Category Archives: zombies

‘The Fades’ has left me wanting more

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Nine years after its departure, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” has left a big, hellmouth-sized void in TV fantasy. But a couple of shows are filling that void.

As much as “Lost Girl,” the Canadian series airing on SyFy, fulfills our minimum daily requirement for “Buffy”-style wit and fantastic action, the BBC series “The Fades” — which has finished airing on BBC America, but can still be found On Demand and on DVD — features other “Buffy” touchstones.

The show is about a teenager, Paul (Iain de Castecker), who comes to find out he is the chosen one, destined to lead the forces of good (Angelics) in their battle with the Fades, a murderous group of walking dead who feast on the living.

But the Fades aren’t just mindless zombies. As led by John (Ian Hanamore in one incarnation, Joe Dempsie in another), the Fades have apocalyptic plans for the world in general and Paul’s town in particular.

It’s up to Paul to protect not only his nerdy, pop culture-obsessed friend Mac (Daniel Kaluuya, whose Brit speak can be hard to figure out but whose constant nerdy references and opening story recaps are a highlight of the series), but his mom (Claire Rushbrook), his obnoxious sister Anna (Lily Loveless) and Jay (Sophie Wu), Anna’s friend and object of Paul’s affection.

Like Buffy, Paul must balance his duties as an unwilling and initially unwitting Angelic with guidance from Neil (Johnny Harris), an Angelic who becomes Paul’s mentor.

But Neil is no Rupert Giles, whose loving but sometimes exasperated guidance of Buffy was one of the cornerstones of that show. Neil is a bastard obsessed with egging Paul into facing off with John and the rest of the Fades.

The show is given texture by other characters, including Sarah (Natalie Dormer), an Angelic who is killed and returns as a Fade.

And hanging over everything, literally, is the end of the world. “The  Fades” shares with “Buffy” the central character’s ability to see the future. Paul’s visions of the end of the world — ash-filled skies and even more dead bodies than are popping up during the normal course of the day — cast a pall even over the daily horrors.

You might find that “The Fades” starts off with a slightly ragged tone. Hang in there. This is a series that starts uneven but very quickly finds its pace.

“The Fades” is punctuated by humor but is as grim as “Lost Girl” is light-hearted. Before the six-episode first season is complete, some very dire things happen to the characters.

The show premiered in Britain last fall and I’m not sure if a second season is underway or planned. I hope it is. Although the threat of John and the Fades is, to a great extent, resolved by the end of the first six episodes, the fate of the world is not. Things look pretty grim as the final scene fades to black.

For “The Fades,” it’s the perfect ending.

‘The Walking Dead’ finds ‘Better Angels’

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In its next-to-last episode of its second season, “The Walking Dead” continued to thin the ranks of survivors of the zombie apocalypse and demonstrate to viewers that no one is safe in this new world.

Some spoilers ahead (not the finale of this episode however, if you haven’t yet seen it).

After last week’s shocking demise of Dale, the group’s conscience, Rick speaks at his funeral and maintains that the group — which Dale had agreed was “broken” — can be repaired.

And for a while, it looks like the group will become a cohesive unit again. The survivors begin making preparations to settle into Hershel’s farm and defend it against either walkers or human interlopers, including those in hapless Randall’s group.

Ah, Randall. Rick still insists on taking the subject of so much recent disagreement miles away from the farm and setting him free. The decision infuriates Shane, of course, who’s been inclined to kill Randall outright.

The stage is set for a fatal conflict when Randall “escapes.” Rick and Shane and Glenn and Daryl set off into the woods to find him.

Randall hasn’t escaped, of course. Shane has taken him into the woods and killed him with the intent of luring Rick out into the wilderness to kill him too, paving the way for once again setting up housekeeping with Lori and Carl.

The last third of the episode, as Glenn and Daryl pick their way through the woods — with Daryl becoming more suspicious of Shane’s story as they go — and Rick and Shane inexorably moving toward a fatal encounter is among the best sequences of this season.

The woods and, ultimately, the meadow in which the showdown occurs are bathed in eerie blue moonlight that makes the inevitable blood seem black as night.

Spoilers for the ending of the episode have been circulating for a few days now. For people who’ve been following news of the show and its actors, the ending probably isn’t a surprise.

The previews for next week’s season finale looked in some ways as low-voltage and small in scope as the entire season has been. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to it.

And I’m really looking forward to next season and new horizons and new characters.

Spoilers are out there (not here) for ‘Walking Dead’ ‘Better Angels’

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Be careful what you click on between now and Sunday night.

Spoilers are all over the Interwebs for the “Better Angels” episode of “The Walking Dead,” airing Sunday night on AMC.

The episode is the next to the last for this season of the zombie apocalypse show.

If you’ve remained spoiler-free this season, I won’t change that. But if you’re determined to find out what happens in Sunday’s night’s episode, spoilers are out there. Big time.

One site I came across this afternoon even had a photo of … wait. I’m not gonna say.

Needless to say, this episode will be a pivotal one, nearly as important as the one to follow, the last episode of this season.

According to online reports, the final episode of the second season of the show will reveal what the CDC scientist whispered to Rick in the final episode of the first season.

So anyway, I plan to be watching Sunday night. Not quite as spoiler-free as I would have liked, but watching still.

More thoughts on “The Walking Dead” whisper

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Is there such a thing as a possible spoiler?

I guess there is, particularly when it comes to “The Walking Dead” whisper.

You remember the whisper. At the end of the first season of the AMC series, the doctor at the Centers for Disease Control whispers something to Rick. But what?

You might remember that I wrote about speculation concerning the nature of the whisper here. I’ve been reading up on it since and came across some interesting speculation.

Ready for those potential spoilers?

The prevailing speculation online — and we know how reliable that can be — is that the doc told Rick that everyone is already infected.

Presumably that means that everyone will eventually become a zombie, no matter if they avoid getting bitten or scratched.

That would explain the emphasis placed, in a recent episode, on Rick and Shane speculating on why two walkers had become walkers despite showing no visible signs of being bitten.

The “Walking Dead” comic book doesn’t solve the mystery and neither does creator Robert Kirkman who, when asked by The Hollywood Reporter, says, “Sure. Maybe. We’ll have to see (laughs).”

Kirkman is likewise mum on what caused the zombie apocalypse in the first place. He told “The Walking Dead” wiki, when asked about what happened, “…That starts to get into the origin of all this stuff, and I think that’s unimportant to the series itself, There will be smaller answers as things progress … but never will we see the whole picture.”

So while we might get an idea of what the whisper is, we’ll apparently never get a good idea of what caused the walker plague.

 

Shocker ending for ‘Walking Dead’ ‘Judge, Jury and Executioner’

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At some point in tonight’s episode of “The Walking Dead,” Daryl tells Dale, “The group is broken.” Dale, as the conscience of the group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse, doesn’t want to believe that’s the case.

Late in the episode, however, Dale echoes Daryl’s sentiments.

Tonight’s episode of AMC’s “Walking Dead,” “Judge, Jury and Executioner,” at first glance promised to be another talky, soap-operatic episode. Hershel gave Glenn his blessing in his relationship with his daughter. Dale appealed to the rest of the group for leniency for Randall, the hapless interloper they took prisoner. Andrea, who’s been closer to Shane than anyone recently, ultimately backed Dale’s stance.

But the episode was punctuated by a couple of notable moments:

Carl, Rick and Lori’s son, decided to go on a dangerous walkabout, encountering a zombie in a scene that provided some edge-of-the-seat suspense.

And the ending …

Spoilers ahoy!

After Dale makes an emotional appeal to spare Randall’s life in the show’s version of “Twelve Angry Men,” he succumbs to a random zombie attack out in a field on the periphery of the farm.

As Dale lays dying, Carl realizes the zombie who killed Dale is the one he encountered in the woods and couldn’t kill.

As if Carl didn’t have enough of a screwed-up future ahead of him.

Two more episodes remain in the season.

‘Walking Dead’ goes ’18 Miles Out’

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Tonight’s episode of “The Walking Dead,” “18 Miles Out,” got at least a couple of its characters moving again, which is a good thing.

Rick and Shane went on a road trip with the hapless goober who Rick rescued last week in his expedition to town. Rick irritated Shane — not that difficult a thing to do — by deciding that instead of killing the guy so he can’t lead his interloper friends to Hershel’s farm they would take him some distance — a little more than 18 miles, as it turns out — away and set him loose.

On the road trip, Rick and Shane seem to be on their way toward smoothing over their differences, which revolve around Lori, Rick’s wife and Shane’s one-time girlfriend.

They pull over at a water treatment plant and plan to drop the interloper off there. Of course, things don’t go as planned. There’s a grandly grotesque walker killing shown. Let’s just say the scene wouldn’t be out of place in a commercial for tires.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch — er, Hershel’s farm — Lori and Andrea get up in each other’s grills. Andrea, who flirted with suicide and Shane, in that order, risks the wrath of the Hershel household by allowing Hershel’s formerly comatose daughter to make her own choice about ending it all.

Much of the cast was off screen and out of the picture tonight. It’s not a bad way of constructing an episode. By focusing on just a few players/storylines, the episode seemed stronger and more cohesive.

A couple of interesting things:

Rick and Shane (mostly Rick) talked about how to prepare for what might unfold in the next few months. Is it me, or is this the first time we’ve heard characters plan or even guess about what could be on the horizon (beyond the early push to go to the CDC)?

There was a lot of emphasis on killing walkers with knives — rather than guns — tonight.

And, perhaps tied into that, was tonight’s episode the first in which characters tried to puzzle out how a couple of people became walkers even though they hadn’t been bitten? “Must have been scratches,” Rick and Shane theorize.

Or … something else?

Three more episodes remain this season. With the announcement the other day that actor David Morrissey would play the Governor — a particularly twisted character from the comics — next season, I’m going to assume that the bulk of the remaining episodes this season will take place on Hershel’s farm.

Sigh. After seeing next week’s preview, in which the survivors bicker about what to do with the hapless goober, I was thinking, haven’t we seen this episode already?

‘The Walking Dead’ eats the Oscars

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Oscar-watching has been an annual ritual with me since I was a little movie-obsessed geek.

And, truth be told, I’ll be checking out the Academy Awards tonight. I especially want to see Billy Crystal’s opening, which is likely to be the kind of corny but crowd-pleasing stuff that Oscar viewers enjoy.

But in pretty short order, I’ll be tuning in to AMC to watch tonight’s “Walking Dead” episode, “18 Miles Out.”

It’s not that I don’t care about the Oscars. I’m kind of interested in who wins. But not enough to miss “The Walking Dead.”

So here are a few reasons why I’ll be watching zombies and soap opera on AMC rather than aging movie stars and soap opera on ABC.

Nobody thanks anybody on “The Walking Dead.” At least they don’t thank everybody. At great length. And monotonously.

Nobody will play anybody offstage on “The Walking Dead.”

Nobody will be talking about what the characters on “The Walking Dead” are wearing. If Shane or Lori gets mostly naked, we might hear some variation on this, however.

Nobody will complain that “The Walking Dead” lasts too long. Maybe that the characters are spending too much time on Hershel’s farm this season, but not that the show itself runs too long.

Nobody will get eaten at tonight’s Oscars. ‘Nuff said.

 

Cops and zombies: Jonathan Maberry’s ‘Dead of Night’

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Shambling and slow as they might be, we just can’t get away from zombies.

There’s “The Walking Dead” on TV — the biggest hit on cable — and “World War Z,” the movie version of Max Brooks’ terrific book and starring Brad Pitt, to come out later this year.

And there’s Jonathan Maberry’s “Dead of Night.”

Maberry is a writer of suspense fiction, comic books and thrillers that take their cue from biological warfare and the queasy possibilities of modern-day laboratory horrors.

In “Dead of Night,” Maberry does a couple of things I’ve not seen in a zombie book before.

He gets inside the mind of a couple of zombies — yeesh — giving readers a feel for the zombie perspective.

And, most interestingly and importantly, he approaches the possibility of a zombie apocalypse from the perspective of small-town cops dealing with its early stages.

Think about it: Most zombie books and movies, even if they have a small-town or isolated setting, include characters who know the big picture.

While Maberry’s story has those characters, it follows, especially early on but throughout the book, the street-level shock troops dealing with the beginning of the end of the world.

Maberry’s small-town Pennsylvania cops and TV reporters don’t know, at least for a while, that a plague of zombies has broken out. They only know that a couple of people have been killed, in grisly fashion, and that a couple of bodies have disappeared. A suspect is on the loose, but it takes a while for them to realize that the suspect and the missing corpse are one and the same.

The characters try to puzzle this out but thankfully never seem oblivious to the mayhem developing around them. As a matter of fact, there’s nothing like a previously dead body attacking you to change your perspective.

“Dead of Night” is a well-written thriller with appealing, made-for-cable-TV characters and situations.

The ending is open just enough to allow for a sequel. I don’t know if Maberry is planning one, but I’m ready to rejoin the zombie hordes if it happens.

‘Walking Dead’ adds action in ‘Trigger Finger’

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Okay, that was more like it.

Tonight’s episode of “The Walking Dead” on AMC, “Trigger Finger,” liberally mixed action with the soap opera storylines we’ve become accustomed to so far in this, the second season of the zombie apocalypse show.

A follow-up to last week’s episode, in which Rick and Glenn went to town to find Hershel, only to meet — and in Rick’s case, kill — two dangerous human types, “Trigger Finger” opened as the companions to the interlopers from last week gathered outside the saloon and, for a while, kept our heroes pinned down by gunfire.

Meanwhile, Shane went off to find Lori, who crashed her car last week and found herself fighting off a walker attack this week.

The episode had the kind of action that too many episodes haven’t featured this year, including the opening gunfight between the good guys and the new and mysterious bad guys. The stand-off was complicated by the arrival of zombies and a serious injury for one of the interlopers. Rick decides to take the injured stranger back to the farm, which further antagonizes Shane.

I’m getting the sinking feeling that the remaining few episodes of this season will be spent on Hershel’s farm. The static nature of the farm setting — and the stories told so far this year — has been a sore point with fans, me included.

But — and this is a very big but — if the remaining episodes have the same mix of action and suspense and character drama as tonight’s “Trigger Finger,” I’ll keep watching.

On the interpersonal relationships front, Shane spilled the beans about Lori’s pregnancy and and Lori cautioned Rick that Shane believes that Lori and the baby are his … and very well might kill Rick to take what he believes he’s entitled to.

Also tonight, Glenn froze in action and dealt with the aftermath and Andrea and Shane seem to be drifting further away from the core of the group. And Daryl seems intent on pushing Carol away.

One thing I’d like to see: More to do for T-Dog. He’s barely in the series anymore.

Best thing about tonight’s episode: The new, improved, man of action Hershel. If we’re gonna hang out with him all season, I’m glad he’s capable of being more than a soft-spoken old scold.

Gruesomest thing about tonight’s episode: Lots of zombie chowing down, plus a grisly fence impalement.

What was ‘The Walking Dead’ whisper?

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Here’s one for fans of the AMC series “The Walking Dead” as we wait for another new episode — the second in the latter half of the second season — to premiere Sunday night.

What did Dr. Jenner, the scientist at the Centers for Disease Control, whisper in Rick’s ear near the end of the final episode of the first season?

If you remember, the survivors of the zombie apocalypse made their way to the CDC at the end of the first season but abandoned it when Dr. Jenner, the last remaining scientist, became despondent and decided to blow stuff up real good.

Before Rick led the survivors out, Jenner whispered something in Rick’s ear.

The Associated Press asked Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick, about the whisper.

Lincoln — who maintains he knows what the whisper was intended to be, but says he hasn’t even told his wife — hints that the whisper was not good news.

“This is a scientist who seemingly held all the cards to what this epidemic is about and I do think, you know, you would imagine he would have something of value to say on that matter,” Lincoln told the AP. “Well, he chose to kill himself.”

Well.

A friend, co-worker and fellow “Walking Dead” devotee of mine, Mark, says he believes the doctor whispered the word “Airborne,” which would not be good news for the survivors.

Having read some, but not all, of the comics upon which the show is based, I don’t know if the whisper was a part of the storyline or if it has been revealed.

I’ve heard other speculation about the whisper, including “No cure.” Also a dark scenario.

Lincoln indicated that the answer would be revealed this year.

As long as the doctor didn’t whisper, “Stay on the farm forever,” I’m good with whatever happens.