Since its inception in 2010, The Walking Dead has earned its place as a long-running TV classic.
Despite its overwhelming popularity, though, it's by no means immune to criticism.
We're here to show you some unpopular opinions about The Walking Dead that raise good points.
We're definitely not the first to notice that The Walking Dead plays like an inverted Star Trek.
According to the imagination of Gene Roddenberry, post-current civilization humanity cooperates,
prospers, and revels in scientific advancement and exploration. Meanwhile,
people in The Walking Dead universe form tribes and go to war against each other, instead of
pooling their resources and working together against an obvious and omnipresent common threat.
While Star Trek is optimistic, The Walking Dead goes a step beyond pessimism
into full-blown nihilism. For whoever's left of the gang, their victories don't
really matter because they live in a world that's already been conquered by walkers.
They just survive terrible things in order to survive more terrible things.
Therefore, if the series ends with anything other than all the characters becoming dinner,
it will have betrayed its central themes of futility and doom. Considering the fact
that the writers have sometimes significantly deviated from the graphic novels' trajectory,
there's no way of knowing if this inevitable conclusion will come to pass on-screen.
At one point in 2006's Clerks II, the character of Randal Graves goes on a
little diatribe to explain his contempt for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As he puts it:
"All it was was a bunch of people walking."
Well, if you replace "walking" with "killing zombies" in Randal's rant,
it's not an inaccurate description of The Walking Dead.
We're definitely not saying the show has ever gotten boring. In order to get truly boring,
it would have to reduce its seasonal body count to a degree that would make it a
different show entirely. But it goes without saying that things have gotten repetitive.
Rick and the crew struggle against the elements until they find the Greene family farm. After
walkers overrun the farm, the heroes set out on their own once again. Then they come to the
prison, and they live there until walkers take over that one, too. Same deal in Alexandria. In
other words, The Walking Dead has a formula, and it sticks to that formula pretty closely.
If a corporation makes a successful thing — it could be a TV show, film,
book, what have you — then its next step will be to recreate whatever that thing happened to be,
in hopes of similar monetary rewards. In a vacuum, that's not a bad impulse. It's why
film genres exist in the first place. But we've hit a point where big companies fear
taking risks on just about anything they don't think is a sure-fire hit.
For proof, look no further than the world of The Walking Dead.
After all, Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: World Beyond,
and any other Dead-adjacent television projects in development exist at the expense of an unknowable
number of other shows that weren't greenlit because they lacked a built-in audience.
Perhaps we shouldn't judge AMC too harshly for its decision-making process because that's also why we
got Better Call Saul. But it is worth asking — at what point do we no longer require expansions
on a story that gets accused of redundancy and spinning its wheels as often as The Walking Dead?
Are The Walking Dead fans all jerks? Of course not!
But there's a significant minority among the fandom that's pretty toxic.
For proof, look no further than Josh McDermitt's social media experience. The actor has received
death threats because some fans dislike the character he plays — the cowardly Eugene.
Of course, if McDermitt responded in kind to each and every crazed fan who threatened his life over
the actions of an imaginary person he plays on television, then McDermitt would look insane,
and that would interfere with his ability to gain further employment
as a Hollywood actor. His only other option was to quit social media, and we can't say we blame him.
McDermitt's far from the only cast member to deal with online strife. Sadly,
fans body-shamed Alanna Masterson, prompting both the actress and costar Steven Ogg to strike back,
encouraging trolls to, quote, "go f---ing do something productive with your life."
When Michonne Hawthorne first appears at the end of season two, we see her leading around
two walkers on leashes. Later, we find out that these are the reanimated corpses of her boyfriend
and her boyfriend's pal. Evidently, she mutilated their bodies due to some justified resentment
connected to the death of her son. But in the process, Michonne discovered that walkers become
docile and harmless once their mouths and arms are removed. Even better, she learned that surrounding
herself with armless, mouthless walkers rendered her invisible to actively hostile zombies.
So, why isn't every living person dragging a pair of neutered walkers with them at all times?
If there's an effective method of walker deterrent available,
why is Michonne the only person who ever uses it? Furthermore,
why does she only use it when it's supposed to symbolize her paranoia and isolation?
This is a list of opinions, of course. It could very well be that people don't
want to stand next to mutilated walkers 24/7 because that would be a completely
disgusting way to live. But once you got used to it, in our opinion,
being constantly safe from walkers is worth being constantly grossed out by walkers.
Let's talk about October of 2016. Fans had waited all summer to find out whose
skull Negan would shatter at the onset of the seventh season. The season premiere started,
and we all held on to our butts, anticipating a payoff that would validate all our theories and
arguments over who had the best guess. After a handful of eternal minutes,
we watched both Abraham and Glenn face immensely unpleasant blunt-force deaths.
And it was gory. Disturbingly so. And there's something strange about the
fact that the show made us wait so long, made us debate and wonder and speculate,
only to treat us to a truly brutal beatdown that left us all feeling queasy.
Granted, nobody on The Walking Dead is ever safe. That looming uncertainty is written into
the genre's DNA. But in the lead-up to season seven, the uncertainty gave way to a kind of
sadism that one might use to promote a snuff film, and that raises uncomfortable questions.
"You are not safe."
Why were we so excited to watch someone die? Is there something wrong with us? Do we need help?
And did the show step over the line with those brutal killings?
So, if you tell us Rick Grimes seems like a nice guy, you'll get no argument.
The protagonist played by Andrew Lincoln sticks by his friends and family,
and always tries to do the honorable thing.
But, perhaps by design, he's not what we'd call a fascinating individual.
In fact, as a sheriff's deputy with a wife and child in suburban Georgia,
he was living a pretty typical life before the world ended. Circumstances in subsequent years
inspired considerable intensity from Grimes, but there's not a ton else that makes him feel
intrinsically unique. He didn't rise out of an abusive relationship like Carol. He's not
the most charismatic person in the room at all times, a la Daryl. He isn't an awesome
swordsman like Michonne. He doesn't even have a memorable gimmick like Jesus or Ezekiel.
In some respects, he's similar to John Connor in the Terminator franchise.
The other characters look to Rick Grimes as a leader, and they clearly draw a tremendous
amount of inspiration from his words and deeds. But nobody ever gets all that specific about what,
precisely, makes this guy so special. Ultimately, this places Rick Grimes in
the same category as Buffy Summers and Jerry Seinfeld — thoroughly effective main characters
who are nevertheless bland as dishwater when compared to all of their friends.
The series premiered in 2010, about a year before the emergence of its contemporaries,
Game of Thrones and Once Upon a Time. These ensemble dramas all felt designed to fill the
void left by Lost -- which infamously dangled solutions to the Island's many
mysteries inches in front of its audience's proverbial face throughout six seasons.
Likewise, The Walking Dead gang's journey in season one to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention led us to assume the origin of the infection might be explained at some point.
Since then, many seasons have aired. And in all that time, characters have rarely
expressed interest in any big picture beyond immediate necessity, and it seems unlikely that
anybody still tuning in expects to find out what started the zombie apocalypse.
One could argue that attaching a clear-cut cause for the end of civilization undercuts
the themes of random suffering and mayhem that permeate throughout the rest of the show.
So if the series never explains where the walker infection came from, it won't be a worse show for
allowing its big mystery to go unsolved. In fact, it's probably safer to leave that particular rock
unturned, rather than offering up a disappointing explanation that wasn't even needed to begin with.
As we learned in September of 2020, season eleven of The Walking Dead will be its last. Regardless
of how the spinoffs have turned out or will turn out, AMC made a good decision here. In fact,
if they made a mistake at all, it was not lopping off the show's aging head a few years earlier.
In fact, why would AMC ever continue a beloved sci-fi/horror series well after
its quality and fan interest started to decline?
Did AMC executives not learn the tragic lesson of The X-Files?
When it started in 1993, The X-Files became a surprise pop cultural phenomenon,
much like The Walking Dead would years later. Also like The Walking Dead, The X-Files probably
should've tied off all its loose story threads and called it a day sometime around season 5 or 6.
Instead, the network dragged it out for nine seasons and two movies,
plus a revival years later. Seasons ten and eleven aren't complete and total garbage,
but their worst entries — particularly the cringe-inducing "My Struggle IV " — are
bafflingly terrible to a degree that damages the legacy of the entire series.
In its defense, The Walking Dead has never produced an episode as abysmal
as "My Struggle IV." But the show won't have officially dodged that bullet until it ends.
Calling it quits at season eleven was a good — albeit belated — decision.
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