Much to my surprise, I keep orbiting around this The Walking Dead universe, and it's just occurred to me why: this apocalyptic virus thing is the perfect metaphor for the masses' dehumanization. In the logic of TWD, the dude lying in front of "his" TV all day long and the walking abomination are no different in essence, in that they're both as good as dead. It took almost half a century of ubiquitous "mass media" to achieve what a hypothetical virus did in less than a year, which I guess puts covid in the category of underperformers. Other than that, the same sad imagery of decay can be observed in both universes, which I s'ppose makes TWD's feudalistic view of the future a prophecy of sorts. We'll see.

I also took a brief look at the TV show, and reviewing this, two main points stuck with me. For one, I was spot-on with "this has the potential of going in the direction of Lost or some other TV series I haven't seen": both the show and the game throw some philosophical manure down the viewer/gamer's general direction -- mostly along the lines of "is there anything of the original person left in the walker?". This is great and all, except these philosophical and scientific questions remain largely unexplored, and maybe rightly so, given that the characters live in a post-apocalyptic world with scarcely any means to look at anything except their own survival. Still, the show ends up focusing on its characters' evolution, some petty political problems and... well, that's about where it ends. Nothing wrong with this, except it makes the subject matter wholly uninteresting.

As for the second point: even though the characters aren't able (both intellectually and through other means) to "do science", the viewer does, given his detached view on events occuring in that universe. This naturally leads me to the question of that virus, its origins and its workings. My remark that "the whole zombie apocalypse thing has great potential to be exploited in exactly the right way" was naive at best; no, I don't believe there's any actual potential there, since we seem to be dealing with a sort of magic virus that makes its hosts capable of existing in a semi-vegetative state for a long while without any sort of metabolism. Tell me, how the fuck is this even possible? are they photosynthesizing, or what? I'm pulling this out of my ass, but I expect such an "organism" to exist for at most a couple of months (again, number pulled out of my ass, perhaps it's less than that!) before completely decaying. This means that TWD should be walker-free after the first season or so; and meanwhile, either everyone learns of the airborne thing and comes up with sane practices of getting rid of the dead, or everyone simply goes away, leaving the planet free of humans. I don't see any middle ground here, no full decade (or however many years the comic spans so far) of people struggling to survive among zombies that appear... well, out of fucking where?

As far as I'm concerned, I played the first two seasons or so a few years ago (I don't even remember exactly, to be honest) then I left the game's rotting corpse to walk wherever it wishes. Meanwhile the old Telltale died too; I also tried The Wolf Among Us, among other of their games (most notably, games related to Monkey Island) and now with their relaunch, I find it hard to believe they have anything interesting left to bring to the table. I'll be here though, so please change my mind.