True Confessions: I Overthink the Walking Dead

In fairness, I overthink everything. It's what I do—it's my job! I overthink things until they're threadbare, and I do it with no discrimination. Sometimes I overthink very stupid things, like old arguments unmoored in memory, and sometimes I overthink things that are not meant to be overthought. This is a unique category and it's where the Walking Dead universe lives.

These are things that ask us to suspend our disbelief. Sometimes it's just a little bit of disbelief, as with the ancient unfrozen parasitic wasps in Fortitude or the alien black cloud of The Black Cloud, for example, but sometimes it's a lot. The Walking Dead universe asks for a lot.

Suspending disbelief is a funny thing. There's more to it than just ignoring implausibility. Sci-fi so often presents us with things that are unreal while not really demanding that we question that unrealness because maybe it's more often the unrealness of non-existence or of magical realism than the unrealness of impossibility. Which is a bigger distinction than it might at first seem.

So, yes, the Walking Dead. For our purposes here, that can be taken to mean the universe more or less agreed upon across the two television shows, Telltale point-and-click video games, and the comics (though I've only read the first 10 or so comics). I like the Walking Dead, in spite of its many, many flaws. At least it makes me want more, which is maybe not the same thing as being "good."

This is about the point that I'm going to get spoilery, but not too much.

I obsess a bit about the zombies and how they are supposed to work. We are definitely not supposed to think about this, however, and are definitely not supposed to ask questions about how the zombies effect some sort of metabolism in the absence off a circulatory system or apparently without the requirement of oxygen (but while still breathing given the opportunity). We're not supposed to ask how they persist without immune defenses or hormones. We're not supposed to ask how they smell and hear with seeming superhuman abilities despite those parts of the zombie brain supposedly being shut down. I could go on. We're especially not supposed to ask how the get by without water.

The problem demarcated by the above observations is less so about impossibility than internal consistency. The zombies could be magic or classically supernatural, but the universe excluded that option with the survivor's visit to the CDC, which reinforced that the zombie pathogen was some sort of virus and was observable and potentially understandable. Jenner, the lone surviving CDC doctor, was convinced of this, if not of his (or the wildfire group's) ability to deal with it.

France was close, remember? But so was Jenner himself.

The CDC stuff is really bad, in terms of science. Viruses, let alone viral DNA, are not visible using optical microscopes, nor do they get together and swap genetic material. It could be something other than a virus that Jenner is looking at, something that show's creators made up. That would be better and probably more interesting. But they seem pretty adamant about the virus idea and the stuff under the microscope is clearly supposed to be viral (above). I don't see the point.

It Looks Human, a bad-science-in-movies busting blog run by a molecular biology grad student, put this well:

The new WD show hits on the outbreak/public health aspect even harder, pushing WD ever further from the zombie universe of George Romero. The Night of the Living Dead movies mostly just ask us to use our imaginations, with some prompting from the imaginations of the characters. That works.

So the Walking Dead zombie cause is something biological, which drives me fucking nuts the more I think about it. But it's also better than at least one alternative, which is something like magic zombies. That would just be boring. Magic avoids the problems of rules and consistency by avoiding them in the first place. Magic can be anything at anytime for the simple reason that it's by definition unobservable. It's magic.

So, yeah, definitely overthinking things here. The CDC episode was necessary to reassure the WD world that the zombies are really for reals "dead" and consciousness-vacant: unthinking machines. But it also set up a universe of contradictions. Which is maybe my problem and not the series's, though, at the same time, it may be what keeps me watching the shows in the first place.

In any case, I'll take the Fortitude zombies. As homicidal, animated wasp-nests they're creepy and gross enough, with about the same epidemic potential. But they're also alive and we're left to guess just how alive that actually is, which is an unease not present in the WD universe.