Are the living dead still alive? – review of the tenth season of the series “The Living Dead”

The series originally known as The Walking Dead was once a powerful brand that was exchanged without hesitation among the first television giants of the present decade, such as Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. Although, unlike its competitors, it still remains in the game, it has definitely lost its importance since then – and with good reason. First, he struggled with a general decline in the quality of the script, and then with an excessive prolongation of the first plot that was really successful for a long time (Negan and Savior). In the meantime, it has also suffered from several bizarre decisions by writers who quickly shed many of the leading characters that are the essence of the series for many fans. What has happened will not be undone, so we can trust that the story is going (after all) to something interesting and wait for further developments.

Now quickly, before it reaches us, it doesn’t make sense!

As I have already mentioned, the Walking Dead have lost most of their famous faces by an avalanche in recent seasons . Judging by the harsh reactions from fans on the web, many of these deaths (or other forms of removing protagonists from the plot) were points where numerous viewers ended their adventure with the show. The outbursts grew stronger with Glenn’s execution, but Carl, Rick, and Maggie later left The Walking Dead . The more prominent supporting figures, such as Abraham, Tara, Enid and Jesus, met a similar fate. This trend is not weakening – it is already known that Danai Gurira, Michonne, will leave the cast after this season.

There is nothing wrong with that, after all, from the very beginning, the creators tried to build an atmosphere of uncertainty around the fate of the main characters in the image of Game of Thrones. So you know that nothing lasts forever, and in this gloomy post-apocalyptic world, no one is safe. Over time, unfortunately, this procedure ceased to serve the story and began to be a generator of poor twists focused on pure shocking and a method of getting rid of people with whom you simply do not know what to do. The situation is also made worse by the fact that the writers act like a guy with a hammer who sees nails everywhere. The “death sentences” affect not only the older, worn-out characters, but also the new ones who should fill the niche after their predecessors, but ultimately do not get such a chance. As a result, many threads seem completely pointless, the motivations of many protagonists become completely incomprehensible, and the plot comes in bizarre circles.

More specifically, Season Nine spent a lot of screen time moving young Henry from third to first… and then killed him. With him, unfortunately, any reasonable reason why the “stolen” Lydia would remain in the protagonist community was obliterated. Indeed, in season ten, the girl wanders somewhere in the background, has almost no relations with others, and clearly serves only as a tool to push the plot in the desired direction several times, and then – how conveniently – she disappears without a trace.

Wait a minute… anyone knows where we’re going?

I regret to say that from at least season nine the script seems to be wandering in the dark and hitting walls, and season ten continues this trend. Showruners clearly do not learn from their mistakes and do not see the fact that they are cornering themselves more and more. In the Living Deadthere is simply a shortage of heroes on which the story could be based. Veterans of the show scatter from the cast like rats from a sinking ship, and new characters die like flies before they become recognizable and likeable. Although some “freshmen” have a certain potential, and the actors responsible for their creation do their best to be remembered by the viewer (here, for example, I appreciate Magna and Luke, played by Nadia Hilker and Dan Fogler, respectively), it turns out to be very difficult with so little airtime and a story that hardly engages them.

Moreover, the communities of the Hill and Alexandria that are being presented to us are becoming more and more unreliable and lacking the “backbone” to support them. Perhaps I think about it too much, but as the action unfolded, these groups lost almost all people with any leadership potential (Rick, Glenn, Carl, Maggie, Jesus, Tara), and for lack of better options, the creators began to put characters at the head of settlements, who never betrayed this kind of abilities (Aaron, Gabriel), and impetuous loners who stayed for a long time on the outskirts of the resulting towns (Michonne, Daryl, Carol). Watching, one gets the impression that the evolution of these particular protagonists in this direction is unnatural and is solely due to the fact that all the more relevant candidates have already been sacrificed for the sake of one or the other.plot twist , without considering the long-term consequences of such a move.

Good antagonist needed immediately!

Another serious problem that draws the current season down is the opponent who is uninteresting and does not create a sense of real threat. Alpha and his “officers”, Beta and Gamma just do not live up to the heels of the previous bad guys. There is a huge qualitative gap between them and the charismatic, dangerous and well-played Negan, and in my opinion they perform even worse than their more average predecessors, such as the Governor. From episode to episode, Alpha becomes less and less intimidating – if it was ever possible to describe it that way – and the more she stumbles, breaks down, and weirdly moves, the harder it becomes to believe that she has gathered and intimidated so many followers. , and that he is able to keep them in check. It is all the more striking because her group is clearly more terrorized and subordinate only to her person than it ever was, for example, in the case of the Saviors.

The Whispers themselves also look pale next to the aforementioned Negan’s wetboys. Initially, they benefited from an aura of mystery and unconventional methods of coping with the post-apocalyptic world, i.e. the ability to control the living dead in a limited way and closely monitor and infiltrate other surviving communities. Unfortunately, this spell was broken quite quickly, and the cutlery, wearing the skins of the dead, became less intriguing and disturbing than the inhabitants of the junkyard known from the older episodes.

Season 10 strips them more and more of the remnants of that kind of horror, and without it the fact that they are merely a jumble of dirty, malnourished freaks intimidated by their emotionally unstable leader emerges. They do not have any fortifications, no base, vehicles or a large supply of firearms – they rely only on hordes of zombies driven like sheep and brutal surprise attacks with the use of melee weapons.

With all that in mind, it’s hard to find a script that is plausible and straightforward. Whispering has virtually no advantage over the protagonists who live in guarded, walled towns, are hardened to fight the dead, and have armor, horses, and many types of throwing and throwing weapons. Even so, the main characters get outsmarted again and again and are too overwhelmed and scared to even try any form of organized counterattack. The story seems to move slowly in this direction, but everything we have seen so far deserves to be called absurd.