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Carl’s ‘Walking Dead’ Letter, Read Posthumously, Calls Us Into Hope
‘I see the sun and the corn and that cow that walked up to the fence and looked me in the eye.’
A friend recommended The Walking Dead TV series to me in 2014, four years after the series began. He agreed to start watching it again from the beginning just to introduce me to it, and he and I watched some of those first episodes together in early 2015.
Walking Dead is about zombies taking over what is presumably the whole world, though the survivors in the U.S. state of Georgia have no way of knowing for certain what has happened beyond their region. They have no communication tools and nowhere to go. Just trying to survive in place, they look for local fortresses and farms, and with weapons both manufactured and homemade, they defend those sites from rival groups.
By March 2018, I’d made it to Season 6, Episode 3, a famous episode in which we’re led to believe one of the good-hearted heroes, Glenn, is eaten.
From there, as the sociopathic dictator Negan behaved ever more hideously, I felt increasingly unable to continue watching the show. It became less about a few meaningful characters fighting ugly, decaying horror-monsters and more about those original characters dying off after being killed…
