Hello, fellow consumers of culture!Last night was the midseason (or season - I'm a child of the 70s and 80s, I find this new habit of seasons just popping up all willy nilly completely baffling) premier of The Walking Dead. The first season was enjoyable, for the most part, with its tense depiction of Atlanta and environs in the immediate aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. The second season really fell apart for me. It's based on a well regarded comic book which I haven't read, and I've heard it's pretty faithful to the original. Since I'm woefully rusty in my blogging skills, I once again present a listicle containing my thoughts on the zombie apocalypse drama.
1. I'm tired of zombies. Really, really tired of them. Has anyone else read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies? Beyond tiresome. But I'm guessing most of the people reading it have missed the glut of zombie related theater I've seen over the past decade. Zombie Shakespeare! Zombie proms (I've seen at least three)! And on and on. And, really, zombies are kind of dull.
2. That said, I am enamored of Carrie Ryan's young adult zombie books which began with The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Primarily because they do what no other zombie apocalypse story (that I've seen) has done: take place a couple of hundred years after the initial zombie contagion has struck and imagined a society in which zombies are a given. She's a lovely writer and she's obviously given this a great deal of thought.
3. That farm is super boring.
4. The Walking Dead has an all-male writing team, which a: is unacceptable, and b: shows.
5. Those scenes in season one in which the women spent all their time doing laundry made me want to put my fist through a wall.
6. The one black male character is written to be a eunuch. All the remaining female characters are white, and the writers of the show behave as if there is zero possibility that he could have a romance with one of them. All he seems to do is to assist the white characters to carry heavy objects or to dig holes. It hasn't seemed to occur to any of them that in their little farm at the end of the world, he might find one of the women, you know, attractive, or maybe would have his own ideas about running things. It's incredibly frustrating to watch.
7. Will a zombie eat that insufferable old guy already? He's just the worst.
8. When all of your action involves multiple trips to the local drug store, you have to know you're doing something wrong.
9. The whole pregnancy storyline really killed the series for me. It's such a potentially potent subject to delve into, and they squandered it. This was where the all-male writing team completely fell down on their job. The pregnancy was entirely viewed from a male or baby-centric POV. Call me crazy, but if I were pregnant in a place with zero medical care or possibly even hand-washing facilities, the thought "OMG, I'm going to die" would be pretty front and center. This was hardly even mentioned.
10. The final nail in the coffin for me was the drama surrounding the morning after pill. There seems to be some MAJOR confusion. The morning after pill is NOT an abortifacient. The morning after pill is emergency contraception. If you are already pregnant (i.e. missing periods, etc. as the woman on the show was) this will not work. The writers of the show are clearly oblivious to this. It angered me when it first aired, but have since heard this same misunderstanding of how The Science works from various Conservative pols who are trying to kill women by taking away their access to health care and choice. So, yeah, this stuff matters. And, no, I'm not going to just enjoy the zombie show and calm down.
11. All the characters are so dull, I'm pretty much just waiting for zombie attacks which makes me feel like a ghoul.
12. I have horrible completion mania, so I'm having trouble not watching. I mean, Season 4 of Alias was just unforgivable and I watched the whole thing.
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