The Walking Dead: Some random musings about walkers

The Walking Dead is a show about civilization ending because of something that causes people to die and turn into zombies or walkers and how the remainIng people adjust.

People say all the time how the show is not about the zombies, it’s about the people. While that is true to some degree, and I’ve talked about that before, the walkers are an integral part of the show and address many of the shows philosophical themes and questions.

The walkers make me think about things all the time. They bring up questions about death, right and wrong, guilt, burial, intention, and all sorts of random questions related to the walkers themselves in theory as well as how they help us understand our own lives.

If the walkers aren’t people and don’t remember who they were, does it really matter if we turn into one? Does it matter who kills us or if we roam for years? Isn’t everything our perception. We see the body of a person on the outside so it seems like they are the somebody.

Related Story: It is SO a zombie show

It’s beautiful to have someone who loved us put us down, but really does it matter to the walker? It’s more for the living than the dead. Isn’t that what memorial services and funerals are? When people say what the deceased would have wanted, it’s funny to me. They’re gone now. It’s for us.

More from Undead Walking

I respect people’s views and wishes, and I like the beauty and poetic nature of the events on the show when family put down their own. But I don’t share the idea of guilt if it’s impossible. I know it’s poetry and not reality sometimes.

I think about Alzheimer’s patients in the opposite way. People abandon them sometimes because they don’t know the difference. They don’t remember who we are. But they are not dead. Unlike walkers they are alive in their bodies. They feel. They feel physical and emotional pain. They think–even if it’s not properly. They are scared. They are lonely.

They may not remember who we are, but they know who people are. And we know who they are. Don’t we want them to have someone loving to take care of them as they are scared and lonely even if they don’t know who it is? We know!

These are ugly things. That’s something I love about the walkers. They are ugly and they force us to look at them.

Now some random questions for which I have no answers except I’m guessing these are all silly questions because the walkers don’t think:

If the walkers are hungry for live flesh, do they feel the hunger?
How do they know they are hungry?
Why don’t they sleep?
Why do they travel in herds? Do they think the other walkers have the skinny on food sources?
Do they care if they are alone?
Do they get bored?

The walkers remind me of watching my dad die. There are so many stages to death and to the grief that goes along with death for the living left behind. The walkers are just empty bodies that look like people. So are our dead. We just don’t continue to see them. The moment my dad was gone was one of the most beautiful and peaceful moments I ever experienced.

Next: Keep the zombies in my zombie show!

But it was fleeting. The grief before and after, the preparation, the chemo, the lifting his legs to get them on the bed, the watching him be scared, the pain in swallowing from radiation, those were all ugly. The year of firsts after he died and missing him after is ugly.

Looking at the ugly is important. In The Walking Dead we don’t just look at the ugly; we kill it.

Home/Opinion