When Zombies Attack ... Morons

The Walking Dead is dumb. The premise is dumb. The writing is dumb. And the characters are especially dumb.

Nevertheless, I have watched every episode (some of them twice). So I guess The Walking Dead is like a golden retriever. A dumb animal that's fun to play with and keeps bringing the ball back.

Getting me to watch really isn't the hard part. As a lifelong Dungeons & Dragons fan, I'll watch anything about a band of multi-talented adventurers trying to survive in hostile territory. The Walking Dead is just The Lord Of The Rings ... in Atlanta.

I haven't read the books, so maybe I'm missing something. But I can't believe the premise, no matter how hard I try. The zombies are mindless. They don't bother to look under cars or behind doors. If you put a drop of blood on the ground, they stop to lick at it, instead of attacking the 180-pound meal right in front of them.

A band of raccoons would be more dangerous than a band of these zombies. Raccoons are faster and smarter, with better offensive weapons (claws and teeth) and much better defense (try killing a scurrying raccoon with a .45, with one shot). And yet our world hasn't been taken over by raccoons. So it's hard to believe that it would be taken over by the zombies portrayed in The Walking Dead. I can't even think of a dumb animal to compare them to, because evolution didn't make anything that dumb and harmless. Perhaps a drunken sloth on Valium.

In order to take over the world, zombies need an edge. Something that makes them scarier than the coyotes that steal chickens from my yard.

1. The writers could have made them strong. They didn't.
2. The writers could have made them fast. They aren't.
3. They could have made them smarter than earthworms. They didn't.
4. They could have given them improved senses, to hunt out fresh meat. They didn't.
5. They could have made the disease spread easily. They didn't. Our heroes splash zombie blood all over themselves every day and don't get infected.
6. They could have made the disease hard to detect. This is how diseases spread in real life. You can't tell who has HIV just by looking at them.

So we have a bunch of dumb slow weak zombies, that are easily identified (and whose victims are easily identified). It makes no sense that they could overtake a country with 2.9 million trained soldiers, 900,000 police officers, and more than 270 million guns in civilian hands.

The only way such a "threat" could bring on the apocalypse is if all humans were complete morons. Luckily for the zombies, the humans in The Walking Dead are just as dumb as they are:

Hi-Res "Walking Dumb" Poster