The Walking Dead: Season 8

The communities of Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom have joined forces to oppose the Saviors, but they have been betrayed by one group of potential allies whilst another, Oceanside, tries to stay out of the fighting. An early victory isolates the Sanctuary and allows Rick's forces to go on the offensive against the isolated Savior secondary bases, but Negan remains a dangerous and resourceful foe. As the tides of war ebb and flow, the outcome remains unpredictable.

The eighth season of The Walking Dead optimistically promises "all-out war!" as it adapts the story arc from the comics of the same name. The early episodes lean into this, with an almost constant stream of battles, sieges, cunning stratagems and unexpected reversals. Neither side consistently wins or consistently loses (although the number of Savior losses in the opening episodes makes their later resurgence seem improbable), a nice change from most media accounts of conflicts where the good guys keep losing until the last second and then pull off a single win and win everything and hit the jackpot.

The battles in the opening episodes make for an exciting start to the season, but are a bit overwrought. Given the show's shock-jock tactics of killing two fan-favourite characters in the Season 7 opener, almost everybody develops thick plot armour and almost nobody of consequence dies (no, Alexandrians who may have been around for three seasons but only have five lines of dialogue in their entire tenure of the show do not count). This makes the stakes feel a bit undercooked. Instead we have a lot of battles - consisting of characters pointing weirdly recoilless guns at one another with CG muzzle flashes, sometimes with allies running right in front of them whilst they're firing - without much in the way of stakes to them.

The show does try to get around this by aiming for character-rooted emotional arcs: Ezekiel suffers a crisis of command after losing too many of his people in the war; Morgan being torn between not killing and protecting his friends causes a mental health crisis; Carl, recognising some proto-Negan-ness in his own character, decides to become a better person; Eugene trying to work out if Negan or Rick will better appreciate his skills; Gabriel rediscovers his faith in adversity, and so forth. Some of these character arcs are satisfying, others just feel they're there to help the show spin its wheels.

Yes, the greatest enemy of The Walking Dead is neither Negan nor the walkers, but the show's problematic pacing. A relentless foe of the franchise since it made the entire second season take place on a farm, it drags Season 8 down into the mud. Making the war last the entire season, sixteen episodes, after last season's sixteen episodes of scene-setting, was a huge mistake, resulting in several episodes where not much materially changes, even as bullets are flying. The show really feels like it doesn't have a clue what to do next when it sends the characters back to the Junkyard, again, to try to win over the Scavengers, again, only for them to betray our heroes, again. At eight episodes to end the war, perhaps with another eight exploring the aftermath (here relegated to a very abrupt-seeming vignette at the end of the season finale), the storyline would have been much tighter and more satisfying.

The season does have a few stronger elements. Dwight trying to balance his survival against being the mole inside Negan's organisation is a fun storyline, and Steven Ogg (best known as Grand Theft Auto V's redoubtable Trevor) arguably steals the season as Simon, whose charismatic backstabbing is highly entertaining. This all makes up for a subdued Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whose undeniable charisma and acting talent feels a bit let down by the inconsistent quality of the scripts for Negan. When he brings it, he's great, but when he doesn't, his story falls flat.

Mid-season the show does dispatch one long-term regular to try to up the ante, but the choice of character to kill is illogical, badly-handled and feels like a bit of a slap in the face of the actor (who famously had just bought a house near the studio because they'd been assured they'd be around for a while longer) and also comic fans, where the character in question survives all the way to the end of the saga. They do try to make the sacrifice have some weight and long-term impact on the story, but it's badly-conceived.

The season finale is also a bit of a damp squib, with the plan to win the day being incredibly illogical and desperately dependent on absolutely nothing going wrong, and the rapidity with which the losing side gives in to the winning side feels a bit implausible. One decision by Rick is also laughably unconvincing: I get what they were going for, but I do not buy at all that Rick of all people would make that choice. That said, Maggie does benefit from this storyline, coming across as a stronger and more decisive leader, and potentially setting up a conflict between her and Rick which could be genuinely interesting.

Season 8 of The Walking Dead (***) is not terrible, but it is badly-paced, overdrawn and overwrought, with some curious character choices and unconvincing plot decisions. There is, however, a lot of half-decent action, and the ebb and flow of the conflict is more interesting than how wars are usually depicted in fiction. This is possibly the weakest season of the show, but those who have settled in for the long haul should find enough here to just about keep going (along with the promise of a better final three seasons coming up, although that is debatable). The show can be seen on multiple streaming platforms worldwide, right now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

The Walking Dead: Season 7

Rick Grimes and his long-standing band of companions have initiated hostilities with a group of extorters called the Saviors, thinking them just the latest in a long line of gangs of thugs and bandits they've been dealing with in the two years since civilisation fell. But the Saviors are a far larger, far more dangerous and far more unpredictable group than any they've come across since, under the leadership of the charismatic and capricious Negan. The Saviors take control of Alexandria, forcing Rick's group to work for them and executing two of their number to make sure they are taken seriously. The group is divided on how, or even to, resist, whilst others of their number find more of the network of settlements that Hilltop was just one of, and gradually realise that the Saviors have made a lot of enemies, something they might be able to turn to their advantage.

It's been a minute since we last touched base with The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman's comic turned Frank Darabont's lawsuit target turned epic zombie apocalypse turned slightly frustrating nation-building exercise. I got so frustrated with the show's pacing being all over the place that I decided to tune out until it was over, which took slightly longer than expected, not helped by the seasons immediately following my hiatus being soundly criticised even by hardcore fans.

As a recap, Season 6 saw the gang take over the town of Alexandria, whose citizenry can be best described as nice-but-dim. Rick and his gang of hardened survivors had to take over the town for their own good, almost turning into villains in the process, a highly interesting idea that the show immediately squandered (the town is immediately attacked by feral lunatics known as Wolves and a massive zombie horde, and only Rick and The Gang have the cojones to sort them out whilst the Alexandrians just gawp), as is often the case with The Walking Dead. The latter part of the season flirted with an even more interesting storyline in which Rick and The Gang are manipulated into fighting the Saviors by the duplicitous Gregory, leader of Hilltop. The show could have had the Saviors as a more reasonable group, so Rick's pre-emptive attack was an illegitimate act and the resulting counter-strike by Negan was more justified, but again that would have made the show too interesting, so we are reassured at every second moment that the Saviors are evil, almost killing two of our heroes on a whim and subjecting multiple towns to tyranny, murder and extortion.

Still, the season was the most action-packed The Walking Dead has ever been and, whilst logic had not so much left the building but screamed out of town in a jet fighter at Mach 5, never to be seen again, there's no arguing it was fun to watch in a very dumb kind of way. This is what I call the "Game of Thrones Season 7 Effect," where character and plot logic have been sacrificed on the altar of visceral action and some sick special effects, but the latter are executed so well you kinda don't mind (and The Walking Dead was never the most subtle study in character interplay in the first place).

Season 7 continues in much the same vein. The season opens with the infamous episode where Negan gets to pontificate at Rick and, via an unnecessarily drawn-out, tension-building exercise, kills two of the regular characters in a very gory fashion. Despite the undeniable gut-punch of seeing two solid characters (one of whom has been around since the very beginning, or almost) go out, it also feels like someone at AMC decided this was going to be their Wal-Mart own-brand version of the Red Wedding and milked it for every nanosecond. The result is possibly the worst episode of the show to date, devolving into that most curious of beasts, extremely boring torture-porn.

Once the show gets over that hump, it sets about exploring its new paradigm with entertaining relish. The Saviors live at the Sanctuary, a massive factory-turned-fortress, and are extorting the people of three settlements, Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom. There are also two other settlements nearby which know about the Saviors but have remained undetected: the Junkyard, home to a bunch of inexplicable weirdos known as the Scavengers; and Oceanside, home to a bunch of women whose menfolk were all killed by the Saviors, buying them time to escape and establish a secret stronghold on Chesapeake Bay. Handily, Carol and Morgan have already established contact with the Kingdom, a town built in and around an old zoo and ruled by a flamboyant ruler known as King Ezekiel (who feels like he has been airdropped into the show from the Renfair Hallmark version of Game of Thrones, but is easily one of the most entertaining characters on the show so we'll allow it), whilst Tara, who went missing at the end of Season 6 and literally nobody at all noticed, has established less-cordial relations with Oceanside.

Season 7 is, as usual, divided into two eight-episode sub-arcs. In the first Rick and The Gang are trying to make their new position of working for the Saviors fly, with some characters angrily planning revenge on Negan and the Saviors but others arguing for patience and time to regroup. Daryl has been taken prisoner by the Saviors so we get to explore the Sanctuary via him (and returning Season 6 bit-players Dwight and Sherry), whilst Maggie is trying to consolidate the Hilltop in their alliance, whilst fighting a rather one-sided rivalry with Gregory. Tara's visit to Oceanside is rather tedious, in the lowest-rated episode of the entire series, which I thought was a bit harsh; there's more than a few episodes before this in which absolutely nothing happens, whilst this at least had some solid walker-killing. A storyline in which Morgan struggles with his vow not to kill whilst Carol needs a time-out in a cottage is...okay, I guess, but only works because of the two actors.

Inevitably, after a few more Alexandrians are killed and Negan turns out to be even more loony-tunes than we first thought, Team Rick decides to fight and starts banding the communities into a big army. The weak link here are the Scavengers who are blatantly, obviously untrustworthy from the off and Rick's efforts to bring them into the alliance are ludicrous (and the fact we get the exact same story in Season 8 beggars belief). Negan also ends up moving from genuinely threatening figure at the end of Season 6 to pantomime dame, flouncing around and straining to find reasons not to kill the more popular characters blessed with plot armour. Jeffrey Dean Morgan always gives a great performance but there are a few moments where even he seems to be asking, "why am I not killing every person in this room?"

Things do get better as the season wraps up, with the web of alliances coming to fruition in a surprisingly messy finale with double-crosses and plot twists and some solid action beats. The season does quite well on this front with a few good set-pieces such as Michonne and Rick taking down 300 walkers with a weaponised steel cable, and later clearing out a funfair by themselves. The storyline in the Kingdom is unexpectedly a highlight, its daftness (Ezekiel has a CGI pet tiger) giving way to a much edgier story as they try to work reasonably alongside the Saviors but ultimately realise they can't.

Season 7 of The Walking Dead is trying to do something that most long-running post-apocalyptic media tries to do and often falters in the process: transitioning from the post-apocalypse to the post-post-apocalypse, from simple survival to nation-building. Running from zombies in the immediate aftermath of disaster with plentiful supplies to scavenge, not many survivors and tons of guns lying around (in a US-set story, anyway) is easily turned into compelling drama. Working out how to get reliable supplies of food and water, especially with a brutal local government around? Not so much, or at least it's trickier. The Fallout franchise had a similar problem with the early games set just after the nuclear war giving way to the later games set 200 years later with tons of factions and even nation-states arising, and the game developers too often falling back on post-apocalyptic tropes even where they no longer made sense, because it was easier.

The Walking Dead is to be commended for trying this tricky transition in its seventh season (***½) and it doesn't fare as badly as I was expecting, with some nice character arcs and action setpieces. But the show struggles with selling some of its plot points and ideas, and the whiff of contrivance as Rick's group need a bunch of allies to fight the Saviors and immediately meet a bunch of allies to fight the Saviors is high. The result is an entertaining-enough season of television, which recovers from a cynical and crappy start to deliver some satisfying resolution, even if you can't quite buy all the steps along the way. The show can be seen on multiple streaming platforms worldwide right now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

The Walking Dead: Season 6

Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors have found a new home in the town of Alexandria. The original inhabitants were organised but lacking in steel, not having seen off the challenges experienced by Rick and his companions. Having helped defend the town from threats within and without, Rick finds himself the de facto new leader of the community and has to take action against an imminent new danger: a vast horde of walkers located in a nearby quarry who are on the verge of breaking out and destroying the town. Beyond that, there are other threats lurking outside the walls, a band of raiders called the Wolves...and another, more mysterious group called the Saviors.

The Walking Dead is probably the most frustrating show on television (although it's also traded that title a few times with Game of Thrones in its most recent two seasons). It's beautifully shot, fantastically scored and has an outstanding cast of excellent actors. The writing and characterisation, however, is highly variable and the show's tone can go all over the place, from slightly cartoonish ultraviolence to gritty realism to funny character interactions and back again, often in a very clunky fashion. By far the show's biggest problem, however, has been pacing and structure. The series has had sixteen episodes per season since its third year, which is very generous by modern American cable standards, but it has struggled, sometimes excruciatingly, with filling that time with consistently gripping drama. From its third through fifth seasons, The Walking Dead has made wheel-spinning into an almost admirable art form.

For its sixth year, the show takes a different tack and one that is quite successful in solving this problem. The first half of the season revolves around two entwined events: Rick and his friends driving off a walker horde at the same time some opportunistic scavengers called the Wolves attack Alexandria. This results in a complex, two-front battle which becomes even more challenging when part of the horde splits off and crashes the party in town. This results in The Walking Dead's most action-packed storyline to date, with eight episodes of building tension, drama and all-out warfare. The series has often been criticised for sometimes forgetting there's even zombies around (although that was kind of Robert Kirkman's point, the zombies are merely the mechanism by which civilisation falls whilst he is far more interested in the social dynamics of reconstruction) but that complaint is certainly dismissed this season. The first few episodes of the show have our characters going to war, engaging the walkers in a full-scale, all-out offensive to save their new home.

It's all splendid stuff. The characters get their moments in the sun, Carol and Tara get new romantic partners, someone gives Daryl a rocket launcher and we're reunited with (slightly inexplicably) fan-favourite bit-player Morgan, who finally joins the cast full-time and gives us the possibly the show's most bizarre stand-alone episode in which he learns aikido from a random dude in the woods and his goat. This episode is gloriously insane, makes very little sense and seems to think it's very profound, which makes it awesomely enjoyable (if not quite for the reasons the writers intended). The first half of the season is The Walking Dead at its very strongest and most gripping, even if the decision to "kill" Glen and hide his fate for three episodes remains utterly moronic.

The second half starts going a bit wonky almost immediately. The end of the battle for Alexandria sees several characters introduced at the end of Season 5 brutally murdered apparently just to keep the cast costs down, which is less tragic than just annoying. Things pick up with a fantastic Daryl/Rick road trip episode in which they meet a charismatic new character called Jesus and then learn about the existence of a network of other settlements. At this point the show's allusions to the Fallout video game series (which have always been present, if not in the actual setting, then in the general post-apocalyptic tone) pick up as Rick moves from being on the defensive to gaining a view of a new civilisation arising from the survivors, that maybe they do all have a future. Having snatched away the possibility of a cure for the Turn in Season 5, The Walking Dead makes up for it by giving us a sliver of hope that maybe things will turn out okay.

There is, of course, a problem: the newly-contacted settlements are being extorted for food and ammo by a group called the Saviors. The show very nearly does something great here by having Rick and co immediately agree to attack them without actually talking to them first, which is a startlingly ruthless (and strategically unsound) move, and thus instigate hostilities. Unfortunately the series provides a get-out clause by revealing that they're the same group that attacked them earlier in the season (and had to be sorted out by Daryl and his rocket launcher), immediately giving Team Rick the moral high ground. This only increases when we get to meet the Saviours and discover just what a bunch of bad 'uns they are. Even so, the show makes some very interesting dramatic choices, such as having our first major interaction with the group come through a group of ruthless women who have sworn in with them, resulting in an unexpectedly feminist episode where they take Carol and Maggie prisoner and we're waiting for Rick to burst in and save them, but this turns out to be unnecessary because Carol and Maggie know how to take care of business by themselves.

So if the second half of the season falters compared to the first half, at least it's making interesting and original storytelling decisions, deploying its large cast of characters in dramatically compelling ways and keeping things ticking over nicely. And then it really all goes horribly wrong in the finale.

The Season 6 finale of The Walking Dead has been justly reviled by very large numbers of both critics and fans. One of the most interesting things about the Saviors before this point is that they're nasty and ruthless, but arguably not outright evil (their insistence on murdering one person as an example has to be countered with Rick's willingness to murder all of them without even knowing anything about them), and in fact seem to be what Team Rick were on their way to becoming given a few more months. The Saviors have some wins and losses, and seem to be a match for our heroes without totally overwhelming them (as, say, the Governor did initially). In the Season 6 finale the Saviors become psychic super-savants, capable of working out exactly what roads (ut of the utter maze of highways, back roads and side-trails sprawling outside Washington, DC our heroes are going to take and blocking them off expertly, building petrol-strewn barricades in minutes and knowing precisely where our characters will stop to get out of their truck to risk a cross-country run so they can set an elaborate trap. It's the most unconvincing, contrived bit of writing I've seen in years and is embarrassingly stupid. The silliness of this ending takes away from the introduction of Negan, the Saviors' much-foreshadowed leader, played with relish by the always-good Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and really reduces the impact of his ruthless execution of one of our heroes (not that you find out who that is until Season 7).

So the sixth season of The Walking Dead (****) is very nearly the best (and is certainly the best-structured and paced), but then makes a series of writing decisions throughout the season which are needlessly annoying, particularly its reliance on fake-out deaths. But as frustrating as it can be, The Walking Dead can also be, particularly in its quieter moments of just dwelling on the world after the fall, surprisingly atmospheric and thoughtful. The show's never-ending quest for consistency continues. The season is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

The Walking Dead: Season 5

Rick Grimes and several of his fellow survivors are imprisoned in Terminus, a society of cannibals. They seek to escape whilst several of their friends, such as Carol, attempt a rescue. At the same time Beth finds herself a reluctant guest of a hospital in Atlanta. Out in the woods, a frightened priest cowers in his church. But the survivors now have a promise of salvation, a cure for the Turn, which calls them to Washington, DC...if they can survive.

The Walking Dead reaches its fifth season, in which everything is awesome and our heroes are happy and smiling. Or maybe not. The season opens with our heroes prisoners in a cannibal stronghold before joining forces with a priest losing his faith and ending with them deliberately traumatising a peaceful community into accepting them as their new protectors. Along the way several major characters die for no immediately-discernible reason and the writers tease the audience with the possibility of some kind of actual over-arching storyline with a firm resolution in mind before snatching it away, leaving both characters and viewers with no hope and to wallow in misery.

Or to put it another way, welcome to another season of The Walking Dead, y'all.


George Romero - someone who knows a thing or two about zombies - once called The Walking Dead a "zombie soap". He's not wrong. That's not a criticism, because Robert Kirkman also called the story that of a "zombie movie that never ends". Week in, week out, month in, month out, on screen, in the comics and in the video games, people tune into the next instalment of this story which tries to make a strength out of the fact it has no end, no master plan and no planned resolution.

This sense of an ongoing narrative works in soap operas, however, because of the shifts in tone. Yes, characters get divorced, get into fights, occasionally die, but they also get married, fall in love and have moments of real happiness. The Walking Dead's biggest problem has always been its nihilistic streak, that the world is full of misery and pain after the Turn and that both the walkers and other people are dangerous and out to kill you at any given moment and every day is a remorseless, never-ending struggle to feed yourself and your family, to avoid injury and disease, and to find shelter and ammo. Other TV shows embrace the darker side of life, but lighten things with moments of genuine humanity (like The Wire, whose cast The Walking Dead continues to pilfer for new roles), occasional comedy (Breaking Bad) or hope (Game of Thrones). The Walking Dead does this only very, very occasionally, which makes it a harder show to watch. It's the ultimate example of "grimdark" on television, with the strengths and weaknesses of that movement.

Season 5, like the past two seasons, attempts to overcome one of its biggest problems - the inability to sustain a narrative over 16 episodes - by dividing the season into two halves. The first half sees our heroes at their lowest ebb in Terminus, but they also have the hope of a cure and an endgame in mind. This ultimately proves a blind alley which is deeply frustrating, but perhaps true to the show's basic premise. Finding a cure for the walkers would, ultimately, feel like a cheap way of ending the series, even if it did provide some kind of upbeat resolution.

The first half of the season is a mixed bag. Our heroes spend way too much time hanging around in a church and the enemies they face from Terminus are characterless ciphers. There's a very half-hearted attempt to inject pathos by suggesting these people were once as good as Team Rick, but turned evil after meeting some bad people. But they never really follow up on it in enough depth to justify the sheer depravities they resort to. This part of the season also makes an ill-considered choice to use fractured, non-linear storytelling, moving from place to place, reversing back in time to fill in back story and accelerating forward again. Non-linear storytelling is a great device when handled well, but The Walking Dead uses it instead in this instance as a way of annoyingly retconning storylines and engaging in cheap emotional manipulation (when Person A was about to die and you thought Persons B and C were miles away, but it turns out in a flashback that Persons B and C were miles away hours earlier, and are now ready to save Person A). It also allows them to pad out the story with filler episodes in which not much happens. The Walking Dead TV show has always been far superior at characterisation than the comic books, and sometimes its use of quieter episodes to expand on character is effective. In the first half of Season 5 it never really works, however.

Once the show returns from its mid-season break, it regains a sense of momentum. Our heroes arrive on the outskirts of Washington, DC (those expecting some great shots of an abandoned Mall won't get them: the show's relatively low budget is never quite as painfully obvious as this season) and find a new safe haven, Alexandria. This results in a much more engaging storyline in which our heroes are presented as the unsafe invaders in a peaceful and stable community, Rick's ruthless pragmatism presented as cynical selfishness and maybe even outright villainy by the existing community leaders. This idea of turning Team Rick into the bad guys has always been an ace in the show's hole and their employment of it is well-assured, accompanied by some excellent performances. However, the show presents even this storyline with the training wheels still on. The revelation of a new group of bad guys who employ tactics far worse than anything Team Rick have done; some of the people in Alexandria turning out to be cowards and murderers; and the Alexandrians genuinely not having a clue about the world outside mean that our sympathies remain firmly lodged with Team Rick throughout. When offered a chance to make a genuinely interesting point on morality, The Walking Dead shrugs and keeps walkin' instead.

Still, The Walking Dead's primary strengths remain intact: some excellent actors, fantastic prosthetics work and some outstanding moments of cinematography and framing of shots. On a moment to moment basis, the show is mostly watchable and there are some outstanding action scenes. Carol (Melissa McBride) remains the best performer on the show, with some brilliant scenes and the opportunity to channel her inner soccer mom in the concluding episodes. She also gets most of the best lines. Many of the other actors also do quality work. But the sense remains that the show needs more of a sense of an endgame and more of a direction to the story. A zombie soap is great fun, there's only so long that it can keep doing that and remain fresh.

Season 5 of The Walking Dead (***½) is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

The Walking Dead: Season 4

Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors of the walker apocalypse are still living in a prison, which they have fortified into a refuge and where they are growing food to augment their supply-raiding of surrounding, abandoned towns. However, they are unaware of growing threats outside the prison, including the return of an old enemy.

The Walking Dead continues to be one of the oddest shows on television. On the one hand, its a big-budget, crowd-pleasing depiction of the mass killing of zombies. On the other, it's a bleakly nihilistic portrait of people who seem to only ever be a few more catastrophes away from committing group suicide. More than once whilst watching a particular season, the idea comes to mind that the show is completely pointless, lacking as it is in any kind of long-term direction or plan for survival beyond holing up for a bit and seeing what happens.

If the show's lack of a long-term focus is a problem, it's one the writers manage to (mostly successfully) push to the back-burner by emphasising individual moments and the crisis of the day. A debilitating disease sweeps the prison in the opening episodes and no sooner is that burning itself out then a full-scale war is underway, after which the survivors are scattered across the countryside and have to fight their own battles to survive. This structure seems to have emerged after dissatisfaction with the previous season's main storyline, which in order to get to sixteen episodes had to resort to lots of cheap filler.

The show's overlong seasons are still a big problem, but the fourth season certainly handles it better by treating each of the two halves as its own eight-episode serial. The first half is tighter, with the characters more closely bound together and even confident enough to spend two full episodes on exploring the backstory of a secondary character in detail. The second half is more sprawling and more of an anthology series, with the characters divvied up into random teams and having to survive without the benefits of the larger group. This allows hitherto chronically-underdeveloped characters like Beth to emerge much more strongly as fully-rounded figures. The arrival of survivors from Texas on a mission which might actually tie into the origins of the walker plague, and the discovery of a new refuge accepting people in from a large area, also gives the show that much-needed sense of direction in its final episodes of the season as well.

There are still weaknesses. The show is prone to repetition, and the zombie-killing is now so routine that the characters seem as bored by it as the viewers are. The structure of the season is a big improvement on the previous one, but events are still too slow-paced and the producers could have done with cutting to the chase a bit more quickly.

Still, the fourth season of The Walking Dead (****½) emerges as the best to date. Entertaining, if at times bleakly so, and always well-acted, the show could still do with a bit more focus and certainly less episodes per season, but it seems to be on the right track. The season is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

The Walking Dead: Season 3

More than seven months after being forced to flee Herschel's farm, Rick Grimes and the group he leads are tired, ragged and badly in need of shelter and a place to relax. Stumbling across an abandoned prison, they set about clearing it of walkers and turning it into a base of operations. Meanwhile, Andrea, separated from the rest of the group, has hooked up with a sword-wielding loner named Michonne (who uses 'neutralised' walkers - with their arms and jaws removed - to carry supplies). They find an apparent safe haven in the town of Woodbury, run by the apparently well-meaning 'Governor'. But it isn't long before Rick's group and the Governor's followers run into one another, setting the scene for a major confrontation and testing the loyalties of those in both groups.

The Walking Dead is a contradictory series. On the one hand, it's often compulsive viewing. It's more ruthless to its characters even than Game of Thrones and Lost (the latter of which it is beginning to resemble more and more) and the show puts a pleasing emphasis on taking common sense precautions against the zombie threat (although it's not above using individual moments of implausible stupidity for dramatic gain). On the other, it often promises more than it delivers and the first two seasons both had a tendency to deploy filler material. The third season is an attempt to tackle these issues and play to the strengths of the premise whilst not getting bogged down so much. Unfortunately, this was sabotaged from the get-go by AMC's demand that the season be extended to sixteen episodes, which turns out to be about four too long.

The series starts off promisingly. The delayed discovery of the prison (which we saw in the final shot of Season 2 close to Rick's group but it's taken seven months of them going round in circles to get back to it) and the need to clear it out provides a lot of dramatic impetus in the early episodes. Splitting the group, getting Andrea and Michonne to Woodbury and a dramatic reunion with a missing former member of their group all provide strong storytelling opportunities. The introduction of the Governor, played with relish by David Morrissey, is well-handled and giving Rick a nemesis and someone to bounce off is a great idea. The first half of the season is indeed The Walking Dead at its best, featuring some rich scenes of character development and even some satisfying action scenes (even if the ease with which walkers are now being dispatched compared to earlier seasons is starting to get a little silly).

Things deteriorate rapidly in the second half. Some rather bizarre wheel-spinning kicks in and we get a face-to-face confrontation between Rick and the Governor which really doesn't do anything, as well a completely pointless episode featuring two characters playing cat-and-mouse in an abandoned warehouse. As more excuses are found to delay the big finale battle, things get less and less plausible until scenes that were supposed to be powerfully tragic become instead rather comical. There's also less focus on the day-to-day details of living with the walker threat; in the final episode people are casually leaving gates open and walking past biters without too much care. The second half of the season does retain some dramatic highlights, such as Carl Grimes graduating from 'pointlessly hanging-around kid' to 'PTSD-suffering child soldier' and the intriguing arrival of Tyreese (played by The Wire's Chad Coleman), but it's a far cry from the opening half.

Ultimately, the third season of The Walking Dead (****) is watchable, entertaining and features some very strong dramatic scenes and elements in its first half. The second half is more disappointing, featuring significant lapses in plot logic and characterisation. If anything, whilst the second season (which was a little too static) benefited a lot from being viewed in rapid-fire on Blu-Ray, the third season suffers, with the longueurs in the second half being far more incongruous than if viewed from week to week. The season is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

The Walking Dead: Season 2

Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors have escaped from Atlanta. Making for Fort Benning and the hope of rescue, the group is waylaid on the highway by a horde of walkers. With one of the group missing and another severely injured, they find a safe haven at a nearby farm and the hope of a new home. But as the days and weeks pass, the unresolved tensions in the group threaten to tear it apart.

The second season of The Walking Dead picks up shortly after the events of the first. Whilst the first only had six episodes to tell its story, the second has thirteen, giving it more time to explore the premise and characters.

Things get off to a strong start in the first few episodes, which focus on the confrontation on the highway and the attempts to bring the group back together. New characters - the Greene family - and a new location - a large farmstead - are introduced and events unfold with some vigour. However, after the third episode the story bogs down a little as characters start spinning their wheels at the farm. This is where the ramifications of a major pre-season production crisis - a budget cut that infuriated showrunner Frank Darabont and saw him leave the series - are at their most noticeable. Whilst the budget problems ground the series for a little too long at the farm, the producers do make the most of the money they do have. The zombie effects are a cut above the more variable effects of the first season and there are some truly gruesome moments that equal the most visceral scenes of any zombie movie that comes to mind.

The long pause at the farm does allow some effective character development, particularly of Shane (Jon Bernthal), whose growing disillusionment with the group and his inability to accept the new status quo and move on is depicted quite well, even if the story does take a few too many episodes to come to a head. However, probably the best characterisation is left to Daryl (Norman Reedus), who evolves from the quieter brother of racist redneck Merle in the first season into a conflicted, complex character who refuses to fit easily into any stereotype. Rick (Andrew Lincoln), our main protagonist, gets a little lost in the mix this season with storylines focusing mostly on other characters, but comes back strong towards the end of the season as he starts to show signs of not handling the stress of command very well. However, his dynamic with Herschel (Scott Wilson) and the twists and turns it goes through is fascinating, with Herschel moving from a pacifistic man of faith to shotgun-wielding zombie-slayer under Rick's (not entirely laudable) influence. The introduction of Maggie (Lauren Cohan) as a love interest for Glenn (Steven Yeun) also adds a rare glimmer of sunlight to a dark season.

Whilst the season does suffer from some slow pacing in its central section, it remains highly watchable, and the pacing issue is mitigated considerably on DVD without a week-long break between each episode. There are some effective moments of dark humour (the 'zombie well' scene is hilarious), the writing is pretty good and the actors mostly effective. Aside from the pacing issue, the character of Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) suffers the worst from inconsistent writing and motivations, which the actress does her best to make sense of but can't quite sell.

Events culminate in a fairly epic two-part season finale in which the bubbling tensions within the group boil over and the biggest battle between the survivors and the zombies to date takes place. Despite some longeurs and niggling problems, Season 2 (****½) ends on a high that leaves a lot of balls in the air for the third season and its promise of introducing some of the best characters and storylines from the comic book to the TV series. The series is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

The Walking Dead: Season 1

Rick Grimes, a sheriff in a small Georgia town, is shot during an altercation and ends up in a coma. Waking up weeks later, he finds the hospital abandoned and corpses everywhere. He quickly discovers that the country is overrun by the walking dead. Rick sets out to find his missing wife and son, hoping they made it to the promised 'safe zone' in Atlanta, but finds that the city has fallen. But there are other survivors out there...


Based on Robert Kirkman's comics, The Walking Dead is essentially a zombie movie that 'never ends' (or at least will go on much longer than any zombie movie or even series of zombie movies). Frank Darabont, the much-feted director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, has applied his writing and directing skills to Kirkman's comic to create something quite impressive.

The Walking Dead's opening episode is bleak and cinematic, with Rick's predicament ably transmitted through Darabont's claustrophobic direction and Andrew Lincoln's superb performance as Rick. Lincoln, a Brit best-known for his comedic role in Teachers, plays Rick's frustration, fear and concern for his missing family to perfection. The first episode, with Rick alone against the zombie hordes, is arguably the best, but the remainder of the short first season, which sees Rick link up with a band of survivors outside Atlanta, is only a notch down in quality.

The rest of the first season concerns itself with the survivors arguing over what to do next and explores the dynamics of the group. Rick's old cop partner Shane has been leading the group, but finds himself supplanted by Rick, which leads to some tension. Two of the other members of the group are racist thugs, setting up tension with the black and Hispanic members of the group, whilst another survivor takes out his frustrations and anger with the situation on his wife. It's not a happy group, and the writers and directors do a good job of exploring the characters and their interactions whilst remembering to bring the zombies on every once in a while to cause mayhem.

Production values are extremely high. The zombie effects are great (a couple of them are obviously fake heads over ordinary people's faces, but these are very rare), up there with the best movies, whilst Atlanta (population 5 million, including the surrounding area) looks convincingly abandoned and bleak. There's a couple of ropey CGI explosions, but beyond that, The Walking Dead looks and feels like a big-budget movie.

The story unfolds at a pretty good pace, though there's a couple of divergences in the second half of the season and a few moments of possible wheel-spinning. However, given that one of the appeals of the story (in both comic and TV form) is that it has the time to show such side-plots and explore the fall of America to a zombie horde in greater detail than a film or novel, that's not an invalid thing to do. By the end of the season there's also a renewed sense of purpose, as the survivors realise that the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) HQ is in Atlanta and may have some of the answers they are looking for. This marks the biggest change from the comics, where the CDC is not mentioned, but as Robert Kirkman (who wrote the fourth episode of the series) points out that's only because he didn't know it was there. If he had, the comics would also have gone there. This sets up a number of interesting possible storylines for Season 2.

Season 1 of The Walking Dead (****½) is a terrific, well-paced and well-acted post-apocalypse series. Let down only by a couple of meandering story threads, it's otherwise a great piece of television. The series is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).