This post discusses plot points from the March 17 episode of The Walking Dead.

What a mess.

While the last two weeks of The Walking Dead saw the show restored to the first half of the season’s strength, this Sunday’s offering (“Prey”) was a giant leap backwards, marking the worst episode to date of the already-uneven post-break batch. But “Prey” was, at least, a clarifying failure. The episode was a case study in how a show loses dramatic force when it forgets its thematic core — a problem that became clear during the Governor’s full-on slasher turn Sunday night.

Let me first back up and run through what, thematically speaking, made The Walking Dead‘s best moments tick. Back in Season One, and in this season’s exceptional “Clear,” it was existential horror. The show’s harshly bright aesthetic, shot through with haunting images, hammered home the sheer terror of being alone (or nearly alone) in a world newly become alien and dangerous. The central antagonists weren’t, properly speaking, characters: herds of walkers, the need for scarce supplies like food and clean water, and psychologically coping with a scary, dirty, and uncertain way of life constituted the core challenges for the crew of survivors.

At the beginning of Season 3, the show broke firmly with that approach, backgrounding the zombie apocalypse and placing the problem of internecine human warfare in a world without a central authority front and center. It was, at first, a well executed switch — it forced the characters to confront basic moral dilemmas (like “who should we care for?”) and develop what is, for all intents and purposes, a foreign policy. The Walking Dead episodes that succeeded here were less about individualized terror, and more about the moral and political challenges people face when attempting to create a stable social order out of whole cloth.

The Governor was the key to executing this thematic shift. He was the show’s first villain in the most classic sense (no, Merle and Shane don’t count), but what made him so effective is that it wasn’t always obvious that he was “evil” in a similarly traditional fashion. Sure, the Governor was always a brutal, authoritarian, but before the mid-season break, it was possible to read his actions (save one) as rational responses to an irrational world. Killing everyone who could pose a threat to your group is an extreme, but not necessarily crazy, response to the fact that you can’t trust others to remain peaceful. His authoritarian decision-making procedure can be seen as the extension of Rick’s “this isn’t a democracy” declaration to a larger community. The challenge to Rick’s group (and the viewers) was to make the case that there was, in fact, something morally wrong with the Governor and to develop the appropriate response to the political challenge he poses.
Read more

This post discusses plot points from the February 17 episode of The Walking Dead.

Is morality a luxury? One might think that, in a world overrun by zombies, setting up an ethical code should take a backseat to survival. But the strongest moments in Sunday’s othewise lackluster Walking Dead made the opposite case, using a breakdown in the relationship between brothers Merle and Darryl as a case study in why morality would and should be a central concern in a post-apocalyptic world.

The brothers begin feuding in the woods, as the meager spoils of their hunting efforts lead Darryl to question whether they shouldn’t make a beeline back for the well-stocked prison. But the real rift emerges when they spy a small group of survivors fighting a losing battle against a group of walkers. Darryl sees people in trouble who need his help. But Merle sees useless dead weight to whom he owes nothing. “They ain’t never cooked me a meal,” he sniffs.

However close Darryl and Merle may have been at one point (even morally speaking, as they apparently planned to rob the prison group when they first encountered it), the conflict over the embattled group on the highway reveals how far they’ve grown. Darryl believes human life is something worth protecting irrespective of utility. Like a normal person, he believes leaving people to die when you can save them to be a grave moral ill. It’s such an important part of his moral character that he barely hesitates to run in, crossbow blazing, and save the day. Merle is left little choice but to follow his brother but, in a nice touch, he saunters towards the battle in a fashion resembling nothing more than a walker’s shuffle, his move away from humanity reflected in his actual movement.

Darryl finally snaps after Merle attempts to stick up the terrified survivors for food. Demanding “an enchilada” from the Spanish-speaking “beaners,” Merle’s moral ugliness is on full display, and Darryl can’t take it anymore. He points his crossbow at his brother, demanding Meryl let them go and deciding to march back to the prison irrespective of what his brother wants. Merle’s Randian selfishness has made him toxic, so untrustworthy and morally repellent that his own brother can’t stand to be alone with him.

The underlying point here is that morality isn’t just a luxury in this world: it’s something people need, both a survival adaptation and, more importantly, one of the only things that makes their apocalyptic life worth living. Last week, it seemed like family ties were the most powerful motivating force for survivors, shredding group bonds as if they were paper. But Darryl’s move back to the prison suggests ethics run deeper than blood. Merle’s utter lack of humanity makes it impossible for Darryl to depend on him; he needs to be with people who place the same value on his life as he places on theirs to survive in a world where no one can really provide for themselves.

In a clever bit of dialogue, this point is directly connected to Merle’s racism. When Darryl sets off for the prison, Merle pleads with Darryl that he might not be welcome: “I tried to kill that black bitch…damn near killed that Chinese kid.” Darryl’s pithy response — “he’s Korean!” — points to the fact that he’s bothered to get to know these people, while Merle’s refusal to see them as anything other than stereotyped cartoons keeps him out of a community defined by shared trust. Human kindness isn’t a relic of a bygone world. It’s a necessity.

But Darryl’s moral revolt isn’t just about the fact that he can’t trust Merle in a tight spot. Darryl appears to simply not want a life in which he either leaves innocent people to die or thieves from them. In his mind, Merle has abandoned the very things that make life good and valuable, the values and beliefs that make humans noble and underpinned their brotherly love itself. “I may be the one walking away,” Darryl tells his brother, “but you’re the one who’s leaving.” As they’ve both returned to the prison by the end of the episode, the central question going forward is whether Merle can return from this moral exile as well.

I hadn’t read World War Z by the time the trailer for the Brad Pitt-Mireille Enos movie came out, but after I finished it this morning, it was clear what a travesty this adaptation seems poised to be. It would be impossible to adapt the oral history as a single, coherent narrative. But the book seems like it would lend itself to a miniseries that could float between different perspectives, or perhaps even more fittingly, a series of movies like the Red Riding trilogy, which explored the long-running investigation into a Yorkshire serial killer. Here are the six sections of World War Z that struck me as the most likely candidates for stand-alone films:

Section: Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonaga Ijiro
Director: Stephen Chow
Why It Would Be Great: An otaku and a blind gardener take Japan back from the zombies? It would be one of the greatest genre mashups since Kung Fu Hustle, not to mention a pair of fantastic roles for Asian men. And while Chow is from Hong Kong, rather than Japan, his touch with Hustle was absolutely delightful. I’d love to see him have a shot at pitting two unlikely heroes against a mob of incredibly scary antagonists, and to pair it with some gorgeous landscape cinematography.

Section: Todd Wainio
Director: Ed Zwick
Why It Would Be Great: As he proved in Glory, the man can do a battle sequence. And it would be exciting to see a filmmaker with his kind of conscience take on the utter failure of the American military, and its attempt to recover from it, strategically and psychologically, and to turn the tide. Also, if Nicholas Brody’s going to get killed in the finale of Homeland this weekend, Damian Lewis is going to have some time on his hands. I’d love to see him take on this soldier’s role, particularly for the chance to see him get paired up with an honest-to-God, badass battle nun, who is Wainio’s partner in the reformed military.

Section: Admiral Xu Zhicai
Director: Shawn Ryan
Why It Would Be Great: Last Resort may be toast, but Ryan was on to something interesting with his story about a submarine crew gone rogue after it was given orders to fire a nuclear weapon on Pakistan. I’d love to see him take a shot at capturing the story of a Chinese submarine crew who smuggled their families on board and created a survivable society on board their ship as they fled from the zombie apocalypse consuming their country. Instead of deciding not to fire their nuclear weapons, as is the case in Last Resort, this story ends with the agonizing choice to nuke a bunker full of hardline Chinese leadership. It’s a harrowing adventure, but a deeply creative one, and it would avoid some of the pitfalls Ryan ran into when he tried to build out not just a sub crew but the population of an island in his ABC show.

Section: Xolelwa Azania
Director: Connie Field
Why It Would Be Great: Field directed Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, the amazing documentary series about the end of apartheid. While most of the people I recommend to direct these movies are feature directors, it would be fascinating to see Field go fictional and tackle South Africa’s decision to implement the Redeker Plan, an effort to save a core of South Africa by abandoning some of the population and the country’s land to the zombie infestation. As a story about racial reconciliation despite the echoes of apartheid in the plan, this could be a fascinating, subtle movie.

Section: Christina Eliopolis
Director: Patty Jenkins
Why It Would Be Great: This story of an Air Force pilot bailed out in the middle of infested zombie territory, staying alive with a voice on the radio as her only guide, could be an incredible showcase for a young female action star, maybe Gina Carano. And Jenkins knows a thing or two about directing a woman under extreme duress. This could be a simple, stripped-down, incredibly scary movie that wouldn’t even need to showcase a lot of zombies to be terrifying.

Section: Breckinridge Scott
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Why It Would Be Great: In Contagion, Soderbergh featured a repellant blogger, played by Jude Law, who spread the news of a false cure for a global pandemic, and was later found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company which hoped to spike sales of herbal remedies. I’d love to see him put this kind of scenario at the center of a film, instead of addressing it as one of many threads in a single movie. He’d have so much fun tearing into a figure like Scott, and portraying the luxury he lives in as a kind of suffocating rot.

Over at New York Magazine, Heather Havrilesky has a great piece that posits an answer to one of the things that gets me twitchiest about post-apocalypse stories: the lack of an explanation for how everything got so terrible in the first place. She argues that the point of shows like The Walking Dead or novels like Colson Whitehead’s Year Zero is to clear away some of the complications of modern society and to let us revel in the possibilities of stark choices or stark scenarios: the opportunity to wander around a city alone, unencumbered by security guards or a need to justify turning up someplace, the possibility of nobly sacrificing yourself for your baby, the opportunity to demonstrate your love and commitment to someone you love who is in danger in a visceral, even violent way. She writes:

The focus of these novels isn’t on the shape and form of the catastrophe; those details are often pretty vague. The apocalypse mostly serves as a way to turn up the contrast on a hero’s solitary battle to adapt and sally forth. Stripping away the complications and distractions of the modern world, what is our protagonist left with? The same melancholy and longing he or she always had, of course, but with far more of an excuse to feel these heavy emotions at every turn. Instead of injecting desperation, romance, solitude, and morbidity into a banal tale, these qualities are encoded in the apocalyptic novel’s DNA, minimizing the trivial clutter and heightening the stakes. Values and ideas about morality are stripped down to their essential nature: Kill or be killed? Conform and tolerate oppression or escape and risk death? Somehow, though, even in older works like Ballard’s The Drowned World, such disturbing questions are savored and relished. There’s an obvious delight taken in the awfulness of the transformed planet. In his survey of science fiction, A Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss refers to this tendency of authors to concoct enviable end times as “the cozy catastrophe.” As others suffer and die around him, our hero runs wild, enjoying the fruits of the worldwide holocaust.

This fascinates me in part because I think my reaction to post-apocalypse fiction, and really, all sorts of futuristic narratives, is to be more interested in how we got there than what we do when we’re there. I love the first two books in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because they’re all about the choices the characters make to extend their lifespans, to terraform Mars, to embrace new religions, and ultimately, to declare independence from Earth, but I’m relatively bored by the third novel, which is about all the sex and drama a new generation has once the future’s finally arrived. Reading The Hunger Games, I always want to know how the Capitol seized enough power to bring the Districts to heel enough to set up the Games in the first place. I wonder about first contact and the Bugger Wars in Ender’s Game, though I think Orson Scott Card is smart enough to weave a lot of backstory about the way the world changed into his story about what it’s become now. I love Contagion so much because it’s the rare, beautifully optimistic movie about how we avert a post-apocalypse, rather than bowing down to the inevitability of disaster.

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.

In the absence of actual, non-Sandy news today, the conversation has turned to whether the approaching hurricane will end up influencing the presidential election, and if so, in which direction. I can’t pretend to any insight into whether Sandy will hurt Obama, help Romney, or what impact losing a day or two of early voting will have on either campaign. But this conversation did get me thinking about something that’s always bothered me about post-apocalyptic fiction: why there are so few central governments playing major roles after huge disasters.

I understand that it’s narratively quite exciting to explore landscapes that are anarchic, the psyches of men like the Governor in The Walking Dead who rise up and assume dictatorial control over small communities, or the group decision-making of a place like Haven, the refuge in Justin Cronin’s vampire novel, The Passage, that’s struck a terrible bargain to stay alive. The post-apocalypse is an opportunity for ordinary men and women to test themselves, and to have opportunities to become heroes, to take up arms and reveal their inner badasses, to stand up for decency and civilization in the absence of other structures supporting those values. We like watching Rick Grimes rise to the occasion, to be surprised by Amy Wolgast’s survival and what it means about the resilience of little girls, be they enhanced with vampiric powers or no.

But in apocalyptic scenarios, established governments have enormous advantages, both in beating back whatever dreadful things are coming down the transom, and in consolidating communities after the worst dies down. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which has really settled in as one of my favorite movies of the past couple of years, is a terrific example of this: as a dreadful, flu-like illness spreads across the globe, individual government employees who go out into the field are vulnerable, but the bureaucracy takes great care to preserve the health and well-being of its core leadership. They get vaccines first. The chain of command both restores order and helps make citizens dependent on the government. People who are frightened for their lives may raid pharmacies and loot their neighbors’ houses, but they’re not exactly likely to storm National Guard barricades of the highways, and they may protest the order in which vaccines are distributed, but they’re unlikely to totally jeopardize vaccine production or their chances of getting their own treatment, much less their chance of being defended against a terrible and rising tide. The Passage at least has a nod to that—the surviving colony is founded by FEMA—but like most post-apocalyptic stories, it skips over the question of how the central government fell in the first place. It’s too bad that most stories try to get away from national, or even local, governments survive or fall as fast as possible. There’s a lot of interesting storytelling to be done about what it takes to lead in crisis, what it takes to resist the temptation to seize dictatorial power, what it means to fail, and what happens when bureaucrats who have been invisible for much of their careers suddenly become the people who stand between a wider population and disaster.

In our age of anti-heroes and fabulous villains, niceness has often fallen along the wayside as an embodiment of dull virtue, evidence of a distasteful unwillingness to commit to strong emotion or decisive action. It’s no mistake that Steve Carrell’s emerged as a surprisingly significant movie star during this past decade. He’s the one person who can get away with making nice interesting, the end goal of hard-fought battles for control in a world that often takes advantage of or mocks decency. And Carell’s rarely used his core strength to better effect than in Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, a lovely, emotionally precise apocalypse romantic comedy that seems at unfortunate risk of being drowned out by this summer’s louder, cruder entertainments.

Seeking a Friend begins with a news announcement that immediately sets it apart from other movies about the potential end times: “The final mission to save mankind has failed.” Upon hearing that awful pronouncement, Dodge’s (Carell) wife Linda bolts from the car they’ve pulled over to the side of the road to hear the radio report on a last-ditch effort to divert an asteriod that’s headed towards earth with cataclysmic consequences. She, as it turns out with, wants to spend her final month on earth with someone other than her husband.

But Dodge wasn’t harboring a secret yearning—unlike the other guests at a dinner party thrown by his unhappily married friends, a very funny Connie Britton and Rob Corddry, he doesn’t want to have an orgy or try heroin—or an alternate plan. So he goes about his job as an insurance adjustor at an increasingly-depleted office, telling callers “Sorry, sir, I’m afraid that’s not covered under your current policy. Yes, the Armageddon package is extra,” and attending meetings where is boss lets the dwindling staff “know of a few positions in upper management that have become available. Anyone want to be Chief Financial Officer?”

It seems Dodge will continue to wind down the end of his life and everyone else’s with these small acts of decency—he adopts an abandoned dog as his sole act of adventure, and tries, unsuccessfully, to convince his housekeeper to spend more time with her family—until a neighbor he’s never spoken with breaks up with her boyfriend and ends up crying on his fire escape. The real source of her heartache, it turns out, is that she isn’t going to be able to spend her last days with her family. “I missed two planes,” Penny sobs. “I missed them all. The end of the world and I’m still fifteen minutes late.” Along with her woes, Penny brings Dodge’s undelivered mail, which includes a letter from a woman he loved and lost years ago, giving him sudden forward momentum. Penny has a car, and Dodge knows someone with a plane, and they strike a bargain: Penny will help Dodge find his old girlfriend, and he will help her make one last attempt to cross the Atlantic home to England.

What’s striking about their roadtrip is its warmth. When they’re arrested for speeding, another cop lets them out of jail in the morning with an apology and a plea for understanding: his colleague is reacting badly to the end times and trying to restore as much order to his universe as he can. Dodge and Penny stop by a Friendsy’s restaurant where the employees are hilariously, cultishly high and reveling, determined to satisfy as many customers as possible before they close forever. “Everyone’s welcome!” the host tells them. ” A dude brought in a wolf last week.” And they’re brought closer, and Dodge comes entirely out of his shell in an almost worldless sequence when he and Penny run across what appears to be a mass baptism on a gorgeous beach. The scene could have been played for sneers or rank sentiment, but instead, it’s a quiet testament to the power of connection. Who wouldn’t want to spend one last perfect day at the beach with someone they love before the world ends, surrounded by people who are eager to share the small bounties in their possession?

The fact that the end is inevitable liberates Seeking a Friend from the cliched, last-minute heroics that consume so many apocalypse movies. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the world to keep on turning, but those stories are in service of future love and kindness, rather than appreciating what you have. The movie gently pokes fun at that kind of planning when Dodge and Penny stop by to see one of Penny’s old boyfriends, a hyper-prepared survivalist who asks Dodge to convince Penny to stay in his bunker because “Can we restart society without her? Sure, but she deserves to be one of the top-quality females in contention.” Seeking a Friend is a movie about the people who aren’t really in contention, and about the fact that whether you can save the world or not, it’s possible to be the hero of your own life.

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, a novel about a futuristic America wracked by poverty and severe energy shortages where most people spend the majority of their time inside an extremely sophisticated video game world called OASIS, and the billionaire inventor of the game who sets off a treasure hunt within it on his death, came out last summer and I finally got around to it last weekend. It’s not a perfect book—Cline does a lot of telling when he should show, as when he introduces us to a blogger and tells us what her style is like at length rather than letting us see it for ourselves in sample posts. But it’s an engaging story, and I think worth comparing to both Reamde, Neil Stephenson’s novel about a similar video game empire though set in a time closer to our own, and The Hunger Games, which features a similar teenaged protagonist—and in a similar way, prioritizes romance over political engagement.

Ready Player One‘s main character is an isolated teenager named Wade, who lives in extreme poverty with his aunt in the stacks—a name for tightly packed and deeply unsteady complexes of stacked trailers. Wade goes to school in OASIS and after the game’s founder dies, Wade becomes a deeply dedicated participant in the scavenger hunt that the man left behind—and that guarantees the winner access to his fortune. As Wade advances further in the quest, a corporation that wants to take control of OASIS starts stalking Wade and his counterparts, killing his aunt and one of Wade’s fellow gamers in an effort to coerce them into turning over the clues that lead to the treasure. In that respect, the book is a lot like The Hunger Games—both books feature a poor teenaged protagonist struggling to maintain his or her integrity in the face of a murderous and seemingly unalterable system, whether it’s a corporation that’s more powerful than any government, or a government that’s taken control of the economy. And like Reamde, Ready Player One features a game founder with a near-unkillable avatar who is an unpredictable free agent in the game.

But all three books have slightly different perspectives on how their main characters should engage with the world outside of the games they’re playing. At the end of The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen, who has been turned into a political symbol and used for purposes contrary to her values, quits altogether: she commits a symbolic act of political violence and returns home, marries, starts a family, and gets as far away from engagement as possible. At the end of Ready Player One, Wade’s victory ensures him not just tremendous wealth but tremendous political power—the reward for winning the scavenger hunt isn’t just the billionaire’s fortune, but his OASIS avatar and the ability to self-destruct the game, driving everyone back into their real, and very broken, world. But the book treats that power, and the possibility of a massive intervention to change the fate of the American public, raised by another character, as if they’re simply not very interesting, at least in comparison to Wade’s reconciliation with his first love. In Reamde, by contrast, getting out of the game and into a world where they go head-to-head with some very nasty terrorists and a mountain lion, is reinvigorating and rewarding for the characters. They get major personal rewards for acting in the world—there doesn’t have to be a tradeoff.

Now, not all novels have to be social novels. And not all heroes have to change the world—nor is it realistic to expect that all heroes will be in a position to kill the hell out of an Osama bin Laden stand-in while also helping ensure the marital happiness of their favorite niece. But there’s something very odd about setting up very clear dystopian conditions, enumerating how they affect the characters, and then suggesting that engaging with those conditions and working to change them isn’t very differing. Both Ready Player One and The Hunger Games are grounded in more explicit social critiques than Reamde, but Reamde‘s far more interested in engaging with the world than they are.