The Post-Apocalyptic Problem

WARNING: This post contains SPOILERS for the third episode of the third season of The Walking Dead. 

I love the post-apocalyptic genre; I really do. It's fun, for whatever morbid reasons, to imagine yourself as one of the few survivors or a global catastrophe, wandering the wastelands and foraging for food, shelter and entertainment in the ruins of a fallen civilization.

But there's one aspect of the genre that I just don't buy, and that's the trope that requires the rise of bloodthirsty barbarian savages to serve as antagonists.

I understand why writers use this trope. The remorseless brigand makes a wonderful adversary, a perfect villain. Taking slaves, ruling by fear and gunning down the innocent and naive makes the post-apocalyptic brigand villain fearsome and loathsome - the kind of bad guy we can't wait to see receive his just desserts.

My problem is one of believability. In a true apocalypse, healthy human beings will be the most valuable resource. With so much talent and expertise wiped out, every survivor becomes a potential treasure trove of knowledge and skills. Rebuilding civilization would require a massive cooperative effort, one best accomplished not with threats and violence, but a clear understanding of mutual needs and goals.

That's why I find it so hard to take the latest episode of The Walking Dead seriously. While well-produced, suspenseful and gripping, this episode embraces the brigand villain trope in such a way as to seriously strain verisimilitude. The Governor, introduced in this episode, runs a small walled enclave of survivors of the show's zombie apocalypse. He learns that a squad of soldiers is stationed nearby, and he tracks them down, ambushes them and steals their weapons and supplies.

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable thing for an evil dictator to do. Presumably absorbing the soldiers into his community would undermine his own authority.

But as a long term survival strategy, the Governor's approach is nonsensical. First, by mowing down the soldiers, he's removed at least a dozen trained, capable people who could have helped defend the governor's town and provided military training to the surviving civilians. These soldiers presumably also know more about repairing, maintaining and operating their specialized equipment than the Governor and his stooges. Sure, they may have fancy HumVees and M-16s for now, but how long before it breaks down?

Finally, this episode establishes that at least one element of the US military has survived the apocalypse. If one squadron survived, presumably there are others, and if any one group has the resources and know-how to rebuild lines of communication and support after a global disaster, it would be the military. Isn't it possible that at some point the Governor's massacre of US troops will be discovered by other surviving units - and punished?

I enjoyed this episode, but the Governor's rule can't last long if he doesn't start making better choices.

The Waking Dead

Members of the University of Alberta Star Trek Club celebrate Halloween 1990. Taken just outside my dorm room at 139 Kelsey Hall, U of A.

While watching AMC's The Walking Dead this Halloween night, it occurred to me that only in parodies and comedies of science fiction, fantasy or horror stories do the characters show any familiarity with the dangers they face. They possess no genre awareness.

If you or I suddenly woke up to find that vampires, werewolves, or zombies were running amok, we'd be terrified - but we wouldn't be ignorant. Decades of books, television shows, movies, comics, even stage plays have shown us how to respond. Everyone in the Western world knows that you kill werewolves with silver bullets, vampires with a stake to the heart, zombies with a bullet to the brain.

On The Walking Dead, the protagonists discover how to kill zombies only by accident. They don't even use the word "zombies;" they call the living dead "walkers." It's as if they grew up in a world without George Romero and Night of the Living Dead, or even the works of Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide.

We see this over and over again in dramatic genre fiction. An unprecedented catastrophe occurs, and none of the main characters seem to have ever read a science fiction novel or seen a horror movie. If the heroes only had a little genre awareness, they'd be far better prepared to tackle whatever outrageous genre problems facing them. There would be no need to learn by deadly experience, to lose redshirts or other cannon fodder in the early hours of the catastrophe.*

Years ago, I mused about the possibility that writers and other creative types don't actually create anything, that they are in fact merely tapping into parallel universes with some as yet undiscovered sensory organ. Some friends of mine hated this idea, with good reason - it does, after all, destroy the idea of the human imagination - but I thought it might make a pretty good hook for a story or two...stories I haven't written yet, of course.

But during The Walking Dead's opening episode tonight, I remembered my idea and thought to myself, perhaps there's even more going on here than I originally speculated. Perhaps writers and directors and painters are somehow inoculating our world against such horrors merely by bearing witness to the awful things that happen on other Earths. Think about it: if Earth is ever faced with an alien invasion or a zombie plague or body snatchers that take over our loved ones, there will be millions of people who know how to deal with the problem from the first moment, because they've seen or read all the solutions already. In the face of that vast pool of knowledge, perhaps genre threats have declared our world, the "real" world, off-limits. If you were a vampire, would you set up shop here? You wouldn't last a week before a gang of garlic-wearing teenagers were water-bombing your crypt with holy water.

So here's to the dreamers, those who see beyond our reality into other worlds more terrifying than our own. Perhaps their dark visions have protected us from the lurking terrors that stalk the many universes, beasts and madmen that move on to other, less imaginative worlds...

*Of course the real reason protagonists lack genre awareness is because professional writers know it would be tiresome to begin each and every story with their characters talking about how "they saw this exact situation on TV!"