Fewer people showed up for the season finale of “The Walking Dead” Sunday than watched the season start. Both were still a considerable amount of people for a cable drama about zombies but still.
Maybe some of them are starting to feel about the show the way I have been. I was a fan of the first season or so. Felt guilty about missing episodes last season. And this time, I just watched the premiere and let it go.
After a while, it is a little numbing to watch people poke, shoot or otherwise destroy zombie skulls by the dozen. And the band of followers we are following, while compelling in the first season, when they made their way to an empty city and actually made it, they’ve been spending subsequent seasons sitting on a farm and protecting it or lately, imprisoning themselves inside an abandoned jail. Fighting a rival community run by a crazed governor was good fun for a while, but eventually the drama turned into pretty much a survivalist narrative — protecting one’s own from other militarized bands of survivors, while the original main story — worldwide zombie takeover — is seen as something that was secondary, or part of the background.
There is still some artistry involved to the show, I could tell from watching the finale after missing a bunch of episodes. Moving forward and backward in time, they were able to stitch together a story about the humanity and brutality inside the group’s leader, Rick, and what example he hopes to set for his son Carl.
Carl, who has been damaged by all kinds of things beyond flesh eating zombies, had to cope with all kinds of things, chief of which was killing his zombified mother. He became a hardened little jerk after that.
Seeing that, Rick tried to get him to be a more peaceful part of the community by doing farming. A flashback of those days on Sunday went back far enough to when I was still following the show, and advice he had taken from the old patriarch of the tribe, Hershel.
But when Rick, Carl and Michonne are out en route to a place they heard was a decent shelter called Terminus, they are captured by an ugly band but are spared only because Daryl is with them. Rick fights his way out of it, showing a kind of pent-up bloodthirstiness that even the show’s producers seemed to recoil from — biting one guy in the jugular as if for food, like a zombie; and then disemboweling another who was threatening Carl.
Once at Terminus they are greeted by the kind of mellow people you’d see at the food co-op (with the realization you’d never live up to their organization or their level of cool).
Rick loses it again when he sees a stopwatch in their possession that probably belonged to Hershel and the gang is outnumbered and put into a train car where, the internet is sure, they are being kept by cannibals (in part because that’s what they were in the comic books).
Food for thought. Or rather, for people.
But at this point I’m not sure I need such a brutal show to make me think about the animalistic natures of men and what our limits are. I’ve learned mine, and that is mostly not watch “The Walking Dead.”