Tales of the Walking Dead is a fine addition to the franchise’s already overflowing basket of hits

The recently concluded series Tales of the Walking Dead (streaming on Amazon Prime Video in India) —a spinoff to the long-running zombie series The Walking Dead—features six standalone stories set at various points in the zombie apocalypse. This allows the show’s writers to access various points in the franchise’s mythology, which is crucial when you already have hundreds of episodes in the bank. It becomes easier to keep things fresh, which is no small challenge for a franchise as prolific as The Walking Dead; this is already the fourth TV series after the original The Walking Dead (2010-present), Fear the Walking Dead (2015-present) and The Walking Dead: World Beyond (2020-21).

Tales of the Walking Dead is a fine addition to the franchise’s already overflowing basket of hits. Not all of these six stories will appeal to everybody—but that’s kind of the point, really, for there’s something in here for everyone. All six episodes have very different tonalities and genres; the second episode ‘Blair/Gina’, for example, written by Kari Drake, is a highly unusual zombie apocalypse story, one that plays like a workplace sitcom, almost, or a 2022 version of Thelma and Louise.

Strong writing, layered characters

Most spinoff shows these days, however, do feature at least one episode where we see the origins of a character we know quite well from the original story. These ‘cutaway’ episodes can be a lot of fun and can add significantly to what we know and understand about these characters. But it’s crucial that the narrative doesn’t get too entangled with callbacks and Easter eggs, too bogged down to make fresh points of its own.

In this regard, the third episode of Tales of the Walking Dead delivers a cracking, standalone story for newbies while also maintaining a certain baseline fan service. In this episode, we meet a younger version of Alpha (the magnificent Samantha Morton), one of the scariest characters from The Walking Dead, where she served as the chief antagonist for much of season 9. Alpha is the bloodthirsty and cunning leader of the Whisperers, an enigmatic, paranoid group of survivors who have segregated themselves from all other survivor groups, going to great lengths to maintain this distance. In a grisly touch, they also wear the skins of zombies to avoid being detected. One of the most horrifying images of the entire show came about as a direct result of Alpha’s leadership: she kills and decapitates several key members of the various survivors’ groups in the show, and then marks a ’border’ for the Whisperers using these severed heads. Not for the faint-hearted, I’m afraid.

Here, however, we see Alpha before she adopted the moniker and led the Whisperers; here Alpha is plain old Dee. Dee is still strong and combative and fierce, like Alpha, but in Tales of the Walking Dead, this combativeness has been framed as pure protectiveness. Dee is scared that her daughter Lydia (whose kidnapping was a major plot point in The Walking Dead) is too trusting and optimistic in a world that’s becoming more cut-throat by the minute. Lydia, it is hinted more than once, likes a fellow survivor called Brooke more than she does her own mother. Dee/Alpha, however, finds Brooke ‘weak’ and unfit to protect her daughter, a philosophical difference that across this episode, deepens to become something much more sinister.

Samantha Morton is brilliant as usual. She delivers these expertly performed flashes of rage where we see the future Alpha in Dee’s eyes. It’s a remarkably subtle performance where she has to create a character that’s both new and not—Dee both is and is not Alpha (yet). Therefore, there had to be a mixture of empathy and heartlessness on display and Morton gets this balance exactly right. A scene towards the end, where she’s talking to a severed head (perhaps parodying Robert Downey Jr talking to his Iron Man helmet in Avengers: Endgame, or even the original source, Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick), is one of the scariest things I have seen all year.

The other episodes are also very cleverly written. In the second episode, ‘Blair/Gina’, a deeply selfish insurance company boss called Blair (Parker Posey) and the receptionist she regularly picks on, Gina (Jillian Bell), are stuck in a time loop together even as the zombie apocalypse begins in real earnest in Atlanta, Georgia. At its heart, this is a story about two women on opposite ends of the corporate spectrum teaming up against an adversarial system (ie capitalism) explicitly designed to keep them at loggerheads. Both Gina and Blair learn to collaborate and overcome their respective fears and prejudices. Parker Posey really is quite brilliant as Blair, the boss from hell.

Zombies: A versatile narrative device

The Blair/Gina episode becoming a veritable anti-capitalist soapbox by the end is no surprise: zombies are an extremely versatile narrative device and they’ve been used by Hollywood in a wide variety of circumstances. In this episode, the ‘numbing’ effect of capitalism—Blair is especially clueless about her employees’ feelings and well-being—is indirectly compared to turning into a zombie; mindless, emotionless, driven only by hunger for flesh. And it’s hardly the first zombie movie or show to make this connection. In George Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead, there’s a key scene where a horde of zombies shuffle towards a mall, the same mall where a bunch of them used to hang out before they became zombies (their ‘memories’ of being there is crucially called ‘instinct’ now, thereby connecting zombies to the way we talk and write about animals).

Philip Horne, in his 1992 Critical Quarterly essay ‘I Shopped With a Zombie’, describes the aforementioned scene from Dawn of the Dead, explicitly connecting it to untrammelled American consumerism. In this reading, American capitalism as a whole has gone feral, so to speak, hungrily gnawing off whatever meat it can from the skeletal remains of the populace.

“Pasty-looking people with unfocused eyes goggle menacingly in throughthe glass from the mall’s central space, hands and faces pressed hardagainst the shop’s display window. Cabinets of sparkling goods standwithin. An unearthly moan of desire emanates from the frustrated crowd.This seems a familiar, indeed cliched, late-twentieth-century image of(especially American) consumer appetite, a result of the nineteenthcentury’s ’transformation of merchandise into a spectacle’. The consumerway of life with its promise of abundance, luxury, unlimited pleasure andhappiness does have a peculiarly compulsive quality. Dazed consumers,haunted by impossible yearnings, shop for shopping’s sake, freed from the causal chains of necessity but feeling endlessly incomplete, hungry for thediffused excitement of pursuit and purchase.”

A famous episode of the detective show Castle (starring Stana Katic and Nathan Fillion) was based around the ‘zombie-walking’ subculture: fans made their own costumes and did their own make-up to look like zombies and pretend to walk like them in the dead of the night, typically in hordes. One character, a professor of anthropology who’s being interrogated by Castle and Beckett (the show’s detective-protagonists) says, “I believe that zombies are a commentary on the inner numbness of modern life”. And although the line is played for laughs, it’s only half a joke at best.

In Seth-Grahame Smith’s 2009 parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the author blends Jane Austen’s distinctive register with the bleak, gloomy outlook of a zombie apocalypse. Look at this passage, which mimics the famous opening of Austen’s novel.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth moreplain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is occupied again?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not and went about his morning business of dagger sharpening and musket polishing-for attacks by the unmentionables had grown alarmingly frequent in recent weeks.

‘Woman, I am attending to my musket. Prattle on if you must, but leave me to the defense of my estate!’”

Tales of the Walking Dead is a smartly written, brilliantly performed reminder of how powerful zombies can be as a narrative device. From the perils of capitalist excess to the vagaries of interpersonal relationships, they can be used to flesh out a lot of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of modern life. This is why they have been a perennial favourite of genre-loving creators in Hollywood for decades, and it’s why the Walking Dead franchise is going strong, a full 12 years since its first TV appearance.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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