As a girl who has spent years of her life watching The Walking Dead, there’s one thing that I wish the series had improved upon—and that’s the zombies themselves.
Walkers, biters, the undead—whatever someone in this franchise would call them, they have always been around and have caused several thousand people to die and even more to make drastic changes to their lives to survive. They’re terrifying and have turned cities into graveyards.
But from the very beginning, even in the comics themselves, one mistake altered the outcome of walkers in general: altering their speed, which robbed them of their biggest strength: their bite.
Anyone can become a walker, but speed is king
One of the best parts about any zombie movie you watch is that, oftentimes, these diseases travel fast. Very fast. They kill people within minutes, and it’s not long after that you’ve turned into a zombie. You could look at a lot of films where the transformation happens within seconds—like World War Z or 28 Days Later. Sometimes it takes longer, other times a day—but the ending is always the same. You're worm food.
The thing about The Walking Dead is that everyone in this series gets infected. It doesn’t matter if you’re bitten or not because if you die, you will still turn into a walker unless you are shot in the head. It all revolves around the brainstem and what wakes you up after you, yourself, have died. That’s why even if you just died from a gunshot wound to the chest, you’d still come back as a walker.
It’s what has led to so many heartbreaking deaths throughout the show. It was often why, even when it felt like someone could survive, the blood loss or something else was just too much, and one of our survivors would have to put an end to their misery.
But if the walkers were fast on this show, this whole “everyone is infected” thing would basically be a moot point. People would die much quicker and still turn into a walker regardless, because there would be no way to avoid that. At least now, in this world, you have a chance to survive because the walkers are slow. But if they had been given speed, it would have been over for everyone. Once you’re bitten, it’s done. There is no cure.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is only just exploring faster zombies
If you’re not caught up in The Walking Dead, the latest spinoff, Daryl Dixon is coming to an end. If you can guess, it stars Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride), and right now, they are still trying to make their way back to the United States.
In a recently released clip from the final season, they run into a walker charging straight at them. Very fast. And very aggressively. Daryl himself even struggles to put it down, even though we rarely see him miss a shot. Then, when we look up, we see a whole horde of running zombies heading straight for them. If you haven't seen the clip, check it out below:
You’re telling me now, years later, you’re finally giving the walkers their biggest power-up? We should have had this in the original series. The bite is their biggest strength, but they can barely use it because their speed is halved half the time. You give it to us now?
I can see why—Daryl Dixon is coming to an end, and the renewal status for Dead City is still up in the air, so who knows how much longer these shows will run? These new variants could kill whoever they want without any real narrative consequences because it’s the final season. However, it still bothers me that we couldn’t see this version of the show.
Granted, maybe it wouldn’t have been called The Walking Dead if they were running zombies. But there were other things we could have changed, other ways that these characters could have adapted to this kind of world. I could almost see how many more people would have died. Would Daryl himself have even survived if the zombies were this fast? This is a real threat.
It makes me recall The Last of Us, another great zombie series, where there are runners and terrifying zombies, but you can avoid them and stay unseen. This series would be much more stealth-focused than all-out wars against the zombies, because they are terrifying.
While we’ll never see Rick Grimes take on these running monsters, I can at least enjoy them in Daryl Dixon's last season, in the form they should have been all along—horrifyingly fast.
You can stream all 11 seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix.
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