Introduction
“That’s all we want, a choice, a chance, let’s keep trying as long as we can.” – Rick Grimes, Protagonist, The Walking Dead
Every Sunday night for almost as long as I can remember, my husband would remain downstairs while I went up to bed so that he could watch AMC’s, The Walking Dead. Each week he would say something like, “I think you really would like it” and I would adamantly reply, “No, I don’t like zombies!” At school, one of my colleagues also spent quite a bit of time trying to convince me, saying that the show was really about psychology and sociology, the subjects that I teach. I remained unconvinced, not willing to even watch one episode until…spring break two years ago. For some reason that I cannot recollect, I found myself watching the first episode. I was overwhelmed in the best way possible. The opening scene has the show’s protagonist, Rick Grimes at an abandoned gas station in disarray trying to help a little girl that just doesn’t seem right. The music, the close up of his face…and when she turns around, you see that she isn’t right – her mouth is ripped open, decayed, with blood dripping from it, her eyes sunken in and bloodshot – she’s no longer a little girl but a zombie, or a walker as they are referred to in the television series. In the first few minutes of the episode, I was already asking a hundred questions and it has only gotten better from there. I realized I was not so much involved with the zombies but more so with Rick. What was his story? Why was he alone? What was happening? This led me to the longest binge watching I have ever participated in. During that spring break, I watched 84 episodes of The Walking Dead. We do have a DVR but not On Demand, so to be able to view the new season which would begin in a week, I had to watch the past six seasons keeping up with our five-episode-only DVR. I was hooked! Just as Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead universe, proclaims, it isn’t really about zombies. It’s about the characters – their stories.
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