If there’s one thing a virus-driven lockdown is good at, it’s creating opportunities to catch up on lots of unwatched TV.
You know: all that time you thought you’d spend writing, which in fact gets lost while binge-watching someone else’s output.
It’s hard to get mad though, because there’s a lot of very good stuff to watch out there, and the Walking Dead franchise is, in this sense, the gift that keeps on giving.
Like any ten-season series, it’s had better and worse seasons, but whatever supernatural process the druids of screenwriting employ to regularly turn out excellent episodes has been perfected by the team behind The Walking Dead.
After so long on the road and on the threshold of disaster, we now have our survivors in communities that, while they have their differences, more or less manage to work together. This is in no small part because they face a common enemy, and I’m not talking about the Walkers, because since season 9 we now also have the Whisperers.
The Walking Dead has always had other living, breathing humans as the main cause of suffering in their post-apocalyptic world. If it weren’t for other survivors, our survivors would be getting on just fine. These other groups have either slipped happily into Mad Max-style lawlessness in the absence of a socially-imposed code of conduct, or they’ve put their own survival ahead of their sense of morality, and justify any number of horrors as a consequence.
The Whisperers are different. While their leader’s motivations are complex, conflicted and emotional, as a group they’ve become what they are to survive, and as a consequence of their leader’s cult-inspired approach to people management. They’re not faking it, they’re a full-on proper cult, and they worship the walkers. That makes them a different kind of threat; one that can’t really be negotiated with.
It’s nice, in these last couple of seasons, to have seen some glimmer of light through the sometimes all-pervasive darkness that is the post-zombie-virus world. The communities thrive and the people find plenty of time for happiness amidst the struggle for survival. Of course the story only provides this to have something to tear down, and it’s not just the whisperers who challenge the survivors, it’s also the sheer difficulty of living in a post-technological age with the constant threat of annihilation outside the town walls.
Some communities just don’t make it.
Against this setting, The Walking Dead manages to successfully deploy themes of vengeance, justice, injustice, redemption, sacrifice and above all community. Perhaps the dark backdrop of the series provides fertile canvas for these kinds of stories, perhaps the writers are just, after all this time, truly great at what they do, but season 10 is undoubtedly excellent, despite some unexpected cast adjustments.
It’s hard to tell if the actors had had enough, or if there are spin-offs being prepared in the wings, but there is an external force that rips characters unexpectedly off the chessboard, without killing them, never to return (or at least not in this season). If I had to think of one thing to criticise from season 10, it would be this. In the manner of their disappearance is a strong sense of real-world factors imposing constraints on the cast and script. Maybe there was no better way of dealing with it. It doesn’t do much to diminish the viewing pleasure, but it does make you wonder where the series is going.
Strongly recommended for quarantine viewing, watching the survivors in the Walking Dead will certainly make you re-evealuate the difficulty of being stuck at home because of our, comparatively less threatening virus.
The Walking Dead Season 10 is available on Netflix and via Amazon Prime.
