The rotting zombies on The Walking Dead, foul as they are, have nothing on the show’s decayed human souls. The third season of The Walking Dead has been about what violence and scarcity do to our society’s moral codes — how our sphere of ethical concern narrows to a pinhead as conditions become dire. Last night’s midseason finale hammered the point home, using the battle between Rick’s band of survivors and the Governor’s to examine the hows and whys of moral decline after the apocalypse.

As The Walking Dead becomes less of a turgid zombie soap, and more about the conflict between bands of humans in a dangerous, anarchic world, its central question has become less “how do we survive?” and more “who do we want to survive?” Each major turning point in the midseason finale — Rick’s choice to spare Michonne, Darryl’s decision to turn back for his brother Merle, Carl’s intervention on behalf of a new group of survivors, and the Governor’s big speech casting Merle out of respectable Woodbury society — are all about defining who matters morally and what the answer to that question means for the people asking it.

The Governor’s answer to this question is the simplest and most inhuman: kill everyone who isn’t one of His People. “We’ll have to take them out, let the biters move back in,” he says of the prison group, comparing them to the National Guardsmen he massacred in cold blood at the beginning of the season. While Rick is more compassionate, treating people outside his group as objects of suspicion rather than targets to slaughter, his worldview also centers on a stark us-and-them distinction. “If this goes south, we’re cutting her loose,” he says of Michonne, who has yet to earn ingroup status despite putting herself on the line to rescue Glenn and Maggie from the Governor’s clutches.

It’s the reversion to this tribalism that makes The Walking Dead‘s apocalypse so chillinglly real. Modern moral progress, as Peter Singer argues, has proceeded by expanding the sphere of moral concern to an ever-larger group of people. People may have once only cared about those who share their nationality, race, or gender, but as Enlightenment ideals about universal human rights took root, humans have moved inexorably towards treating everyone as equally worthy of moral concern. The Walking Dead‘s third season has suggested that, when you demolish a stable society, this purported moral progress will have proved a smokescreen, and that our enlightened selves are just as brutally tribal as our ancestors.

The moral drama in the struggle between the two groups of survivors, then, isn’t over the appropriateness of groupism in the shadow of the End. Instead, it’s about how we rebuild our moral code from the ashes. The difference between the Governor and Rick rests mostly in how they make decisions, and not the decisions they make.

The Governor is, for all his pieties, a dictator. He alone makes every critical political decision, hiding critical information from his subjects to ensure that they always come to see his own righteousness. His labelling of Rick’s group as “terrorists” who “want to destroy us” depends on Woodbury’s residents not knowing that the attack was really a rescue mission, a worrying suggestion that War on Terrorism secrecy may be dulling our own moral sense. What seems right in Woodbury, in short, is whatever the Governor says is right.

Though Rick declared that “this is not a democracy” at the end of the second season, his decisionmaking has become more cooperative, depending on input and informed consent from all the group members. When Rick asks Darryl to escape with the group and leave Merle behind, he gives him reasons to so, appealing rather than ordering. When the Governor instructs his lover Andrea to stay away from the battle, he dismisses her questions with a curt “do as I ask.”

So though Rick is the clear leader of his group, their moral code is determined by mutual consent and deliberation rather than dictatorial fiat. Indeed, Carl’s suggestion that Rick give up his leadership post in the preview hints that the group’s moral democracy may bleed into an actual one. Under the Governor’s rule, that would be unthinkable.

I caught up with this third season Treme last week, and among other things that struck me about the show—particularly that television shows about music are always going to be viscerally satisfying in a way that even the most beautifully-shot shows about food can never be—that the show really clicked for me this season, and distinguished itself from David Simon’s other shows, through its female characters. I wrote about two of them, LaDonna and Janette, as part of a piece on television’s difficult women for the Daily Beast late last week:

I was initially frustrated by Janette Desautel’s reaction to the opportunity to open a large, well-backed restaurant back in New Orleans. Her disregard for human-resources briefings and her distaste for even the prospect of profit margins seemed petulant to me early in the season. But as the restaurant opened, her temper tantrums started to make sense as the reasonable-sounding restrictions began to make it harder for Janette to run her kitchen, manage her staff in a way that was effective, turn out dishes that became so in demand that it was impossible to fulfill all the orders and still keep quality high, or even hold a benefit for a fellow, if less-glamorous, New Orleans restaurateur.

The experiences of that woman, LaDonna Batiste-Williams, raise the question of what it even means to be strong when the world punishes you for being cool and composed. After surviving a brutal sexual assault and struggling to reopen her family bar in the aftermath of Katrina, LaDonna spent much of this season waiting for her assailant’s trial to begin and trying to push back against demands of protection money. Her rudeness to her husband’s upper-crust relatives or willingness to cuss out the man extorting her may not be badass, but they’re an assertion of dignity to people who are all too willing to peel it off her like a layer of skin. And while LaDonna may never get the baseball bat she keeps behind the bar out in time to chase off the man trying to intimidate her into withdrawing her rape charges, or to keep him from burning her bar, her failures don’t make her weak or flailing.

I also thought Treme did an excellent job this season with two of its much more subtle storylines this year, too: Annie (Lucia Micarelli), a young musician beginning her rise towards the big time, and Sofia (India Ennenga), the daughter of civil rights lawyer Toni Bernette. Annie’s trajectory is outwardly smooth: she signs with an agent who keeps his promises to her, she begins touring and her work is well-received, her album comes out towards the end of the season. What lends the story drama is how her success is received by the people around her. Her mother (Isabella Rosselini), devalues Annie’s success because she isn’t performing classical music, and makes little effort to learn more about the blues tradition Annie’s working in, even as her father makes some efforts. And even worse, her boyfriend Davis, a DJ, is pursuing his career in parallel to Annie’s, and is so distracted by his own dreams that he doesn’t even notice that Annie’s success is happening. Davis is more musically and politically ambitious than Annie is—while she aspires to record some of her old friend Harley’s songs, he’s trying to convince his aunt to fund a scathing opera about Katrina and New Orleans’ musical legacy. But when he finds success, it’s with the musical equivalent of a temper tantrum that goes viral, cussing out his aunt, and Annie, or so it seems, in the process. The two of them break up without a big, bruising fight: neither of them needs to speak out loud the obvious truth that Davis will always be jealous, and Annie’s simply grown beyond his parochialism. By the end of the season, Annie’s performing at Jazz Fest, and Davis watches her, invisible, from the crowd: he finally sees her and her successes, but her world is now too large for him to stand out in it.

Sofia’s story is somewhat more dramatic, but it’s still handled as if the human scale of it is important and worthy. In retaliation for her mother’s investigations into the New Orleans Police Department’s actions during the storm, Sofia becomes the regular subject of traffic stops, warnings from cops, even an arrest for being underage at a party where alcohol is being served. Sofia is doing her best to be a good kid, and to protect both her family and her mother’s work by not getting into trouble—Toni’s surprise when she finds out that Sofia has broken up with an older boyfriend she thought was a bad influence on her daughter is a lovely example of a mother coming face-to-face with her daughter’s maturity and being pleasantly surprised by what she finds there. But it’s New Orleans, and Sofia is a teenager. Some joy and some trouble are inevitable. And when Toni decides to send Sofia off to finish her senior year in Florida, it’s both the right thing and painfully unfair. When Sofia comes home for a visit and finds Terry Colson, an NOPD officer who becomes her mother’s new boyfriend, drinking juice in his boxers, the polarization between them is reversed. Their conversation may consist of Sofia telling Terry that Florida sucks. But from Sofia’s face, she’s unexpectedly pleased that her mother’s found love, or something like it, in the wake of her father’s suicide. Both of them are growing, and for the first time, capable of recognizing it in each other and being happy for each other, as if they are friends as well as mother and daughter.
Read more