I’m only on the third episode of season one, yet I’m already starting to understand why “The Walking Dead” is so fun and entertaining, in spite of being a vision of our world transformed into a hellish nightmare.<\/p>\n
I think the key is the humor. Not humor among the characters — their lives are grim and terror-filled and constantly in peril. I am speaking, rather, of all the witty meta-humor sailing over the fourth wall. The characters are not in on the joke. But we and the writers are.<\/p>\n
For example, at this point our intrepid every-man hero, having braved huge ravenous hordes of flesh-eating zombies through a combination of resolve, resourcefulness, and an insane amount of dumb luck, is finally reunited with the wife and young son he had feared dead.<\/p>\n
Because he is the hero, and therefore noble, our man decides to turn right back around to brave the flesh-eating hordes yet again, in order to honor a promise he had made. His wife is frantic with despair at the thought of her husband deliberately heading to near-certain death so soon after their tearful reunion.<\/p>\n
But listen to what their young son tells her in the very next scene:<\/p>\n
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