Sympathy for the Zombie: The Strange, Splattery Humanity of The Walking Dead

It's almost an understatement to say that The Walking Dead isn't about the walking dead -- it's about the people. Until the episode's climax, the zombies, or "Walkers," as they're called, figure in fairly marginally. There are a handful of encounters with lone Walkers, and a few more run-ins with larger groups, but the zombies are mostly background to deputy sheriff Rick Grimes's (Andrew Lincoln) emerging quest to reunite with his wife and son. Does that make it dull? No it does not. What it does make is a high-tension counterpoint to horror in which people are easily discarded.

I haven't read any of The Walking Dead comic series, so I'm coming at this with only a vague understanding of its continuity, along with a firm belief that adaptation from comic to television -- if you absolutely have to adapt -- is probably the most optimal media marriage. (Read: God, please don't turn Y: The Last Man into a movie.) That said, obviously some pacing issues might arise from translating several serialized issues into a 90-minute production. But "Days Gone Bye," the first installment in the AMC adaptation of Rober Kirkman's ongoing comic series, doesn't slow down -- mostly because it's already pretty slow.

But it's slow in a quiet (and I mean quiet, Bear McCreary, but we'll get to you in a minute!), very deliberate, tension-filled way, that's crystallized in the opening scene when Deputy Grimes tries to siphon some gas and stumbles on a tiny zombie girl. After creeping around the bodies and the overturned vehicles for a good two or three minutes, Grimes sees this girl and tries to communicate with her. She turns around and they regard each other for a very brief minute before he shoots her very precisely, and her body falls in slow motion. And it's almost like both of them -- even the girl -- are really, really sorry for this. From this initial, establishing scene onward, there's a pervasive sense of people, zombified or otherwise, as indispensable, which is pretty clearly divergent from the bulk of the genre.

Oh, there's a fair amount of gore, like when Secretariat gets pulled apart at episode's end (never get attached to horses in zombie ventures). Particular care is taken, however, not only in dispatching of the Walkers, but also in how we see their bone-picked bodies. Zombie-kill-of-the-week, for example, goes to Grimes for the deafening bullet-under-the-chin maneuver in the tank. But it wasn't winking or ironic in the way that terminating zombies so often is: Garroting them with their own intestines, for example, or crushing their heads in trash compactors. (Runner-up for zombie-kill-of-the-week, by the way, goes to the baseball bat/face shield combo, but even that wasn't gratuitous because we didn't see anything!) When Grimes -- and everybody else for that matter -- needs to take out a Walker, it's a procedural, almost ceremonial action, taken out of a need to end the perversion of the indispensable, but lost, person.

The best example is after Grimes parts ways with Morgan and Duane (the father and son survivors, played by Lennie James and Adrian Kali Turner, who warily bring Grimes back to health -- and up to speed -- following his escape from the hospital). Grimes returns to the field where he encountered his first Walker, half-eaten and clawing through the grass, and Morgan prepares to shoot his wife, who's become a Walker. "I'm sorry this happened to you," Grimes says before he shoots the woman precisely in the head -- thus cuing Bear McCreary's airy and hopeful violins. Meanwhile, Morgan waits and struggles until the opportunity has passed. It's almost as if it can't be done if it's not done in this precise, rigid way of directly through the forehead. It's killing -- the least glamorous thing he can do. It'll be interesting to see whether that holds in the remaining five episodes this fall.

Now. Shamefully raise your hand if you joked about Atlanta being better off all filled with zombies. That's what I thought. Any comic fans out there? What was your take on the adaptation?