Riding hundreds of pounds of delicious horse meat
into a city filled with hungry carnivorous zombies
wasn't the brightest idea this Georgia sheriff ever had.
Former Volvo salesman Ed Gruber, on left, is momentarily
stunned by this sudden good fortune.

In the promos for this series we saw something unforgettable -- a lone horse and rider heading into the city of Atlanta on the empty incoming lanes of a freeway jam-packed with deserted out-going cars. For that scene alone this series is worthwhile, but even though it's fun to watch it's less than I expected. What I expected from that promotional shot was what I saw -- a competent gunman in the tradition of the Old West, riding confidently into the concrete jungle just because he could. That's not the guy on this horse.

Recap of the Final Episode at the end of this article!

Every zombie movie needs a unique bit, because since the release of Night of the Living Dead when I was just a kid the story has been worked and reworked. It's always a cool story, even when it's done badly, but the best versions deal with the concept of a world-ending zombie plague in surprising new ways. What's surprising about The Walking Dead is that the hero turns out to be pretty much clueless, literally the last one to wake up to the horror of the world's ending.

In a coma for most of the dramatics, Sheriff Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) has no idea what happened to his planet while he was slumbering and struggles with things more experienced zombie fighters don't even think about twice. He worries about the feelings of the zombie dead and ponders whether it's morally correct to actually shoot one. Although this approach seems to be the unintentional result of writing for television and not a truly original artistic idea, it does give us an interesting new look at Zombie Armageddon. Everyone in the story who's still living doesn't seem to be very good at surviving. It's not the cream of the crop who survive, it's just the stuff that floats.

From the people trapped in the sky-rise department store who don't think to drop heavy objects off the roof onto the tightly packed zombie crowds; to the trailer park survivors at the quarry outside town who haven't thought to put up barricades; we're dealing with a bunch of heroes who really haven't quite made the jump to the new reality. The fun I find in this show is taking it apart and looking at what's wrong, and in that sense there's plenty to do. Out of Atlanta's population of 429,500 (the city proper) there appear to be only a couple of thousand zombies walking around. That's a very optimistic figure and should mean that if you drop enough stuff from the Home Improvement Department off that roof, the war will soon be over. At least shoot the zombie guy who's banging on the glass door with a big rock, because he's the only one who remembers how to use tools.

Faults in the logic of this story are too numerous to mention, but include the lack of weapons and ammunition in the Deep South. This is supposed to take place in Georgia. Knock open the door of any abandoned farmhouse in post-apocalyptic Georgia and you ought to find enough sniper rifles, shotguns, pistols, assault rifles and ammunition to outfit an Army platoon. And that's just the civilian side of Georgia. With all the dead soldiers laying around there shouldn't be a shortage of tools. In real life the combination of rural survivalists, local police forces, extremist militia and real military would have quickly dealt with the zombie plague and turned on each other already.

That's ok, it's just a story and I'm having fun watching it. The final episode of Season One airs tonight and I'll be here, filing away ideas for the end of the world.

Season One Final Episode Recap: TS-19, How do I Love Thee?

We entered this last story with the entire surviving group of survivors from the Quarry Run Trailer Park arriving at the Centers for Disease Control and realizing immediately it was a bad idea. Just as they're about to head off into the darkness and zombieland, the lone survivor of CDC, a pock-marked microbiologist named Jenner, opens the door. Pockmarks on a microbiologist aren't a good sign, and when Jenner says when the door closes it doesn't open again, somebody should have thought about that. But with zombies coming up behind you it's hard to be skeptical of an impregnable fortress.

Follow up:

For some reason, perhaps so we'll think better of Deputy Shane Walsh (played by Jon Bernthal), we flashback to what was apparently a much better part of this story and are treated to a few minutes of real action from the day Walsh tried to rescue Rick Grimes from the intensive care unit at Zombie General Hospital. Grimes is sleeping like the dead and even though the Army is evacuating the hospital and trying to kill off all the infected before they turn into zombies, the dead are rapidly overpowering the squads of heavily armed and heavily armored soldiers. Exactly how unarmed people who stagger slowly and wear only hospital gowns are doing this isn't clear. Walsh puts a handkerchief over his mouth when the zombies approach, opening the possibility of some earlier more contagious aspect of the plague, which later must have evolved into something you can bathe in without catching. Walsh thinks Grimes must be already dead, since the power goes out and his life support machines display blank screens. OK, he does listen for a heartbeat and try to wake him up, and he does barricade the door after he leaves. Point taken, Walsh is a good guy.

Back to the CDC in Atlanta where everyone's having a good meal, a hot shower, lots of wine and you just know something horrible is about to happen. Jenner's a man with secrets he doesn't want to share and suddenly he's lots less concerned with conserving electrical power than he used to be. When he takes blood samples we're suspicious he many have injected the Earth's last living blonde (Andrea, played by Laurie Holden) with the zombie virus, having just lost his last living tissue samples of the plague. This turns out to be a false thread since the naked sitting in the shower and the vomiting in the toilet is just from being concerned about the end of the world and drinking too much wine.

Walsh is drunk and in a bad mood and wants to know why Jenner is the only scientist left -- and if you're thinking that this episode sounds like a whole lot of talking, you're right. It's like somebody wants to convince us there's a coherent story behind this saga. Jenner recounts what happened there, very sketchily, and apparently it was a real world scenario where people bolted after realizing this was not a drill. Those who stayed on either caught the virus or decided to kill themselves first -- except for Jenner and the love of his life, Subject T-19. We only see T as a faded photo and a detailed video of a cat-scan as we watch her brain succumb to the virus and then reanimate as a stripped-down lean mean ravaging machine. Then Jenner shoots her in the head. On the cat-scan it's really pretty, with lots of little silvery lights flashing through the synapses like a 3-D Tron world. Then it all dims and slowly the red light takes over, creating that hunger for human hamburger.

Jenner apparently has made zero progress in his search for a cure, since he says the plague might be a parasite, a virus, a bacterium, a fungus or an act of God. Thanks for narrowing down the possibilities, dude, our tax dollars were well spent. Jenner does apologize and explains that T-19 was the smart one, he just works there and no amount of computer backup compensates for stupid.

After a brief period of socializing in which we get to see why people from Georgia should never be allowed to have alcohol, it's morning again and the old survivalist from the Quarry Run (Dale, played by Jeffrey DeMunn) asks about the big red LED countdown clock on the wall. Jenner explains after a little coaxing that when the last of the diesel goes through the generator and the power grid fails, the CDC complex will self-destruct for the benefit of the world, taking all the deadly things it studied into hell along with it. And oh yeah, there's no way out, he was serious about the door staying closed because it's part of the countdown procedure.

Clearly this isn't good and a panic begins. Doors begin closing, trapping everyone in the command center, where Jenner explains with a blissful expression how wonderful it will be to die when the air heats instantly to 6,000 degrees F. I voted with the last surviving redneck fellow who instantly picks up a fireman's axe and starts swinging at doors. The CDC may have planned against rocket launcher assaults but they probably didn't plan for rednecks in the building, and that does eventually provide the way out.

Jenner grudgingly opens the internal door, probably to get rid of all the unpleasant people firing shotguns and swinging axes, and everybody charges out into the lobby. Everyone except last black woman and last blonde woman, who choose to stay behind and die clean. The black lady's husband argues briefly and then he's off to throw chairs at the bulletproof windows in the lobby. Dale can't talk Andrea out of staying so he stays with her.

Outside in the lobby, despite technical applications of axes, shovels, and very lightweight lobby chairs against the windows, everyone is trapped and panicking so hard they're running out of steam. Then the abused redneck woman with the short hair (leaving out names here because I couldn't find the bit characters on the main website) says, hey, I've got something here in my purse that might help. And she pulls out a hand grenade she found in Grimes's uniform pocket his first day at the Quarry Run. I'd be wanting to know what else she had in that purse but Grimes is happy with the hand grenade. It blows out the window pane and everyone bolts for the RV's.

At the very last minute Andrea and Dale climb out the window too and don't seem to understand there's a nearly-nuclear explosion building up behind them. The caravan waits, time runs out, and everyone ducks. What follows is one of the most obvious computer-generated virtual explosions I've ever seen, and it leaves the building's surroundings -- including the RV's -- untouched. It's like the refrigerator scene in the last Indiana Jones movie, except without the tumbling and the crashing. It's good to know the old duck-and-cover trick we were taught during the Cold War still works.

In spite of the flaws, I do like this show. You can't go wrong with zombies, and the human characters in the story seem pleasantly real, like the people you'd actually get stuck with at the end of the world. Everybody's panicky, everybody's making poor decisions, and now everyone looks really really tired and dirty. So much for that hot shower.