‘Castle’ Adds Zombies for Episode; Zomsploitation?
The ZRC is always cautious about just putting Zombies into any old story for the novelty’s sake, because usually that novelty is anything but novel and degenerates to an Anti-Zombie pogrom, but handled properly, this sounds like it could be a bit more interesting:
Castle has an episode coming up that’s hopping on board a trend made popular by The Walking Dead: zombies. Creator Andrew W. Marlowe explained to TVLine of “Undead Again,” “Zombies are very much in the zeitgeist, and we thought it was something that was worth tackling.” The way they’ll do it will be “credible,” and as Marlowe brought up how they’ve tackled aliens, there’s really no reason to think they’ll do anything but handle this the right way. Previous spoilers did reveal that there are characters part of “Zombie Walks,” so it sounds like it’s going to just be something that’s done in the city. Is their victim going to be someone who participates in those walks?
Zombie Walks are becoming fodder, or at least backdrops, for plots in entertainment as they establish a nearly ubiquitous presence nationwide; we talked about at least one example from the world of film was discussed previously here on the ZRC blog.
The problem is the constant risk of what you could call (and I choose to for this post) ‘Zomsploitation’; are Zombies (or Zombie events) being added merely for sensationalistic reasons? Will their presence demonize (not usually literally) the Undead, or help to acclimatize the public to the existence of the Differently Animated on their streets?
Still, even if a TV series only featured a Zombie as a victim of the week, that’d be something, an acknowledgment via the backdoor that Zombies are people too (because to be a victim, one probably needs to be a person).
Food for thought.
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