When people look back on “The Walking Dead,” which ends its 12-year, 11-season, 177-episode run on AMC this month, they’re more likely to remember it as “that zombie show.”
But rewatching the pilot recently, I used to be stunned to be reminded of just how much depth and heart the series delivered to that concept. For many of that episode, we watch as Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), having awoken from a coma to find society has mysteriously collapsed, wanders through a seemingly abandoned world. On his way home he comes upon the rotting upper body of a lady, and is paralyzed with fear when it suddenly turns over and begins to tug itself toward him. (One in every of the nice initial ideas of the show and the comic book upon which it is predicated was to position at its center not the standard damsel in distress but a frightened man.)
“The Walking Dead” ends its 12-year, 11-season, 177-episode run on AMC this month.
Later within the story, having gotten himself together (and gathered a big cache of weapons, a “Walking Dead” staple), Rick returns unexpectedly to that woman. And as a substitute of showing disgust or horror, he quietly grieves for her. “I’m sorry that this happened to you,” he says, after an extended silent moment of simply watching her struggle to proceed to drag herself along.
For years, “The Walking Dead”was a show that found inside its horror-movie conceit a probability to explore questions of grief and loss in ways every bit as resonant and deep as more critically acclaimed shows like “The Leftovers” or “Six Feet Under.” It was also just an ideal roller coaster ride. You may see the writers pushing themselves to create dilemmas that had never been done in a zombie movie before—trapped in a dumpster, in a military tank, in a revolving door—or to think through the implications of the zombie mythology in latest ways. One in every of the most important conflicts of the show, one which never fully went away, was the truth of getting to kill beings that also seemed alive. Could a loved one still be “in there” ultimately? How could one truly know?
Near the series finale, a baby zombie keeps following Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan), one in all the show’s few remaining solid members from the early seasons. And it’s every bit as upsetting to look at as within the early days of the show. Ultimately Maggie finally ends up taking the boy in her arms and easily holding it before putting it out of his misery.
One in every of the most important conflicts of the show was the truth of getting to kill beings that also seemed alive.
I originally stopped watching the show in Season 7, after Maggie’s husband, the show’s likable Glenn Rhee (Steven Yuen) was beaten to death with a barbed wire-wrapped bat by one in all the series’ many insanely violent men. (While this, too, got here right from the comic book, it proved to be an enormous mistake for the series. The showlost almost three million viewers that 12 months, and almost as many the 12 months after that.) Going through the ultimate set of episodes now, I feel like Rick within the pilot: I don’t know the way these people got here to this place, but I’m very sorry that this happened to them.
One in every of the persistent storylines of the series is about Rick and his friends running into another community of people who seems to be hideous ultimately—and having to destroy them to survive. On this final season, our heroes have been integrated into an actual walled society, complete with houses, lattes and pressed suits. Within the midst of the nightmare world of “The Walking Dead” it’s a really weird thing to see. But having now once more discovered cruelty and viciousness on the community’s heart, they’ve spent their final episodes together lurching toward one in all the show’s many inevitable blood baths. The villains will little doubt be slaughtered and our characters became saviors.
Even greater than the comic book, the show has at all times fancied itself a commentary on society.
Even greater than the comic book, the show has at all times fancied itself a commentary on society. It’s an instinct that is smart for a zombie story—from its origins the genre has been used to speak about current social ills—and for a television show imagining humanity attempting to rebuild itself after a plague.
But in practice that predilection has at all times been probably the most exhausting (and by this point exhausted) a part of the series. Ultimately one fascist really does appear like one other, and the relentless bleakness of the show’s tackle society becomes tedious. Returning to that well repeatedly also raises the query whether the series doesn’t experience the human-on-human violence that these conflicts create. Or possibly that’s just a top quality of its audience. On the show’s final panel presentation at Recent York Comic Con this October, a clip from an upcoming episode showed the fan-favorite Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) suddenly whipping out a knife and stabbing a nasty guy through the hand. The gang went crazy.
In reality, because the characters sneak back into town within the penultimate episode, attempting to get to the community’s villainous leader—a power-hungry, deceptive white woman—they unexpectedly jogged my memory of the attackers upon the U.S. Capitol, one other motley group of would-be resistance fighters drunk on conspiracy theories and with a longstanding paranoia about female politicians. Prior to now those styles of parallels could have been intentional—one in all the show’s great reveals was that the “walking dead” refers to not the zombies but to the living, who’ve lost touch with a lot of their humanity. But in the ultimate episodes these political parallels seem unintentional.
Having caught up on some astonishing moments that I had missed from the series’ recent past—the hopeful-to-the-end death of Rick’s teenage son Carl (Chandler Riggs), the departure of Rick himself and the following final episode of his wife, Michonne (Danai Gurira)—I feel an unexpected sadness that the show is ending. There just aren’t many shows which have offered such profound meditations on sacrifice, grief and love.
In Rick’s final episode, as in his first, he’s a confused, mortally wounded man, limping away from a mob of the undead and yet looking similar to them. Death is coming for us all, the show reminds us time and again. Yet the stories of those characters facing that reality and still reaching for an additional day and each other has often been a testament to not horror, however the ineradicable beauty and nobility of existence.