Apocalypse-zzz-zzz

I’ve long had a fascination with end of the world stories. I owned VHS copies of the original George Romero “Night of the Living Dead” movies. They are packed up somewhere in the basement. For the record, the best ever was the second one, Dawn of the Dead (original version), that happens in the shopping mall.

More recently I got onto the bandwagon for the Walking Dead series. Originally I thought it was pretty good, but eventually the writing really went downhill. We had the repeated plot arcs of our heroes finding some functioning settlement to join, later finding out it is founded on some kind of demented rule, including demogogic, psychotic leaders.

The first spin-off happening in the West, with Latin characters, began promisingly but has by now reverted to pattern. It got worse when the ‘Walking Dead universe’ expanded to include the idiot kids in the “World Beyond” spin-off. I realized the problem was not that I hated kids, since I very much enjoy the tykes in Stranger Things, but because in the WD series the kids are stupid and obnoxious. It’s a weak story that depends on characters doing dumb things.

A newer series I’ve been bingeing is Y: The Last Man on Hulu. It’s got a similar story line — protagonists traversing an apocalyptic landscape, encountering weird communities — but the communities are more interesting, as is the original cause of the apocalypse. The two other novel elements are the treatment of gender identity, in the foreground of the story but something regarded as incidental or only mildly curious — and the representation of depraved Trumpist, Christian nationalist political actors. Gender and sexism are big parts of the subtext of the series. I can’t recall anything else with the same intensity of focus.

There is only one season (I’ve just three more episodes to go), so undoubtedly there will still be much to be resolved.