Dear Walking Dead, I am Breaking Up With You…

… I think after tonight I may be completely done with The Walking Dead.

I’m just not that cynical to find it entertaining anymore. I cannot accept what the writers are presenting to the viewers — that all of humanity can be so completely, utterly, irreparably far gone.

Everything beautiful that show was is gone. Gone. It went down the trough drain.

Last year I declared The Walking Dead to be fully Catholic. This year I take it all back. I wrote,

The Walking Dead is more than a zombie show. It’s a show dripping with themes of redemption, grace, forgiveness, turning away from the past and coming back from wrong doing. It’s the damaging effects of sin, and the corrupting nature of evil. It’s humanity stripped down to is barest forms.

Season four has been all about “coming back” from a self imposed, soul devouring darkness of despair. In the mid-season finale we hear Rick, echoing the words of Hershel Greene in episodes past, tell the Governor…

We’ve all done the worst kinds of things just to stay alive. But we can still come back. We’re not too far gone. We get to come back. I know… we all can change.

*** Season Five Premier Spoilers, continue reading at your discretion. ***

This season began with cold, calculating Carol becoming the hero with her ruthless detachment. We also saw Rick wanting to kill every survivor in Terminus… and that trough scene. That trough scene is something I fiercely want to scrub from my brain.

Oh, Herschel of the Happy Death, I am so glad he wasn’t alive to witness any of that.

Yes, we established quite a few seasons ago that the real monsters were not the zombies, but the survivors, having been driven to their most base survival mode. Yet through it all Rick and his group remained determined to do more than survive. They wanted to live and retain their humanity.

Yet I’m afraid the writers of the show may have decided that their humanity has to be last causality of the series and are going to spend episode after episode devising one unfathomable horror show after the next until Rick and his gang are finally broken.

The premier ended on a happy reunion note but I think it’s only going to make the gang more desperate to do whatever it takes to stay alive, no matter the expense. I’m not prepared to watch that because it’s something I refuse to believe about humanity. For one thing, it’s completely inaccurate.

History is filled with the blood of martyrs, martyrs who willing embraced death in the face of adversity in order to preserve their souls. It’s not that much of a stretch of the imagination to accept that there are just some things people won’t do.

My Catholicism also makes me believe that for every evil that exists there is an equal goodness. Rick and his group where that goodness, sort of. Herschel was that goodness. Now the show is being scrubbed of all that goodness and hope. And it’s just not possible for one to exist without the other.

And with that, goodbye Walking Dead. We had some good times at the beginning of our relationship, but you’ve gotten all depressing and brooding and we’ve grown apart. I wish you the best.

PS- Please don’t kill Daryl.