Lots of people who watched the show’s new spinoff series, Fear the Walking Dead, remarked on its comparatively slower pace to the parent series, but I’d say that’s completely reversed. Yes, Fear has far less blood and guts, but what it does have is what The Walking Dead desperately needs: a goal, other than survive. Fear‘s showrunners gave its leads a goalpost to reach (find their family, get out of town, figure out what’s going on with the military), and constantly moved it back when things went pear-shaped, but at least gave some semblance to an ending – the apocalypse.
That’s essentially the antithesis of what Robert Kirkman always envisioned for the series – no endgame, just living – but as the years go on, the treading on the tires are starting to wear and sometimes it’s hard not to wonder how many times these people will stumble upon a community, witness something awful, walk for a while, and do it all over again. Repetition can breed complacency, and some fans will be just that – completely content with watching these characters struggle in this world. For the rest of us, it’s just breeding boredom.
Still, simultaneously, infuriatingly, I can’t completely denounce the show for being so daringly slugged. It’s managed to take a weird, sometimes impressionistic look at a crowded sub-genre and made a veritable hit out of it all. At the same time, I feel less on board with the show’s aimlessness than I have in the past, and the myriad amounts of character drama occupying the intervening spaces just aren’t explored well enough for me to feel satisfied. Rick is gruff, Carol is guardedly petulant, Daryl rides a motorcycle, and The Walking Dead finally feels like a long-running series that’s begun to listen more to its fans than its source material.
It still reigns supreme in the gore department, with skin and ribcages falling off with gusto in the opening minutes alone, but it’s just not enough to counterbalance the circuitous nature of the show the longer it continues. Some may be okay with that, with a series that just is in this world, with people that are just dealing with random stuff happening to them, and with no overarching thrust pushing them forward. The characters and situations and stories are undoubtedly integral to many out there, to those who could – as the old saying goes – watch Rick and the gang read a phone book and still be entertained. It’s hard for me to distinguish between The Walking Dead‘s fluctuation in quality and my own plummeting care for these characters and this world, but what I do know is that, for the rest of us, sometimes it feels like that saying is taken all too literally by the writers.
