zombies. The first issue has him facing off against them with his swords and guns, at the end of which he is rescued by a ragtag band of survivors, while the second issue discloses the fate of the band of survivors...and like Deadpool, it isn't pretty...

Long before The Walking Dead became a television phenomenon, Marvel Comics had already cashed in on the popularity of zombies, getting no less than TWD co-creator Robert Kirkman to write three Marvel Zombies miniseries, which featured "zombified" versions of popular Marvel superheroes from an alternate universe and which sold like hotcakes. That they would revisit the genre, even just to have one of their more popular/overexposed characters poke fun at it, seems beyond exploitative at this point, and the question really is whether or not they have anything new to say on the subject. All I can say so far, judging from the two issues I've read, is "not really." It's entertaining enough, but there is absolutely nothing groundbreaking about this miniseries.

Well, there is one innovation writer Cullen Bunn introduces to the zombie mythos, and it's that of zombies who actually say more than "braiiins." These zombies actually still contain the residual consciousness of the people they once were, but they are no longer in control of their bodies. As a result, they moan and lament the savagery wrought by their bodies while they are helpless to stop them. It gets old fairly quickly though.

What doesn't get old, however, is the fantastic art by Ramon Rosanas, who provides both line art and color art here, and who honestly had me wondering by the end of issue #1 why he doesn't have an A-list book under his belt yet. His attention to detail is wonderful to behold, and he really has the whole grayscale thing down pat. Also, given that Deadpool is the only character here who appears in color as opposed to the black and white zombie world around him, Rosanas does an excellent job contrasting him with his surroundings by really making Deadpool's signature red outfit really pop.

As good as it is, Rosanas' art really cannot elevate what is essentially a by-the-numbers attempt to cash in on the fame of The Walking Dead, but to Rosanas' credit I think he comes as close as any other artist could to making the book better than it has any business being.

2.5/5