{"id":341,"date":"2019-02-11T17:30:55","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T22:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/?p=341"},"modified":"2019-02-11T17:30:55","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T22:30:55","slug":"dead-set-doesnt-hold-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/2019\/02\/11\/dead-set-doesnt-hold-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead Set Doesn’t Hold Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

As upset as I was that\u00a0literally everybody<\/em>\u00a0that we met in\u00a0Dead Set<\/em> becomes zombie bait by the end of the show, I have to say I\u00a0really respect Charlie Booker and the direction he took this show. It is definitely sad that nobody, between the characters we were rooting for initially (like Grayson), those we came to love (like Riq, who made a badass turnaround in the final three episodes to shed his helplessness motif and become pretty courageous), and those we just loved to hate (like Patrick, ugh), survived. That being said, I was awfully okay with the fact that this show didn’t drag out the survival of characters and just killed off everyone in a spectacular display of blood and gore.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The reason I feel this way is because, for the first five or so seasons that it ran, I was a really big fan of\u00a0The Walking Dead<\/em> on AMC. In my estimation,\u00a0The Walking Dead<\/em> really set the initial gold standard for televised zombie horror. It was gripping, there were great but flawed characters and a solid plotline. However, as of today, I have not watched the show since my sophomore year at Davidson and I realized yesterday after its midseason return (which I did not bother to watch) that I do not even know what season the show is on at this point.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So what happened? Well, to put it bluntly,\u00a0The Walking Dead\u00a0<\/em>got boring. It fell into an incredibly repetitive rut with the plot in which Rick and his cohorts find some new “safe” location that seems perfect, some evil person or people show up and create an issue, it all comes to a head in the final episode or two, one of our favorite characters gets killed off, and Rick and his gang escape to a new “safe” location. Rinse, wash, repeat. I know our current villain, Negan, seems to be sticking around but after four or five seasons of Rick and his gang running around, going on supply runs, and climatic end-of-season finale firefights with villains, it got repetitive and I stopped watching.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That’s why I have to tip my hat to Charlie Booker. He doesn’t make the show longer than it needs to be, nor does he have any issue with creating a depressing yet clear ending to the show. The conclusion of the show has me thinking about a modified conception of the 7 theses of monster culture, specifically the second one, “The monster always escapes.” I think, for\u00a0Dead Set<\/em>, I would revise that thesis to be “The monster cannot be overcome.” I’m no horror expert, but most “modern” horror I’ve watched has a sense of inevitability that the monster will always be lurking, and even if the monster is killed, the protagonists who kill said monster often deal with long-lasting effects of their encounter with the monster.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All this is to say that Booker, unlike the writers of\u00a0The Walking Dead<\/em>, embraced that inevitability of the monster’s immortality without boring us to death. So hats off to you, Charlie Booker. You may have written a demoralizing end but at least you did not let your show become its own zombie and leave us begging for you to put a bullet in its head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As upset as I was that\u00a0literally everybody\u00a0that we met in\u00a0Dead Set becomes zombie bait by the end of the show, I have to say I\u00a0really respect Charlie Booker and the direction he took this show. It is definitely sad that nobody, between the characters we were rooting for initially (like Grayson), those we came to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":236,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-c"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-5v","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/236"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}