The Emotional Core in The Walking Dead

This post contains some minor spoilers for season 1 of The Walking Dead. Basically, everything I write at the momet is in reaction to Tim Waggoner’s Writing in the Dark. Today I was reading about the need for an emotional core with an story or within the chapter of a story. I also noticed that The Walking Dead was streaming again on one of the platforms I subscribe to. I wanted to look back at the beginning. I confess, I stopped watching during season 8. I grew tired of the pace. I cared less about the characters. To begin with I loved this show, so I thought I’d consider the first few episodes that I’ve rewatched while considering the emotional core.

Let’s start with Morgan. He’s only in this first episode of the first season, as far as I remember, though he does return later. He helps Rick out, but doesn’t accompany him to Atlanta. He’s not ready to leave yet. The reason why has huge emotional weight. He’s not ready to let go of his wife yet. His grief is a huge part of his character, and the writers use the scenario – zombies – to develop this further. He’s not ready to let go of his wife yet, and to make it harder, she’s still wandering the streets at night at a zombie. As he watches her through the sights of his rifle, I found myself wanting him to pull the trigger, but he can’t. That’s powerful. That works.

Rick’s story is great to begin with. He wakes in the hospitl, he doesn’t know what’s going on. But as soon as he gets home and realises his wife, Lora, and his son, Carl are gone, his mission is to be reunited with them. This is a powerful emotional core. He makes logical choices based on this, despite impossible odds.

Perhaps they’re reunited too easily. There’s too much coincidence. The group Rick meets up with in Atlanta just so happen to be the same group Lori, Carl, and Rick’s police partner Shane are part of. It could certainly be made harder for Rick here, but bringing them together does introduce another issue. Lori thought Rick was dead. Lori started a relationship with Shane. Now there’s tension between them. As far as I remember, this develops over the rest of the first two seasons. There’s a great moment, maybe in episode 4 in which Rick and Shane are in the woods, checking for zombies. Rick is in the distance, and Shane points a gun at him. Shane can’t really shoot him here, there would be no explanation for that, but it shows his conflict, and his desires. He has lost Lori with Rick’s return, but he’s also glad he’s back, as he is his friend. Each of the characters involved here has their own desires, their own secrets and their own motivations. It works really well.

Finally, I’m going to write about Merle and Daryl. Make no mistake, Merle is an awful human being. He’s racist, he’s violent, he’s cruel. But when he’s left chained to a rooftop, and the walkers are knocking at the door, that’s almost too much. And as awful as he is, when we meet Daryl, we realise he’s someone’s brother. Someone cares about him. And yes, Daryl’s pretty awful at this point too, but it does give us an emotional core for the episode: he wants to rescue his brother. When he realises how Merle was abandoned, his anger is understandable, and when they get to the rooftop, and Merle’s gone, Daryl’s emotional outburst is powerful as it’s related to this core. As much as we thought Merle was a terrible human being, the reaction to the idea of sawing through your hand is a visceral one, and as the reaction omes from the person who cares about him most, we feel it more.

There were lots of smaller moments between characters too in these first few episodes where an emotional core was more than apparent. I never liked Andrea, but her relationship with her sister was sufficiently developed so the outcome there mattered. Carol is given hardly any time in these early episodes. She becomes such an important character. Maybe we see the start of that journey in her final moments with Ed.

I wonder if the emotional core is what The Walking Dead lost over the years, because it reached a point where I simply didn’t care anymore, even when long-standing characters died. Maybe I’ll have to watch all of them to figure it out.