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How the Second Season of the Walking Dead Missed the Mark [Season Review]

By | March 19th, 2012
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Earlier today we ran our usual recap of the Walking Dead as David took point and looked at key moments of the series. While there used to be a rotating review team to talk about the show, it was essentially boiled down to just David doing it alone because — to put it quite bluntly — the majority of us had essentially lost interest in talking about it. While we’re all tremendous fans of the comic book, there was really only so much to say at any given time about the weekly installments of the show.

To put it bluntly: the entire second season of the Walking Dead was rather disappointing. Now that it’s all over and done with, it’s time to take a look back and try to figure out what went wrong between this and the first season, to which we were all rather enthusiastic fans of.

I do want to mention: it is not my intention to be a fuddy-duddy of sorts. As explained to me by another member of the site, apparently the Walking Dead is insanely popular, and because I live in my own private world/bubble where three episodes of Black Mirror was the best show of 2011, clearly my thoughts don’t even remotely represent a majority. Yet, never the less, there are a still a few things that the Walking Dead‘s second season ostensibly got “wrong”, and I can only hope what I’m about to address will be looked at in a more careful lens for the third season.

Take a look behind the cut as I rant and ramble like a jilted fanboy. Spoilers are heavily discussed.

The first six-episode season of The Walking Dead was, in terms of adaptation, a fairly accurate representation of the first six issues of the book. Beginning with a lone man waking up alone amidst the downfall of mankind and trying to find his family in a world where the odds are implicitly against him, the show felt like the book. Sure, it took a few deviations and had a different character here or there to show that the team behind the scenes wasn’t afraid to take a new chance, but overall, the show was the comic.

That is, up until that last episode. Most fans of the book were confused when the show found itself in the CDC headquarters, as opposed to out in the wilderness fearing the threat of coming seasons and finding Shane and Rick at odds with one another for a dark arc finale. The comic’s first “season” (so to say) ended with Carl putting a bullet in Shane’s head to save his father, showing that the book’s outlook was only going to go downhill from there; the show, on the other hand, essentially threw that out in place of an ending that was a tad bit more optimistic, putting together it’s survivors and playing them off into the sunset as the short season came to a close.

All things considered, that should have been the first sign that the second season of the Walking Dead was going to be heading in a curious direction. Where the comic was always able to take the stance of “anything can happen at any second,” things don’t work that way in the television world. Certainly some contractual elements have to be obliged; certain actors sign up for multiple seasons at a time and, generally speaking, a network might be a bit timid to have an eight-year-old shoot a grown man in the head on some kind of moral or ethical ground (although AMC has Breaking Bad, so perhaps that last argument is moot). The general impression that everyone making the show had was that, by leaving Shane alive, they could tell some interesting stories — or, at the very least, more stories.

Yet that never really took place, and for one very obvious reason: in the 13 episodes of the second season that aired, the entire reason to tune in was to see Shane and Rick go at it for dominance. Really and truly, there was no other ongoing saga here; two alpha males loved the same woman, and both of them wanted to show off who was the better man in a world where none of that machismo should inherently matter (yet always, always does). This wasn’t a case of having more stories to tell, but rather an example of trying to tell a short story over a longer time span. The show threw away thirteen episodes on this battle which was always going to end one way and one way alone (Rick “defeating” Shane certainly surprised no one), and we were given the longest run of filler episodes that I think has ever aired on television.

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This shouldn’t surprise anyone who is a frequent reader of the sequential art medium, but for those of you who are unfamiliar with this concept, indulge me for a minute: one of the essential goals from the artistic perspective of any given comic is not only to show cool images or tell a nice story, but to display the passage of time. As your eyes move from panel to panel, you watch the passage of time throughout various scenes; despite two panels being adjacent to one another, they could in some instances represent a gap in time spanning months, or years. The space between the borders of the panels is one of the most important tools that a comic creator has, and anyone who has read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” can tell you this lesson by heart.

To that end, one of “the Walking Dead’s” greatest strengths is it’s handling of time and pacing throughout the story. Whether through the use of decompressed sequences (which often times actually results in a slower moving comic, humorously enough) or it’s ability to push the story through large gaps of time without hesitation, the story of “the Walking Dead” has often moved rather quickly, heavily focusing on arc by arc storytelling. There are a few stories that last a bit longer than that here and there, but for the most part that’s how the book has operated since it’s inception: we watch the survivors for specific periods of time in specific adventures that all link together sequentially in the end. That’s partially the reason the trades of the book do so well, because you can pick up a volume and be given a satisfying story that leaves you wanting more (that and all the zombies, of course).

What I’m getting at is this: in terms of the comic placed against the show, the second season took roughly 13 hours (give or take) to tell a three-issue story. That’s ultimately my biggest complaint; as mentioned, the comic has done a much better job of moving the story along with succinct pacing and a sense of tension and terror that the show doesn’t have, and placed against a first season where every episode was somewhat the equivalent of a single issue of the book, this really skewered the pacing of the show. The entire story in the book that takes place at the farm is a short one, albeit a rather great one, and while the show does hit all the notes the original story does (Carl getting injured and a barn full of zombies being key), it just keeps it going. Sure, this is a story of survival and if our characters find a nice place to settle down they should take it, but the characters in the book very quickly realized the folly of the farm — especially when they found a barn full of zombies — and, in a world full of walking nightmares, moved the fuck on.

By taking so long to “get to the point” of how bad of an idea staying on that farm was, not only did the show effortlessly meander around the obvious plot points but the Walking Dead inherently took away two of the greatest aspects of the comic by doing so. Opening every issue of the comic results in the reader questioning “what could go wrong now?” whereas every episode of the show revolves around the question of “when are they going to stop talking about maybe doing something?” There was no fear or tension to the Walking Dead because it wasn’t really a horror show anymore. Sure, there are zombies, and yes, the comic book is not just about those brain dead bastards either, but the Walking Dead essentially relied on people being interested enough to wait until the last five minutes where maybe something would happen. In one episode, a zombie shows up at the very end to kill Dale in a really poorly telegraphed sequence, and that alone becomes the sole element of the episode worth watching or discussing, as the rest of the episode was just Dale walking around and talking to people about their feelings — a shtick that got old just about three episodes in.

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The second, and arguably the most important one, is that the show basically made all of the characters unlikable. That really is the key thing; in the comic book, it was easy to connect with the large cast of characters. The worse the situation got for them, the more you feared for their lives. The group was always on the run, and it was easy to foster affection for this ragtag group of survivors because you wanted to see them live. When the Walking Dead stretched out the story to thirteen fairly grueling episodes, the emphasis went on having all the characters overtly pontificating about themselves, the situation they’re in and the bleak future as opposed to just showing you because really, on a farm with no zombies until the last second, things aren’t as bad as they could be (in the comic, the survivors were forced to survive without shelter during winter before the farm and a town full of zombies). A large majority of the scenes in this season ended up being ultimately repetitive, to the point where you basically “get it” very early on: “Yes, it is so difficult to be alive in this world. Maybe if one of you died, though, we could see why it’s awful and not just hear about it like a dramatic reading a teenage girl’s old LiveJournal.”

Now characters who had plenty of redeeming qualities suddenly become insufferable. We end up watching a show of incredibly selfish character who all have a distinct and heavy emphasis on what makes them flawed in a bad way, instead of using those initial flaws as places for the character to grow. Andrea’s arc is chopped up from a girl who grows into the second in command of the group to a woman following in the shadows of a mad man. Laurie just becomes a manipulative and indecisive character who, by the end of the season, is left with one of the worst character moments on the show as she randomly decides that maybe trying to push Rick into killing Shane wasn’t a great idea. Glenn is no longer the shy outlier of the group who slowly becomes a man, but rather the character forever stuck in a crap position at the bottom of the ladder, the group’s gopher, and his relationship with Maggie doesn’t help him one bit (if anything, it hinders him). Hershel, a strong if confused family man, becomes an alcoholic loser devoid of any authority, with all of his religious aspects removed – an incredibly poor decision, as his handle of authority against Rick’s resulted in a great and tense dynamic.

And Rick? Well, he’s just a mess now. Instead of being the shining light of hope that the group needs, he’s now a dark and dysfunctional man who ends the series as the worst character of the group, and I can only imagine how quickly his leadership will be contested when the third season starts. Contextually speaking, Rick never gave up hope until the end of the prison story (outside of a moment or two here and there), and even then he managed to pull through. The character only really because somewhat irredeemable recently, and it seems as if the Walking Dead is trying to blow that load prematurely.

Really, the only likable character on the show is Daryl, and that’s because his character rather openly doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. He is the only character who doesn’t need to spend more than an episode talking about how bad the world is now and how everything is different, and even then he’s just hallucinating in the wilderness by himself. Daryl didn’t need to sit around with the others to discuss whether the hunt for Sophia should continue, he merely went out and looked for her. Say what you will about his family ties, but he is the only character I would trust in a real world situation.

And this is, of course, to say nothing of the lack of Tyrese. Anyone who has read the comic knows how pivotal his character is in the upcoming story, and to not have him or — worse yet — to perhaps replace him with T-Dog, who spent the majority of the season AWOL, is just silly.

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So what do we have as season two reaches it’s close? 13 episodes for a story that should’ve been done in two (not including the moment where Carl gets hurt), and a very long and ineffective morality play about how even in a world full of flesh eating monstrosities, human’s are the worst animal. Perhaps I’m spoiled by the early and fervent quality of the original series, but the entire season is akin to a very long road-trip: you spend a lot of time trying to pick a good song to listen to, and perhaps you have a nice pit-stop at an attraction here or there, but the entire duration of the drive is never as important, memorable or interesting as where you’re trying to get to.

Of course, that brings us to an interesting point: despite its mediocre thirteen episodes, the Walking Dead builds immediate intrigue with it’s last five minutes (a trick employed in every episode, so it was ultimately fitting that the last five minutes of the season overall were the ones that counted). The introduction of Michonne (cloaked, assuredly because an actress for the character hadn’t been picked — or it’s Danai Guirra) and the final shot of the prison in the distance are truly enough for anyone who is a fan of the book to be excited. Truthfully, those five minutes alone eclipse the entire zombie-filled opening sequence, and that’s the sequence most people have probably been waiting to see all season long in a show with a name somewhat referencing zombies (and that other pivotal scene that hasn’t happened in the show where a dejected Rick screams at the group, “WE ARE THE WALKING DEAD!”, making that thematic undertone quite overt).

The prison arc ran from issues #13 – 48 and is the longest and darkest “Walking Dead” storyline outside of that whole overall survival story, with a ton of great stories in it. What makes that even more interesting of a fact is that really, almost none of the best prison moments have any zombies! In fact, the entire prison story touches on a lot of the moral and ethical questions this season tried to address, but in a much more intriguing way that kept it in tune with the rest of what was happening in the book, so it should really be of no surprise to anyone when someone who has read the book cries out in excitement at the end of the episode. Why wouldn’t we? This is what we wanted to see, is it not? The prison and it’s inmates, Michonne, and soon the Governor and all the horror that happens in Woodbury; it’s the definitive “Walking Dead” storyline, and the one that every subsequent one is held up against. Bring it on, season three! I forget why I was upset about season two and am ready to see that gym sequence!

Yet, at this point, it is worth remembering the last time a story was forced into a filmed production by avid fan fervor: Spider-Man 3 and the inclusion of Venom. We all remember how well that turned out, now don’t we?

From what I hear from other people, the Walking Dead is a great show. Maybe I’m just spoiled on things that I consider better television, like the aforementioned Breaking Bad and Black Mirror, or Sherlock and Game of Thrones (which proved that copy and pasting from the source material and giving it to actors works quite well in adaptations). Perhaps I’m picky or allow myself to be too reliant of a fan on the source material, but I just don’t see it. What I see is a lot of wasted potential. If the Walking Dead wants to match “the Walking Dead”, its third season needs to remember what makes the book so great: palpable fear and tension, likable characters in a tragic situation, a heightened dramatic pace and a dark veil hanging over the show in which any character could die, not just the ones who bother us weekly, and honestly, at this point I want what happened to Carl in issue #83 (spoiler) to just happen in the show. It’d certainly shake things up a bit.


//TAGS | The Walking Dead

Matthew Meylikhov

Once upon a time, Matthew Meylikhov became the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Multiversity Comics, where he was known for his beard and fondness for cats. Then he became only one of those things. Now, if you listen really carefully at night, you may still hear from whispers on the wind a faint voice saying, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not as bad as everyone says it issss."

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