The Walking Dead: World Beyond

A lot of things surprised me in 2020.  The pandemic was one thing, chuckled about as some distant news story on a ski holiday with doctor pals in January and then ruining things throughout the rest of the year and beyond.  In August, I broke my hand on a barbell, which was in itself a nasty surprise, especially as I was in a cast during a number of weeks when gyms actually were open.  But also on that list of unexpected events is the appearance of a second spin-off programme from the universe of The Walking Dead.  There was me, one evening during some of lockdown, scrolling through my screening platforms and strategising to decide what to watch so I could join in with all the chatter and ensure a completed boxset each week so I can keep up with these nonsensical weekly posts.  Picking my way through Amazon Prime with low expectations, wondering if Jeff Bezos really needs any more money off me in this day and age, and there, nestled among subsequent series of Mr Robot and The Man In The High Castle that I will never sit through, was the recognisable font of The Walking Dead.  But, this wasn’t in the characteristic dark hues I normally associate with this horror series.  It was bright and neon, exciting and new.  I didn’t need to think twice before clicking play on The Walking Dead: World Beyond.

We’ve discussed the importance of the colon here before.  And no, I’m not talking about the large intestine (shout out, IBS sufferers).  I’m on about those two dots you sometimes see between words.  In TV shows, they separate an original title from its spin-off progeny.  You know, like Narcos and Narcos: Mexico.  Such a tiddly pair of punctuation points can carry a very large responsibility.  If you’re an impassioned fan of the original show, then this extra facet better be a welcome addition rather than an embarrassing dilution.  High hopes were had.  The Walking Dead, abandoned by many, remains my definitive zombie boxset.  Despite running for so many series, it always maintains its edge in finding new ways to bring to life the horrors of an ongoing undead apocalypse.  Its companion show, Fear The Walking Dead, was one of the first programmes I ever wrote about here and itself attained similar heights to its originator.  To recap, then, I had high hopes.  I have now written some paragraphs about my disappoint.

Just One More Episode was meant to be an exercise in boxset worship, but it’s developed a side hustle as the internet’s definitive home of zombie TV content blogging, so it’s only fair I speak frankly about World Beyond.  What made those hopes all the higher was the interesting angle of the concept.  With the initial outbreak of walkers now so far in the past of The Walking Dead’s universe, World Beyond would tell the stories of the first generation to come of age since the end of the world (a bit like the future youth of the UK now we’ve been dragged out the EU).  Our protagonists are enjoying their teenage years at the Campus Colony, a university-based satellite settlement of a grander network of civilisation that has sprung up.  For me, simply seeing how life is conducted there would be compelling enough, but this would clearly lack any real jeopardy.  Cue the Civic Republic, a more enigmatic political entity with whom our heroes’ community is forging a new relationship.  Hope and Iris are sisters whose father has gone to lend his academic skills to the Civic Republic but, suspecting him to be in danger, they sneak out of their safety bubble and embark on a journey across the devastated USA to rescue him.

So, we’re dealing with sheltered teens here.  Understandably, they’re not used to brain-injuring countless walkers while out and about.  In fact, they’re so pathetic, they tend to scream and lie down, allowing a zombie to get on top of them and try to bite them, only for an adult to have to come along and sort them out.  How they avoid getting bitten is beyond me, but this not only makes the walkers look like a non-threat, it makes it hard to respect our heroes.  By its very nature, the most kick-arse Walking Dead characters are the ones that can handle themselves around zombies with skill and flair.  Sure, the kids in our ragtag gang of rescuers all have the comic book-inspired looks we would expect, clutching weapons that give their character a signature or dressed individually to showcase that they’re hard as nails/troubled/a bit intellectual.  But it’s all mouth and no trousers.

Then there’s the fact they’re on a voyage.  Our setting is therefore a stream of southern scenes that don’t really ever establish a sense of place and theme.  Each season of The Walking Dead has a settlement at its heart, but in World Beyond we stumble from one tire fire to the next disaster, giving the episodes a cumulative effect of never really going anywhere.  We know Hope and Iris’s dad isn’t going to be rescued until things have been drawn right out.  This diminishes the tension and, ironically for Hope, drives in a feeling of hopelessness you can’t really escape.

The Civic Republic itself is squandered as a source of intrigue.  Too over the top to be that credible, yet too mysterious to be a true threat, they top and tail this first season of ten episodes in a way that makes you wonder if they’ve been forgotten.  There’s no real reason for them to be so sinister beyond the well-established concept that, even in a zombie apocalypse, humans will always be the biggest monsters.  We almost rush through any substantial grounding of the political and civil landscape to focus on the inner emotions of our teen stars, but watching them come to terms with smashing the head in of their first zombie of a multi-episode character arc just isn’t what bloodthirsty Walking Dead fans are looking for.  Naturally, the only way to script such psychological storytelling is with clichés, driving down the show’s originality score even further.

You have to be cruel to be kind, so let’s hope the second series finds some edge, otherwise this could be the beginning of the end for a character universe that has compelled so many viewers up till now to follow its adventures.  My hunger, quite literally, for zombies, means I will sit through this stuff, but treat yourself to something like Black Summer or Kingdom (킹덤) if you’re serious about living your life under the constant threat of the dead coming to life and eating you.  You never know what 2021 might bring.

Black Summer

I’m not sure why I’m doing this now, as Black Summer dropped on Netflix back in April and, as with all zombie content, I had to watch it there and then.  However, something about the title seems appropriate as we reach the back end of August.  No, it’s not a spin-off of Dear White People, whose third season has just launched, the viewing of which I am saving for when I’ve bought a big telly for my new flat.  My choice is more to do with the tempestuous weather that everyone has been moaning about.  Brits have evolved to be waterproof as it’s almost always raining here, so I’m not sure why one globally warmed day of 38 degrees would lead us to expect constant sunshine until the schools go back.

Summer 2019 is black due to the gathering storm clouds that seem to signal an afternoon shower each day as some part of new European rainy season.  From my office window I can spectate as workers clad optimistically in summer dresses and t-shirts alike sprint across pavements while a good old bucketing-down catches people unawares.  I know I shouldn’t delight in others’ suffering but getting caught in the rain (along with piña coladas) is something that truly affirms your humanity: the planet has literally wetted you.  Plus, I must get it from my father – he used to arrive early to pick me up from my Sixth Form job at Waitrose before I could drive, simply because my shift ended half an hour after closing time and he would derive endless entertainment from watching affluent potential shoppers stride towards the automatic doors, only to respond with outraged incredulity when they were denied entry to their favourite providore and therefore forced to forego a top-up shop consisting mostly of artisan cheese and fine wines.

Let’s make no bones about it: I don’t like summer.  In fact, a zombie apocalypse would probably improve my ability to withstand the aestival months.  I would like to blame London for this.  It’s the worst place in the world when hot, mostly as it was built in Victorian times for the damp climate mentioned above (though, over a hundred years later, they’re still building most of it).  The morning Tube, as unpleasant as it already is, takes on a new level of odorous odiousness: once you’ve spotted one sweat patch, you suddenly realise that everyone’s every crevice is proffering its own wet spot to any casually observing eye.  I may scoff into my novel, but I secretly know that the tickling in the small of my back is from my own sweat beads dashing down my spine to pool and fester in the dark dankness of my crack.  And there it stays for the whole working day and whatever else I am doing with my evening (watching boxsets).

Londoners do two things in the sun.  The first is to find a patch of grass, regardless of its proximity to the heavy traffic of a thoroughfare.  The second is to drink on it.  I don’t enjoy exhaust fumes, nor is it fun to look for somewhere to wee after your third cider, all while wishing you’d put more effort in at the gym as your body stretches before you like some squidgily marshmallow-like dough.  So, once the longest day has gone past, the chill in the air returns and the leaves start to fall, a certain joy fills me as I know we are approaching my favourite time of year.  For some reason, autumn carries with it the most nostalgia.  A breeze can suddenly evoke the exact moment in Year 10 when I realised that other people were stupid.  Factor in the bonus that each autumn brought another year of school: older, wiser, no cooler, but with a new pencil case.  The geek in me loved going back because I enjoyed all the writing and the learning and such.

Which is why some writing is happening now, as a hobby.  I started this blog about TV shows.  I should probably therefore spend a couple of passages actually tackling this week’s programme instead of sharing half-baked yet whimsically charming reflections on the passing of time.  Regular readers will know of my love for the zombie genre.  Fear The Walking Dead remains one of my most-read posts, while The Walking Dead and Korean treasure, Kingdom (킹덤), have of course been covered.  One show I’ve seen some of but not included here is Z Nation, another serial tackling the undead apocalypse.  Its crime?  Too many LOLs  I exist in perpetual fear of a zombie takeover, so I really struggle to see the funny side.  I don’t mind dark humour in the face of annihilation, but the viewer in me wants the genuine threat treated seriously.  The point is, Z Nation misses the mark slightly, but my scant research has revealed the Black Summer is its origin story.  Let’s not hold this against the show though.

Our action opens in an unnamed suburb, some weeks after breakout.  Enough confusion still exists about what is going on, and things are never really explained.  We only glimpse the unfolding of disorientating events through seemingly unrelated characters, all desperately trying to survive (with varying levels of success).  The characterisation has been accused of shallowness, but I’m going to describe it as subtle – you’re deliberately left conflicted about who is good and who is bad, bringing to life the fact that trusting others while the undead chase you can lead either to salvation or betrayal, but you’ll only find out when it’s too late.

The suburban streets in the sunshine take on a claustrophobic air, with peril around every repetitive corner, separated individuals hopelessly searching for loved ones.  Tension builds around rumours of sanctuary, yearning for reunion and the constant risk of zombies and bad people.  The eight episodes stumble forward, arrhythmically switching perspectives and pace, though we culminate in a series of gun battles which are equal parts thrilling climax and video game fodder.

For devotees of the genre, this is a worthwhile watch.  Its fresh-enough approach avoids the pitfalls of what we have seen before, but there’s a sense a bigger vision is lacking behind all the death and destruction.  I’d happily sit through a second series, but the internet is not forthcoming with details of any recommissioning.  I promise you genuine chills from Black Summer’s flesh-eating walkers, especially in the mix of the show’s concerning plausibility.  But I realise the most alarming image you may have from this week’s post is that of my sweaty crack.

The Walking Dead

I don’t know if I can carry on with The Walking Dead.  It doesn’t give a lot back.  I’m persevering because, when it’s at its best, it’s truly among the most impactful television I have ever seen.  But series eight, which has just returned from its mid-season break, is a gruelling and gruesome onslaught of hopelessness.

I mean, who has a mid-season break anyway?  With the average American series over twenty episodes, compared to Brits calling it a day after about six or seven, I realise I don’t have a leg to stand on.  But where are the other mid-season breaks in adult life?  I’m very much in favour of bringing some sort of half term to working life, otherwise it’s just endless, isn’t it?

But anyway, they’ve had a good innings.  Who’d have thought such an incredibly graphic and violently gory drama would attract such international acclaim?  There was a slight head start from its roots in a series of popular comic books, but I don’t know anything about these really, so I won’t wade in with my views (though a lack of knowledge has never really stopped me before).  In short, the initial premise is that a man wakes up from a coma to find that a zombie apocalypse has taken hold on the USA.  Cue eight seasons of struggles to stay alive.

And what a man.  Rick Grimes is the Southern sheriff whose sweat-soaked shoulders end up bearing the weight of leadership: he finds himself the de facto head of a ragtag band of survivors.  Around him, there develops a cult of Rick.  He seems to be able to keep people safe.  Repeatedly, the characters end up in nice new communities: planting a few crops (they seem to favour beans), sticking spikes through zombies’ heads at their perimeter fence to avoid being overrun, teaching the children how to cope (mixed ability, of course).  This obviously lowers the scope for drama, so it never lasts long.  After a while, you begin secretly to wish it will all go terribly wrong.  After a bit longer, you realise this is inevitable and merely bide your time until the undead stream into whichever compound and thin out the cast a bit.

However, Rick doesn’t go around mansplaining how to kill a zombie to a bunch of terrified mother hens.  He’s epic, but the strong female characters run rings around him.  Michonne, Sasha, Tara, Rosita and Maggie are just some of the bad motherf*ckers keeping his show on the road.  For me, though, the most impressive is Carol.  While every cast member of The Walking Dead grows and develops, Carol’s beginnings as a brow-beaten housewife couldn’t be further from where she ends up.  The first episode of series five, No Sanctuary, is proof of her undeniable badassery.  It’s one of the greatest things I have ever seen.  Take a bow, Melissa McBride.

This is what happens to Rick’s people.  They get tough.  And then they come across other people that are softer, and dominate them, or they come across other tough people, and fight with them.  This seems to be the rut we are stuck in.  With each series, more times passes since the apocalypse.  The undead might be more decayed than before, but it’s the humans who are even more monstrous.

I’ve already covered the spin-off show, Fear The Walking Dead, where I mentioned that the constant threat of death makes the drama more intense.  Your favourite could be killed at any juncture.  Never are they more at risk than at the huge storyline climaxes that have punctuated the start and end of each season (and each mid-season for that matter).

It’s these peaks that have been more like troughs in recent series.  In an effort to avoid being predictable and allowing its main characters to seem immortal, The Walking Dead will desperately cull a few of them, just to keep you on your toes.  But these deaths feel like betrayals, particularly when they don’t take the storylines anywhere.  There’s a balance to be struck here, but the striking has failed to hit the mark like it used to.

I should have seen the end in sight when a tiger appeared in the second episode of the seventh season.  Shiva might also be in the comics, but this wild animal’s introduction in The Well, obeying its human masters, shattered many illusions for me.  The dead coming back to life?  I’ll buy it.  But a tiger that knows which people to maul based on the community they come from?  Come on!

Countless friends have abandoned ship, complaining that the storylines are too drawn out, that there is too much build up before the release of any action.  But then series eight has been constant battle action, and that doesn’t feel right either.  When you’ve invested so much in a show, you feel it owes you something.  I’m sticking with it in case I can work out what I feel it owes me.  Maybe I’ll know when I see it.  I don’t want to be a fan that expects everything to be done just to please them, so I’m bearing in mind that this is still one of the best shows out there (which I seem to say every single week on here…).

Given my love of trash (Bromans, Survival Of The Fittest, Geordie Shore), I’ll tolerate a lot of things.  I’ve come to terms with how much the cast perspire in the 100% Georgia humidity.  I don’t mind that so many of them seem to be British, which makes me constantly scrutinise their accents for an accidental syllable of Home Counties pronunciation.  I don’t mind that the rest were in The Wire.  I could handle The Cell (series seven, episode three) when Daryl is held captive and tortured with the same song on loop (ruin your day here).  And finally, I can handle the current storyline doldrum.

The reason for this is series two, episode seven, Pretty Much Dead Already.  It ends with an epiphany.  It makes you question all you thought you knew about zombies, about humans and about humanity.  It turns on its head the unwritten rules of TV.  I felt like the sofa had collapsed away from under me and I was freefalling into a new world.

I’m just waiting for that to happen again.

Fear The Walking Dead

If you’re going to watch a lot of television shows, it’s worth figuring out what sort of themes you like the most.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to interest myself in shows about solving murders.  I’m (probably) never going to murder anyone, so it all seems largely irrelevant.  However, any show with a hint of zombie apocalypse goes straight on my watchlist.  If I follow my own logic, then this should mean that I fully expect to live through humanity being killed off by the undead.  But then, I don’t think I do see this in my future.  Yet, it’s still feels more relevant to my life.  And this is most likely because half my days are spent in a zombie-like routine, catching the same buses, standing in the same spots on Tube platforms, thumbing through the same apps and repeatedly writing the same office emails.  It’s not quite apocalyptic, but its tedium is probably as painful as being eaten alive by cadavers.

Anyway, we’ve got distracted.  The point is, I love anything about zombies.  Ever since I was dragged to see 28 Days Later (actually about an infection), I’ve never found anything as compelling as working out what I would do in the same situation.  That said, I still don’t have a plan.  And so, with the eighth series of The Walking Dead hitting UK screens, it’s time to turn attentions to the spin off, mostly because I’ve just finished the second series.

With the democratisation of TV content, allowing viewers to pick their own schedules, a model that’s done so well for Netflix and Amazon, it was an absolute mugging off that BT did the worst thing ever with Fear The Walking Dead on its UK launch by holding it hostage on its paid-for channels in order to force people to sign up.  Instead, people simply resorted to pirating it, so go fudge yourselves, BT.  I have been a good boy and simply hung on for the episodes to come under Amazon Prime.

The show’s lack of ubiquity is a real shame, as its quality really is up there with The Walking Dead.  Sure, the gore maws your eyes sore, but having the fall of civilisation as a backdrop really makes a good character arc seem all the more compelling.  The action centres on LA in the early days of the outbreak, complementing The Walking Dead’s setting in the well-established future of the same apocalypse.  The tension that dominates the first series as the characters try and work out what’s going on while we’re fully clued up on their fates makes for epic viewing.

But, it’s actually very hard to like any of the characters.  The show still has you rooting for them to survive, but they mostly are a real bunch of bastards.  This continues into the second series and ties in with the theory that, while monsters may walk the earth, humans will always be the biggest bad guys.

Beyond describing the premise as following a band of survivors attempting to live out the end of days, there’s not much else you need to know.  Comparisons to The Walking Dead might be all we have.  While everyone in that show looks sweaty as balls in the Georgia humidity, Fear The Walking Dead plays out in the dry heat of California and beyond.  As someone who is almost always too hot and can barely keep any clothes on, my biggest concern is how someone can bear to wear jeans in a desert, not the fact that they are being chased by brain-devouring zombies.

The languages geek within me loves the fact that a good portion of the show switches between Spanish and English, and you’re definitely in for a treat if you like boats.  The Walking Dead’s zombie lore is well observed, though Fear The Walking Dead does rely a great deal on the fact that smearing yourself with dead people’s bodily mush disguises to zombies that you are still alive.  It’s a bit too easy.

Zombie-based dramas trump a lot of other themes, simply because any and all of the characters can die at any minute.  It might sound macabre to enjoy this, but what else can consistently provide such strong human drama?  In murder mysteries, the victim is already dead, lying there cold and inert in a chilly morgue.  In Fear The Walking Dead, the victims of death stalk the earth having a lot more fun (and doing that sort of breathy growling they enjoy so much).  Just don’t watch it straight before bed as you will be too tense to sleep, unless you have finally numbed all your emotions by watching too much of this sort of thing.