The Walking Dead continues this fall, for better or worse (and from a Zombie Rights perspective, pretty distinctively worse). But one could be forgiven for wondering if the show is giving up on making its audience scared of the Undead in favor of a bat-wielding psychopath, at least judging from this first episode.

More after the cut.

Last season, The Walking Dead seemed to realize that its audience was perhaps bored with being menaced by the innocent Zombie population of their post-apocalyptic setting, and introduced yet another band or two of violent survivors, the most persistent of which is the Saviors, led by Negan. At the close of last year’s finale, Negan was preparing to beat one of the core cast to death with a bizarrely impractical bat wrapped in barbed wire, and even those poor, misguided souls who enjoy Anti-Zombie media had to ask: is this even about ‘The Walking Dead’ anymore?

Well…

That trend continues with this season opener, as the Undead take a distinct back seat to the scene-chewing antics (and at times quite over the top violence) of Negan. In fact, in order to effectively menace Rick with the Undead, Negan has to abduct him and drive him miles away in an RV.

Even then, it’s hard to see the Zombies as the threat compared to the maniac with a machine gun who likes to beat captives to death with a bat he has a… unique… relationship with.

Yeah.

And so The Walking Dead stumbles forward into another season of casual Anti-Zombie, and increasingly, casual Anti-Anything-That-Moves violence. The ZRC will document it all for future historians of this dark and intolerant age.

Tags: Robert Kirkman, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, October 24th, 2016 at 2:39 am and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.