The Walking Dead

I know just looking at the title some people may already be shaking their heads saying I have no idea what I'm talking about, but just hear me out. I remember when I first came across the show back in 2010 when it first premiered. The showing I saw was featured in black and white and it was about five to ten minutes into the very first episode. Something about it immediately grabbed me. Now, this was around the time where I was still slightly terrified of all things horror but started coming around on the genre.

One thing I could say for sure is that despite many people thinking "it's just another zombie thing" it's actually very unique. What makes it unique? Well, most zombie movies go the same way. We start off with a group of people, then there is an outbreak and everyone is becoming zombies and at the very end, the star couple barely escapes. Great. Although one could argue that we get to know the main character in this show, Rick, like we get to know Alice, in the Resident Evil series, nothing really makes you care about any of the characters. In every other zombie movie and series out there you barely get any back story to what is going on or about the characters. Even when you do get some of that information, it has little to no impact on the plot or storyline, and honestly, sometimes you don't even care. They are just about the action of people killing zombies and zombies eating people and even I will admit, that gets boring after a while. But what this show does so great, is that it's so much more than that.

At the root of it all, the show really isn't about the zombies. Many people may be upset by that but that was never the sole focus of the show, that was just the first conflict. When something so catastrophic like a zombie apocalypse happens, a lot more things go down than people simply dying than getting back up hungry for brains. It's about how something like that can destroy a society and how people react when it becomes every many for themselves and what happens when groups for and civilization is attempted to be rebuilt. It's like one of my favorite conversations about the show on Rick vs Negan. If you don't know anything about these charcters here's a brief summary to catch you up. Rick is our lead, a sherrif who wakes up in a hospital after being shot, into the new world. After waking he goes in search of his wife and son as he fights his way through the zombies. Negan is a major villain introduced in season 7 who is famously known for his brutality among his people along with his enemies. He acts like he plays fair, but in reality, he makes sure he gets the best while he keeps everyone else healthy enough to work for his "cause" or he kills them. So the conversation that comes up is "If we started the series with Negan, would we see him as the good guy and Rick as the villain?" For a number of reasons, you could argue that we may see it this way if we knew Negan's back story and remembered that there were a few times others, including Rick's son Carl, were afraid of Rick when he went a little too far over the line. So you come to the realization that there really aren't any true heroes or bad guys, there is just your perspective of the situation, just like in life.

Another thing that makes me love this show but also pains me that is soon to be ending, is that it incredibly relates to the way we are living now in this pandemic. In the beginning, it was thought that if you got covid you were automatically doomed or that it would just be a matter of time just like when someone got bit by a zombie in the show. We, a lot of the time now see a divide in the world of Pro-vaxxers and Anti-vaxxers like how in the show it would be Rick's group or all the other groups fighting against them. Both illustrate how people are affected in a time of crisis and how they react in hopes of survival. It shows how the lines sometimes get blurred on what is the right and wrong thing to do in some given situations. We are trying to get through this new world of covid like they are still and will forever be trying to get through the world of zombies.

Lastly between the comics and the show, I love how they differ. That way sometimes you know what comes next if you keep up with both and sometimes you get pleasantly surprised. And the acting and writting are far beyond phenomenal. Whenever I see the beautiful character arcs and how well all of the actors play them on the show, you feel so connected with them and then with the comics as well. So those are most or maybe all of the reasons why The Walking Dead is the best show ever.