Late to the party - "The Walking Dead"

 

Rick Grimes. Good guy, or is he?

OK I admit it, I'm very late to the party with this one but in my defence, I read the excellent "The Walking Dead" graphic novels up to a point long before I'd bothered with the TV series. Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's peerless Zombie epic is a mammoth collection of stories though, and it seems the TV series - set to end next year (finally!) is equally gigantic and not to be dipped in lightly. 

When the show cropped up on Disney Plus I figured it was about time to give it a go. Bizarrely one of the main reasons I never touched it was because of Love Actually. Yes, Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes in the show) dared to appear in that movie, a movie I detest with every fibre in my being, so therefore I felt I couldn't commit to believing in him and his casting as Rick in the show. 

BUT just like you've probably realised with stuff like Harry Potter, the 'main guy' isn't the character you keep your eye on as TWD unfolds before you, in fact though his story is interesting (particularly for us dads) it's a tiny pifflingly small concern in the wider ruined world of TWD, and the 'supporting' characters in the show are always far more interesting. 

The show sets out its table in a parallel to the comics at first, dealing with a ruined post apocalyptic world populated by the undead. Zombies, ahhh who needs to bother with the science of reanimating the dead when you can just do a bit of pseudo-scientific hand-waving and get on with the grand business of imagining a world where every corpse could come back to kill you. Rick wakes up in hospital after being shot, and swiftly realises something is very, very wrong with the world. Soon enough he encounters his first zombie and so the show puts its foot gently on the accelerator as Rick begins an epic journey, first to find his wife and son, then to find an eventual band of 'family' gathered as the show progresses. 

Without venturing into spoiler territory (as I've not seen every episode yet, but am a good chunk into season 8 I think, I've binged so hard on this I've lost track) what makes the show interesting is the constant challenge to the viewer (and indeed the reader if you stuck with the GNs for a good while), prompting the question "What would YOU do if you were in the same situation?" - and also to pose a more important question...is Rick really the 'good guy' in all of this? Many, many times you'll find yourself wondering whether things would have been far better if Rick had succumbed to a swift pair of zombie gnashers early on in the show. 

Bugger off, I'm not dancing to "Thriller"

Slight spoiler here as eventually it looks like Rick's wayward band of stragglers finally find settlement and peace, the show ramps up the 'good and evil' motif introducing probably one of THE most interesting (at least at first) characters in the whole thing. Negan, a psychotic barbed-wire-strung-baseball-bat wielding erudite maniac who is the head of a group known as "The Saviours" who are basically TWD's equivalent of a huge protection agency, press-ganging other communities to provide for them while they rule the roost. Negan and Rick clash spectacularly many times but soon the show begins to focus on the various interconnected relationships with nearly all of the main characters, picking at their seams and their weaknesses until it begins to do something that quite a few folk warned me about - descending into a bit of a 'soap opera' setup and a cycle of repetitiveness that I was also told would drive me crackers later on. 

But all the stuff I started watching the show for is still front and present. A ruined world, civilisation gone the way of the dodo, that weird fascination with ruined America from the smoking cities laid waste to the off-grid backwater towns being reclaimed by the wild flora and fauna that feels so abundant in some places over there. 

There's a heck of a lot to like about the show and I'm glad I finally took the plunge. It's testament to the cast and our endless fascination with our own ruin that it's kept going as long as it has, but the end really is nigh and I'll be watching to see whether yet another long-running saga can stick the landing, or whether it'll just dribble away into obscurity. Something tells me this one won't die quite as easily as a walker getting laid low by a sharpened traffic sign.