Made to Suffer, by Travis Fishburn

It’s going to be another 2 months until The Walking Dead comes back with another batch of 8 episodes to complete this season, and I’m immensely looking forward to it. In the past few episodes, the series has evoked feelings within me that I haven’t had since Lost was airing.

That reference might not sound appealing to everyone. To me, Lost currently remains to be my favorite show of all time. When it aired, I had never watched any of HBO’s original series, so the show introduced me to the possibilities and quality in a television show. The show’s run, and especially its finale, garnered a lot of backlash from viewers who had become invested and were dissatisfied with the show’s ultimate destination. What Lost all came down to, in the end, was its characters. Now, maybe I’m alone, but if I want to engage with and invest in a show, the most important thing for me are characters. While the mysteries and sci-fi elements of both Lost and The Walking Dead make them inherently geeky (a quality that never loses points in my book), what makes each of them great are the relationships, trials, and evolution of their characters. Similarly, while the show title of Lost was really referencing the “lost” state of the characters’ souls, I use the same approach when looking at the name The Walking Dead.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The biggest contributor in my comparison of the two shows is The Walking Dead‘s introduction of The Governor (David Morrissey) and the town he is in charge of, and the similarity with that of Ben Linus (Michael Emerson) and The Others in Lost. Both characters are leaders in seemingly harmonious communities, and are in opposition with each show’s main group of protagonist characters. They are both mysterious, manipulative, and dishonest, yet with hints at sympathetic backstories that refrain viewers from casting them completely in moral darkness.

The most compelling and intriguing aspect of The Governor that’s been introduced thus far has been his determination to discover ways to unlock the memories  in the walkers (zombies) that have been passed over from their previous life. The root of this is his daughter, whom we discover was turned at some point and has been locked up within a closet in the Governor’s room. The undead corpse of his daughter is the last remnant of his life before the outbreak. The existence of her old memories means the possibility for him to keep something that he should have let go of. Try as he might, the audience knows that both his daughter and his old life can never come back.

The Governor is attempting to subdue loss by refusing to let it happen; clinging to any scrap of hope he can. That scrap is ripped from him when Michonne (Danai Gurira) destroys his daughters corpse, sending him into a frenzy. The character is evolving from someone with little to lose, to someone with nothing to lose. I’m not a reader of the comic series, so I can’t address what might be coming, but I my assessment is that his daughter was the only thing holding him back from complete disregard for others.

As we’ve seen, he knows how to manipulate. Rather than using his experience of painful loss to relate to other people’s circumstances, he uses his empathy for their attachments and relationships to exploit them. We’ve seen him torture Glenn and Maggie for information, and at the end of this week’s episode, we see him take advantage of Merles’s attachment to his brother, Daryl, to turn him into a scapegoat. His inability to adapt emotionally, along with his spite, has made him incapable of connecting with so many of the kindred spirits that surround him.

On the other side of the coin, we have Carl (Chandler Riggs). Carl’s ordeal of witnessing and shooting his mother, in addition to the loss of Sophia last season, has begun to shape his worldview. This week, Carl encounters a new group of survivors within the prison. He helps them escape a group of walkers, and then realizes that one of them has been bitten. After countless experiences with walker bites and the recent death of his mother, Carl knows what this means. He offers them help, but puts them in a prison cell and locks it. The new group has a liability, and locking them together is the only way to force them to take care of it, and to guarantee his own group’s safety.

While Carl undoubtably feels sympathy for this group’s circumstance, especially that of the bitten victim’s son, he’s learning that it’s best to step away and look at things from a logical perspective. Considering all of the traumatic experiences he’s faced, I’m concerned that the character is going to begin cutting himself off emotionally from other people in order to better handle bad situations. Whereas every other character becomes emotionally distraught from their losses, I think Carl is going to accept each change by disallowing attachment to cloud his judgement and weaken him.

I could be completely off on my prediction with Carl, but I think it creates a unique dynamic to force the youngest and most innocent character in the show to overcome the same feelings that haunt the antagonist. This is by no means a hopeful or commendable route for the character to take, being emotionally numb is just as detrimental to life as being overly attached.

As in Lost, the driving force behind the developments of each character in The Walking Dead is how they deal with loss, and how they pursue survival and hope in spite of it. Both The Governor and Carl have polarizing, yet valuable qualities. Love for family isn’t wrong, and using rationality over emotional bias to do the what’s right is absolutely something to be admired. The problems The Governor and Carl are discovering is that each of these qualities, on their own and in the absence of anything else, is spiritually poisoning. Balance is an integral aspect to living an emotionally and spiritually fulfilling life. Both characters will undoubtably continue to find ways to survive the upcoming events in the series, but why will they?