Can The Walking Dead survive a new season?

AMC kicked off its two week-long Fear Fest event on Sunday night with the hotly anticipated season two premiere of The Walking Dead, the zombie apocalypse hit that’s been released to critical acclaim almost across the board. A record 7.3 million viewers tuned in for the airing, setting a new benchmark for cable dramas. I can only conclude it got such high ratings because 7.3 million people fell asleep before they had a chance to turn off their televisions, felled by sheer boredom.

A major staffing change occurred between the first and second seasons, and this definitely showed in the lackluster season two premiere, even with Darabont’s ghostly influence (he contributed to this episode). While many reviewers appeared dazzled, it suffered from distinctly cheesy special effects, especially in the first half hour, along with dragging pacing, boring music, and generally poor production values. It felt like a faded imitation of the more cinematic first season, an attempt, perhaps, to trade on the laurels of earlier episodes.

‘What Lies Ahead’ opens with our band of disorganised incompetents fleeing Atlanta after discovering the promised land didn’t have so much to offer after all, only to be waylaid almost immediately by a herd of zombies after being trapped in a traffic jam. Their problems are compounded by engine trouble, and of course their response is to scatter frantically, because everyone knows that the best offense against zombies is to isolate yourself from the group, preferably while fumbling the components of your dismantled gun because you don’t know how to service it, let alone put it back together again. One wonders how, exactly, these people have managed to survive a zombie apocalypse for this long.

The Walking Dead feeds a very specific taste for ultraviolence that has fans raving, with a multitude of gory scenes, many of which play out primarily through the use of sound effects. Crunching, sucking, and dripping are the order of the day, and it’s a guilt-free medium. Who, after all, could be opposed to human-on-zombie violence? Rather than having to feel guilty about taking pleasure from the grotesque, viewers can be satisfied; their thirst for blood is slaked with a healthy side of justice in the war against the undead.

Bland visuals appeared to be the order of the day in ‘What Lies Ahead,’ underscoring the muddy, dusty fatigue of the apocalypse and interspersing it with the occasional bright dot of colour to draw the attention of the viewer; a red shirt, an alarmingly green tree. It could be a sly reference to the comic book origins, or a deliberate stylistic statement. Even the blood is murky. Alas, the general beigery tends to have the unfortunate effect of underlining the terrible overacting. With every face fraught with meaning, the episode quickly grew as fatiguing as the apocalypse, and there was little to hook new viewers, except for those who enjoy excessive emoting to no clear purpose.

The pacing of the episode was reminiscent of the theme of the series itself, a slow, halting, zombielike shuffle periodically interrupted with moments of ‘tension’ might to frighten viewers or draw them in further. These scenes left me strangely unmoved, and at times actively nodding off; the attempts at creating drama were rather undermined by the sense that if this band of people has managed to keep it together this long, it’s unlikely a few zombies are going to bring them down now. Much though some of us might wish.

This episode didn’t leave viewers hanging without some heavy-handed symbolism; first, the clunky ploy of using children as symbols of the hope of humanity, and then of course the church scenes, just in case any viewers missed the fact that the apocalypse is serious business with devastating consequences for what’s left of humanity. The prayer scenes in front of the tormented Jesus were especially charming, but ‘What Lies Ahead’ had to take it one further with a classic ‘hunting the stag’ scene in those oh-so-green leaves, culminating in a shooting that was anticlimactic for readers of the books.

All in all, a most unsatisfactory second season opener for a show viewers have come to expect much more from. Should the show continue down this path, it seems likely to shed viewers—or maybe not. It seems like almost everyone other than me thought the episode was ‘brilliant;’ ‘easily one of the best series on TV — and certainly the scariest,’ ‘this spare, bleak and truly horrifying saga of survival excels,’ ‘the creepiest, scariest, most fetchingly wretched and wretch-inducing drama on TV.’ Perhaps the whole thing is ‘too psychological’ for my tender mind. Or maybe I just haven’t been infected yet.

Clearly the producers have some ideas for handling this season sans David Darabont as showrunner… I’m just not sure they’re going to be any good. My proposal for making The Walking Dead more exciting this season? Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), shirtless, pursuing zombies with his bow. Preferably from the back of a silky white unicorn. Think of the crossover potential with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic!

Front page photo: “Zombies” by iluvrhinestones, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.