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I admittedly haven’t been keeping up with my zombie fiction lately. I haven’t watched The Walking Dead in many years, for example, and while stuff like Train to Busan is on my list I keep forgetting to fire it up at an opportune moment. It’s not a situation like Stephenie Meyer where she didn’t want to read or watch about horror, it’s just circumstance.
But anyhow, with that backlog weighing on my mind, I got around to checking out the pilot episode of a zombie series one of my friends had been talking up — Z Nation, a SyFy show whose first season is now on Netflix.
So far I’ll say this: if the pace of TWD is too slow for you, Z Nation will probably be right up your alley. The pilot barely stops to breathe as it keeps piling on the zombie attacks (and zombie tropes). By the end of it, I hadn’t really gotten much of a sense of the main characters or why I ought to care about them — in fact I joked to Dawn something along the lines of “Oh hey, all the PCs are together now.” And no I’m not really kidding about that, one character in particular pretty much joins up by shrugging and climbing into the back of the truck after they say “Hey you’re a good sniper, come with us.” The rest of the story is one you’ve probably seen before… zombie outbreak, America As We Know It has fallen, last outposts are trying to find a cure, and eventually a ragtag band is set up to make their way across the wasted nation.
So the show so far is not what I’d call particularly innovative or insightful, but if you want to see a lot of people get eaten and zombies get bashed/shot you’ve come to the right place. It’s fun to watch for that, even if we weren’t particularly compelled at the time to see what happens next. If any of you out there have watched more episodes I’d be interested to hear your take, does it stay with my first impressions more or less or go somewhere a little less traveled?
6 thoughts on “Z Nation”
Ragnarok
Innovative and insightful is definitely not what you’ll watch the show for. I’ll watch it mostly as a guilty pleasure.
By the end of the first season, things begin growing disconnected, with things advancing by leaps and bounds without prior explanation. Still enjoyable.
Ballookey
Oh yeah…I started watching that a couple weeks ago. And forgot.
Grace
I’m seconding Ragnarok’s evaluation. The first season is pretty good — best for one-liners and action — but loses focus by the end. The second season has a few good episodes, but is mostly kind of weird and confusing. My wife and I have season three sitting on Netflix, but we haven’t quite run out of more attractive stuff yet!
Clint
Yeah that’s our main problem, too, so much backlog of more high quality fare that we didn’t feel too much need to cling to this. Even in terms of guilty pleasure we’ve still got a lot of “Into the Badlands” to watch (which might be another blog to come).
SteelRaven
The writing isn’t the best but Z Nation does try it’s best to make a Funny Z-poc show while other would try xeroxing Walking Dead’s drawn out dramas.
Brad
I’ll take Z Nation as the Zombie Apocalyse any day over TWD.
Z Nation – the end of the world is here, so the obvious solution to cope is to get a high powered gun, a spiked baseball bat or other weapon of choice & rampage your way across the wasteland.
TWD – X years in, the end of the world is here & characters are still carrying their pre-Apocalypse baggage about if there was enough steaks in the freezer. Get on with it, I don’t want to be bored like the TWD premise, I work enough with real life zombies in the office!!!
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