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Tale As Old As Time

by DICK CHENEY

The Walking Dead
creator Frank Darabont

Sometimes you can watch a piece of fiction that gives you a new perspective on your own life. Andrea (Laurie Holden) has engaged in a loving and caring relationship with the Governor (David Morrissey), the dominant villain on the third, interminable season of The Walking Dead. Her sex scenes with this one-eyed creature are among the best in television because they both appear requisitely lumpy, coming across less like a glamorous, evil couple than a couple of middle-aged people making the best of it.

After coitus, Andrea considers taking the advice of her friend Carol, who advises plunging a knife into the neck of the Governor to end the ongoing war between the two camps. Outside of Woodbury, and indeed outside everywhere, the undead continue to walk around. There are still zombies on the show, they are just completely unrelated to any of the actual drama.

holding a knife while nude brought down the Aztecs

Andrea moves towards the Governor's exposed neck where he sleeps, holding the knife with which she intends to take his life. Suddenly she stops and turns around, giving up on the murder. We are left with the why. Why didn't my wife take my own life many years ago? For example: one time I made her feed me out of a trough and then watch video of me playing tennis with Benjamin Netanyahu for over three hours.

I used to be intolerable, but now I am completely great. I even take out the trash, and I only use duct tape to seal the dog door in the winter. I can't do a push-up anymore, but I no longer laugh out loud when Lynne tries one. Over time, some of us improve like aged wine, and along the same duration, others just fall apart.

"listen lori...are you this strapped for other projects? that guy's youngest daughter kissed me on the cheek"

Rick (Andrew Lincoln) has lost his wife, and it has completely unhinged him. In this bizarre role, he is so much more entertaining than he was as a loving father and sort of husband, but in unmaking the central hero of The Walking Dead, the show has unraveled, losing the centrifuge everything else spun around.

One thing The Walking Dead does as well as any other drama is kill its darlings, a phrase meant to indicate that you should not give over to sentimentality, and so should remove the best part of anything. There is nothing worse than this expression, originally coined by Ernest Hemingway in a bathhouse. He didn't have any darlings to kill, what did he care if you murdered your own?

Carl u know what you must do

In this context it does not meant Lori dying during childbirth, since no one wanted to see her acting at any length and it was a mercy killing. It means that the Korean-Gentile relationship between Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) had to be sacrificed. I was in favor of turning it into a Bonnie & Clyde type situation and having Glenn go on to marry an older woman (Annette Bening) afterwards, but instead the couple shared a more unctuous conflict over near rape. Since the show has no idea how to deal with a topic so serious, they just kinda make like Glenn does and avoid it.

glenn demands that he stand and she sit for every long talk they have

The Walking Dead showed how inadequate it is at dealing with deeper issues between characters who know each other while trying to write dialogue between Merle and Daryl. I've never met two brothers where one is a racist and one isn't, except maybe if Joe Biden has a really open-minded brother.

"I just love that Ricky Rubio" "Same"

But yeah, Merle's amputation has become a part of his personality. Sometimes he's like really sensitive ("These people of color resent that I tried to kill them") and sometimes he's like, "Let's steal these folks' belongings," which frankly identifies him more with the far-left than the far right. I can already imagine the scene where Daryl holds Merle off of a stranded group of travelers' spoils by arrow-point as an allegory for tax reform.

"when rick shot my daughter in the face I was like damn son"

The Walking Dead is more fun when it is outright sinister, as when cynically setting up a romance between Carol and the likable ex-convict who resembles her in every way, and then disposing of their future romantic prospects so suddenly via a bullet from the Governor. Then again, most jokes on the show revolve around instantaneous death for a participant in the drama, so minus for creativity, and plus for surprise.  

eurasian

The obvious choice would be to focus more on The Walking Dead's best character, Michonne (Danai Gurira). You understand everything about who she is by how she treats the undead - like a determined, purposeful mother. It's weird to see her deferring to Rick but I guess that conflict had to be put on the backburner. It would be prescient to use her as the singular protagonist for a number of episodes, or why not just one singular flashback episode? Let's turn this into Lost, I want to be there when they explain that this is the central mystery of the show:

Fuck you all.

Take for example a common citizen in Rome. The empire is ending, some chap gets it in his head that a famous personage represents Sodom and the evil in his homeland. He doesn't have two swords; he never actually does anything about it; circumstances just crumble of their own accord. As the world ends, there is still a need to end a part of it yourself. The expression on Michonne's face tells us everything about what she feels about what happens around her.

go with it

The underlying message at the heart of The Walking Dead is that adapting to the circumstances you find yourself in is everything. The costume you find yourself is properly called a habit. It is what actually defines you - the vow that you make, not that you are the one that makes it.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

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