When did Humans become the Black Hats of Modern Fiction? Westworld, The Walking Dead & Encroaching Dystopia

When did we become the bad guys?

When I say we, I mean it in the Royal sense. A collective *we* referring to modern society. Humanity. For decades in cinema, television and half a dozen other entertainment mediums, we were the good guys. Human beings, men and women, we understood right from wrong and saved the world from monsters – demonic, alien and who knows what all. In the last few years, particularly, something has changed. Westworld is just the latest returning show in a line of hugely popular TV shows that make this very clear.

We have become the monsters we always imagined we were fighting against.

Westworld is all about the relationship between man and machine. In a near-futuristic theme park setting, where android ‘hosts’ play out narratives for human gamers (with money) so they can indulge their basest desires, the first season of Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s original 1970’s movie was all about the confluence between machine and consciousness, tied up with the moral treatment of what are considered hardware, but steadily come to realise they are much much more. Westworld plays out as a high-concept genre thriller in the making, with philosophical overtones, but the message within Nolan & Joy’s take on Crichton’s cautionary tale is clear: we are *not* the heroes of this story.

Game of Thrones – ‘The Pointy End’

VARYS: Ah, the children. It’s always the innocents.

One of the interesting aspects of ‘You Win or You Die’, which I failed to mention in my analysis of that episode, was how the children were completely eliminated from view, at least the younger children who will prove so crucial to the central narrative of Game of Thrones. ‘The Pointy End’ redresses this balance by re-framing the episode from the perspective of a future generation who will shape the future of Westeros, so it is perhaps quite appropriate this is the first script to be written by George R. R. Martin.

Martin is, of course, the creative force behind this entire mythological world. As writer of A Song of Ice and Fire, he has devoted over the last twenty years of his life to the vast, sprawling narrative which began in A Game of Thrones in 1996 and will likely conclude with A Dream of Spring sometime, you would hope, before the Sun exhausts its fuel and the Earth crumbles to dust. Martin is a notoriously slow writer, even for someone putting together such a magnum opus at this – a short A Song of Ice and Fire novel tends to run at around 600-700 pages. Indeed one of the reasons Martin didn’t write an episode of the TV series after Season 4 is precisely because fans were hounding him, day and night, to finish The Winds of Winter, reputedly the penultimate book, which as of writing still remains to be published.

The Sense of no Ending: The Walking Dead and sticking the landing

Let me preface this piece with a confession: I haven’t watched The Walking Dead in at least five years. My relationship with the show ended following the lacklustre conclusion to the third season. Many people have suggested the fourth is the best so perhaps the joke’s on me, but here’s the reason I never came back: I just couldn’t cope with the nihilism. If there is a TV show built on a deeper sense of profound doom than the adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic, it’s doing a very good job of hiding itself.

The Walking Dead has, from the very beginning, been predicated on the fact there will be no happy ending. The zombies will never be eradicated. The world will never be saved, the virus never cured. The survivors will spend the rest of their lives fighting impossible odds only to one day die, either naturally or horrifically. No light exists at the end of this tunnel. Bleak, huh? Bleak and, for many, alienating. The Walking Dead is shedding viewers by the episode as it’s Eighth Season airs in the US. Many have suggested the rot has been setting in for the last couple of seasons, for several reasons (stand up, Negan). It feels like a show approaching its death throes which is ironic, because The Walking Dead refuses to end in kind of conventional sense.

Endings are fascinating to me. Endings are where the power lies in storytelling, no matter whether you’re dealing with a TV show, movie, book, video game, anything with a narrative structure. You’ll hear many fiction writers talk about how they’ve figured out their conclusion before anything else, novelists in particular. That’s a much harder maxim for television writers to follow given the mercurial nature of the business. Movies are able more conclusively to craft an ending if they are telling a contained story but now almost every cinematic experience ends with the promise of a follow up, whether a straight sequel or a cinematic franchise. The solitary, told story experience is one to be cherished, in whatever form of media.