I like zombies. Also apocalypse stories. So it was no surprise that I liked The Walking Dead. I love playing through scenarios in my mind, wondering how I would react if I were in such a situation.
One of the things I am sure of is that I would make better day to day decisions. The people in The Walking Dead do all kinds of stupid things but I completely buy into their emotional, immediate choices even when those choices are bad. Kill that person, let that person go, empathize with a zombie, these are all things that would totally go wrong.
But geez, can you stop making awful choices day after day when there is no pressure? The zombies are pushing on the fence. Go kill them all! You can kill one every ten seconds, so if you work on stabbing for an hour you kill 600 of them. There won't be any more zombies then, and you can stop worrying. Clear the damn zombies out around your base, don't just let them accumulate to disastrous levels. Get four people, build some spears, go get your stab on!
But no, they just let the zombies stand there until it all goes bad. Fools!
I would be a much better zombie apocalypse survivor than most people, that much I am sure of.
The show was really great up until the end of season six. People told me that it went bad in season seven, but what they didn't mention was that the finale to season six was a travesty. I watched it and was all bitter and grumpy and then I finally realized why: The writers had done all the same awful things that me and my friends did when we were telling stories in Dungeons and Dragons when we were teenagers.
You see, back in those days, we were terrible at storytelling. We would have bad guys who always just knew what the heroes were up to. The bad guys had infinite supplies of troops, traps, weapons, and plans, and could have easily defeated the heroes at any time. They often captured the heroes and taunted them, only to dump them off somewhere for no reason at all. The players often wondered why exactly such powerful villains had nothing better to do than spy on the heroes all day and try to be a pain in the ass.
And the finale to season six of The Walking Dead was exactly that. The series has had plenty of good villains so far and they didn't resort to all these idiotic setups to establish the bad ass nature of the villains. This time around the villains knew everything the heroes did, despite that making no sense. They had unlimited soldiers, fuel, trucks, and weapons and spent lavishly of those things just to taunt and annoy the heroes. In a post apocalyptic landscape where all these things are precious, scarce, and irreplaceable the villains tossed them away simply to be brats.
It wrecks the world. It makes me feel like all the previous struggles for supplies that everyone went through were a joke. Dealing with hunger and desperation in previous seasons was trivialized because obviously there is enough of everything just sitting around for these idiots to waste it to no purpose. The immersion is gone.
I can't be too harsh in sum - the show was great up until now. But geez, when you can't do any better at writing a season finale than the whimsical creations of a teenage DnD player you have lost your way.
No I just need to do what I did after watching The Matrix 2 and 3. "Gee, The Walking Dead was so good. It is too bad that they never finished season six. I am sure it would have been great."
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