My Hands Are Clean

It is never a good sign when the behind the scenes drama of a show is more entertaining than what happens on screen, but the feud between The Walking Dead. creator Frank Darabount and AMC got more heated than most of the zombie battles on screen when the network decided it would rather spend more money on Mad Men, a show that got three times less the viewers of The Walking Dead. But with all the turmoil, the second season of the show got off to a great start with the zombie parking lot, a better sequence than anything in the slow moving first season. And it was all downhill from there.

In the mist of the zombie parking lot, little Sophia just had to run off into the woods, not to be seen again for two month. If it were not bad enough that we had to sit and watch characters we do not care about spend all that time searching for a kid we did not care about, all the searching was for not because she was hanging out with the other zombies in the zombie barn that became the group’s camp. Of course none of the people that fed the zombies in the zombie barn bothered to think to themselves, “hey, they are looking for a little girl, maybe the little zombie girl in our zombie barn is her.” Nope, we had to wait until Shane went off his rocker, the second of four times this season, and opened the zombie barn to find her.

To think how much worse that could have been if I actually cared about Sophia, but like the rest of the cast, I just did not care. Anyone in the cast could have been eaten by a zombie and I would be fine with it. I would have been content had Hershel went on a murdering spree post-zombie barn incident or if the dude from Terriers had gotten the best of Rick in the bar. The writers even managed to ruin the two more entertain from the first season as both Daryl and Glen got too whiny as the season progressed.

The season finale started much like the season premiere, with a horde of zombies, presumable the same ones (who, they moved slower than the plots on the show if they are just now getting to the farm). And we finally got the massive zombie fight I have been waiting for since the start of the show and the show finally delivered on something and thinned the cast some more (goodbye Hershel’s family whose named I never bothered to learn, but to the son, why did you not drive off as soon as Rick and Carl were on the roof, and how about locking the door in a zombie apocalypse?), but unfortunately Lori was not one of them. And Andrea inexplicably was able to escape hundreds of zombies to be saved by some Assassin's Creed looking person with arms zombie minions. Wait, what?

But as soon as everyone was safe and sound at the Sophie camp, the show started slowing down with the characters back to being whiny except for Rick who looks to be morphing into Shane. Great. And much like the end of season, the characters are stuck in the middle of nowhere with no plans (aside from the giant prison a mile away, seriously, they could not end the season at its doorsteps?). Even with the awesome zombie battle, The Walking Dead remains the single worst television show I have watched this season (and I made it through every episode of Pan Am.). Or at least until The Killing returns in two week. AMC: telling the slowest stories on television.

The Waling Dead 2.x gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.