TV Eye, S2013 ep 2 – The Big Dead Society

You can’t move for the dead these days.  Hunched and drooling, shambling about with their incessant moaning and expressionless faces.  But at 5pm you’re allowed to leave the workplace and the need to blank out pummelling their heads in with a baseball bat reduces to a low hum.  The dead on TV are much more interesting.  And they’re less likely to want to discuss Top Gear with you.  EVEN THOUGH I HAVE TOLD YOU I DON’T WATCH TOP GEAR. 

BBC Three – the channel that sentient beings normally avoid – have managed to pull off a neat twist in the rapidly crowded zombie genre.  Well, a neat twist if you haven’t seen True Blood before.  That’s right, In the Flesh (BBC iPlayer) has zombies assimilating back into the world after the ‘rising’ - that to my shame I didn't notice - of 2009.  Unusually in this zombie apocalypse, the apocalypse part has been mainly avoided as the government has managed to treat the sufferers of Partially Dead Syndrome and return them back to their families.  Which may explain some of your work colleagues.

Obviously being a PDS sufferer is going to leave a few mental scars to go with the usual physical scars.  Memories of ripping the flesh off people for a manwich certainly puts the concerns with the horsemeat scandal into perspective.  A touch of zombie group therapy is therefore a sensible move before re-entering society.

Naturally, with people being people, there are some sections of society that are not too keen on having the PDS living in their neighbourhood.  Particularly in the village of Roarton, where the authorities left the inhabitants to fend for themselves.  That’s government cuts for you.  But in a development that would delight David Cameron and his Big Society plan, the locals formed the Human Volunteer Force to defend themselves against the ‘rotter’ threat.  Well done, everyone.

Except the HVF hasn’t been disbanded and the community is still full of resentment about their abandonment.  There’s probably votes to be had in Roarton for Ukip, but it’s not likely to be very helpful for the returning Kieren, despite the make-up, and contact lenses used to lessen the visual impact of PDS.  Anyway, the first of the three episodes was excellent.  Watch it.  I command you as your leader on all zombie related matters.

Over in the Former Western Colonies the authorities seem less organised in coming to terms with the zombie threat.  Which is always a risk in places that insist in using a ‘z’ in the word.  As The Walking Dead heads to its series conclusion, a more rudimentary form of civilisation is existing.  Always a threat when two conflicting groups are led by one man who has a penchant for keeping zombie heads in fish tanks and another that wanders off for hours chasing after a vision of his dead wife.  It’s challenging circumstances, granted.  But still, you wouldn’t necessarily have these traits as part of your success criteria in a leadership selection committee. 

I do believe I can sort out the problems between the inhabitants of Woodbury and the prison, though.  Apologies if this has already happened, being a week behind the FWC broadcast, but wouldn’t it cheer everybody up if Andrea was sacrificed to the zombies?  The world’s worst judge of character and self proclaimed needlessly demanding spokesperson and mediator for the few humans lucky enough to fulfil the stupid demographic in a post zombie apocalypse world has no purpose in this world beyond irritation.  No one likes you, Andrea.  I bet you would have a needlessly lingering death to just annoy.  Die, Andrea, just die.

But in reality, everyone knows an Andrea.  You probably work with two or three that you tolerate on a daily basis.  The more I think about it the more it seems that surviving any future zombie threat is just an extension of modern life.  I think we’ll be fine.  Unless you’re an Andrea, because I’ll certainly be shooting you in the head as a precaution, just in case.