Walking After Midnight on the Doomsday Clock

The second half of the Walking Dead, season four, premiered tonight. I watch the show regularly, but I can't say I'm a zombie fan. It's more, I'm a post-apocalypse fan.

Being an eighties child, I grew up with the apocalypse. The threat of nuclear armageddon, and the movies that it spawned, was the main thread. Certainly, having a childhood in Oklahoma there was plenty of "Bible/Nostradamus" end of the world anticipation, not to mention having a father in the military, and later living in West Germany in the final years of the Cold War. I regularly saw tanks on the highway and attack helicopters on the ground near my high school. The prospect of global annihilation was very real to me.

Nowadays, with the threat of superpowers lobbing ICBMs at each other much less likely, other feast have taken hold. EMPs wiping out our modern technology, asteroids hitting the Earth, or plague films. These last seem to be the most common, from Outbreak to Steven Soderbergh's Contagion film. Modern zombie films seem to be variants of these.

A former boyfriend pointed this out when we were dating. He was an avowed zombie fan, not an infection fan. Perhaps it's best he joined my list of exes.

I have to say, though, he was right. When I was a kid, zombies were the undead, brought back to life. They were not demons, and they were not vampires (Robert Rodriguez seems to conflate all three). Culturally, they were placed under a course by a voodoo priest or witch doctor - the living dead were more or less human but with no minds of their own.

The Walking Dead, and other contemporary zombie shows, seem to use infection as a modern explanation of how this would work. Being a zombie is like being rabid, much like 28 Days (and eventually, Weeks) later. You get bit, you lose your mind, and attack the nearest non-rabid humans.

Except . .  .the Walking Dead still acknowledges death. People die before they become zombies. They die of disease. They die of wounds and injuries. Early in the show, MRI scans are shown of the brain as it "reboots" into is zombie state. The zombie pathogen somehow rewires the brain to function after the brain has died.

OK, so far. But then, what about the rest of biology? Or, necrology rather. In the show, bodies appear to deteriorate. As the show has moved forward in time, zombies have gotten squishier and fall apart more easily. Yet, how are they able to move? What little knowledge I have of human necrology is that we tend to bloat until all those gasses come out. After that we dry up.

For that matter, how does regular sustenance work. Do zombies need water? Do they get dehydrated? How is protein being converted into muscle mass if their muscles have already deteriorated? For that matter how do they digest if there is not digestive tract? In the first episode, a little girl was show crawling . . .with no abdomen. How are these neurons firing? What is powering these things?

All little trifles to be overlooked, zombie fans assure me. Don't take it so seriously. And, I don't. Like I said, I watch for the post-apocalyptic aspect.Things like, the breakdown of civilization. Scavenging for food and fuel. Organizing into groups and attempting to rebuild civilization. I watch The Walking Dead for the same reason I watched a reboot of the British show Survivors - it's about a small group of people who survive a more conventional though severely lethal plague, and who then fight over he scraps.

It's insight into our base motivations, and the tribal conflicts that have been smoothed over by centuries of laws, customs, and agreements - and which still flare up today. I watch these shows because they remind me how fragile the whole system it - and how glad I am that it works at all.