Five Questions for Season Five of The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead

rises tonight for an astounding 5^th season.

The Walking Dead

Just ponder that notion for a moment. Freaks and Geeks only made it to one season. Same with Firefly. But The Walking Dead, true to the intertextual nature that characterizes the zombie trope, refuses to die. It has been roundly criticized, lambasted, laughed at, and run from. And still it shambles on.

I’m not going to go into the criticisms that have been levied against the show. That’s the subject of another post, probably by someone with more clout than me. (In 2013, Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker quite reasonably asked “how much punishment can one soul, one body, one viewer take?”)

But I do have questions.

And, in the spirit of buzz feed (which I understand is now among the best mediums for the dispensation of pop culture ponderings), I will go further and say that I have five questions. Five seasons, five questions. Symmetry. That ought to be worth something…

So, here goes:

Five Questions for the Walking Dead as We Enter the Fifth Season (and in no particular order):

Oh, yeah. Slight spoiler alert. Nothing you couldn’t guess on your own.

1. Why doesn't everyone on the show suspect the possibility of cannibalism at Terminus sooner? The place is called “Terminus”, for goodness sakes. The end of the road. Also, the season ends with Rick and his pals in a cattle car. They’ve already watched walkers eat others with relish. The question, then, isn't whether they ought to at least consider cannibalism as the end-point of Terminus. The question is whether, what with the utter lack of livestock and still more burgers than you can find at an SEC tailgate party, how Rick and his pals managed not to consider the possibility of cannibalism sooner.

Here’s how, in my estimation. The notion of the cannibalism, the obvious conclusion of everything one see’s in Terminus, is also among the most repugnant notions that humans at least in western culture can endure. In studies of the neurobiology of disgust and repulsion, cannibalism ranks among the most potent predictors of biologically programmed repugnance. To that end, the lack of realization that Rick and his gang demonstrate is in some ways a testimony to their sustained value for their remembered culture; the culture that they’re striving to keep alive in light of so many changed and mangled rules.

2. Where will the facial hair take us? Rick has a scraggly and manly beard. The army dude has a mustache that Ron Burgundy would envy and perhaps even try to steal. Even Glenn is sporting a little something on his face. I know this isn’t the same as wondering about cannibalism, but looks are important in the apocalypse. Seriously. How we groom ourselves is an important aspect to how we maintain our civility. I say there’s more in those whiskers than the lack of a razor.

3. Will Michonne be able to hold it together? I've wondered in previous posts whether Michonne would every smile. She has now smiled with great enthusiasm as she forms her bond with Rick’s son. Still, I wonder about her capacity to stay free of going all Hulk on everyone as she reckons with her particularly traumatic past.. I ask this in all seriousness. She is loyal and powerful, but her very strengths combined with her horrific experiences make her potentially an emotional time bomb. We know that resiliency comes from many places, and it may be that her realignment as a member of a community has allowed her brain the healing space that it needed to re-equilibrate. Still, she’s a complicated character. She went, in fact, from one of my least to perhaps my most favorite character. What will become of her now?

4. Is The Walking Dead truly a classic zombie story? Zombie stories rely on a clear arc. There are rules to zombie stories even more than there are rules in other horror memes. So, the question now is whether a sustaining story can be told throughout multiple seasons and still be called a zombie story. I think it can be done, but we have to think of the show as a series of movies, an anthology if you will. I know many viewers got bored during the long time spent in the prison, but that’s not so different from the inevitable boredom that sets in during any zombie story when the survivors finally achieve security but lack intellectual and emotional fulfillment. There’s a term for the sadness that sets in when you live in a familiar and yet drastically changed place. It’s called “Solastalgia,” and it was coined by Australian scholars to describe the existential crisis that emerges when one’s culture or home looks increasingly foreign. I think if we view the entire show through a solastalgic lens, the show works better as a cleverer than you might think commentary on the overall dissolution of our cultural expectations.

5. Will The Walking Dead affect the way look at current world events? The obvious question, unique to this year, is also the most uncomfortable to ask. The Walking Dead deals with contagions that become pandemic. The world is now facing, on multiple fronts, contagions that have become either epidemic or are potentially on their way to pandemic. There is therefore an eerie coalescence of what we see on the news and what we see in shows like The Walking Dead. Will the show lead to panic, or will the show allow the healthy displacement of our disease borne fears into the safe haven of television. TV has a funny way of wagging the dog. We’ll need to guard against panic as the season begins. It’s just entertainment, after all. It should make us worry no more or less for the current fight our world is having with some pretty scary germs.

Regardless, I don't think anyone really saw a fifth season coming when the show began. That, by itself, and regardless of your opinion of the program, is an accomplishment. We should acknowledge that accomplishment; even learn from its success.

And expect something good tonight. Remember what Rick said in that dark cattle car:

"They're screwing with the wrong people." (I think the uncensored version used a different word, but you get the point.

Steve Schlozman is the author of The Zombie Autopsies, and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The Zombie Autopsies has been optioned for film by director George Romero.