I think I’ve figured out why I keep coming back to The Walking Dead and its spinoff franchises, even when they descend into repetition, holey and hokey plots, baffling characterization, and zombified soap drama.
Repetitive as they are (and with as many problems with plot and continuity as Fear The Walking Dead has), they’re interesting as explorations of deeply dysfunctional families. And while, yes, the literal families depicted in the show are usually fairly dysfunctional, as are the “found families” that survivor protagonists band into, I mean that on some level every group of humans in this franchise functions as a dysfunctional family, often headed by an abusive, neglectful, narcissistic, or otherwise monstrous parent who, through it all, is themselves horrifically traumatized and acting out of what they think are good intentions.
In other words, I feel like the show traces the link between familial trauma and the uniquity of dysfunctional communities or institutions in a way that would be hard to do in a conventional setting. So many workplaces and communities (religious, social, identitarian) and governments all literally reenact dysfunctional family dynamics. It’s been identified as a key element in authoritarian structures; under “late capitalism” many of them similarly authoritarian to some degree or other, and dysfunctional to some degree or other. The thing is, that dysfunction is so widespread that it’s effectively invisible to us unless someone straight-up starts talking about democratizing the workplace, or until one pauses to think about the implied power relations still woven into words like “boss” or “employer.” We’re so used to the networks we’re part of being essentially authoritarian and dysfunctional (and those are the same thing) that we can’t even see it clearly when we look through a normal lens.
That invisibility is why I think the allegory of The Walking Dead seems to work: whatever the problems the series has as entertainment, as character and plot and coherent narrative, its traumatized survivors and zombified walking dead manage, through allegory, to render visible the epidemic nature of trauma, dissociation, and pseudo-familial dysfunction that seem to be so ubiquitous in this world in which we find ourselves. And in some ways, bleak as the show often is, one feels seen when seeing a depiction of the world that confirms one’s own observations about it, I think.