Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was an unforced error on my part because I had to get up super early… then never actually got around to writing a blog post. When I got home from work I pretty much crashed on the couch and along with doing some chill maintenance gaming in Final Fantasy XIV, I decided to binge my way through Black Summer season 2 on Netflix. For those who are unaware of this show, it is another in the zombie survival genre, but it is told in a bunch of disconnected story fragments shifting perspectives between a large cast of characters. This means it is not necessarily told in chronological order which can completely screw with your perspective at times.
There are very few characters that carried over from the first season, and this time around we are introduced to a large number of new players centering around what ultimately is a handful of events told from different perspectives. The central conflict of the season is that someone is flying over the snowy expanse of land and dropping off supply crates. Some contain food and medicine and others weapons… but all of which are highly sought out by the groups of survivors inhabiting what appears to be the backwoods of Colorado or some other similar area. I enjoyed the show in spite of the fact that they seem to be really bad at dispatching zombies. However one of my friends stated that was one of the things that they actually liked about the show because no one seems to have a supernatural aim.
For those unaware, Black Summer is the higher budget and production value cousin to Z Nation. I had no clue at all that these two series were connected until I watched this video outlining how the virus in both shows worked. The Red Death as far as zombie virus strains go is one of the ones that produce near-instant zombies. That means… your highest priority when someone is dying is either to damage the brain or get the hell away from them before they wake up and start running around seeking their next meal. As far as Zombies go, these also appear to be of the stupider variety meaning that if they ever lose sight of their prey they cannot seem to reason out where they might have gone to and begins the process of open hunting again. There are times when the cast of humans literally hide around the corner of a building and the raging zombie seems to be incapable of understanding spatial reasoning enough to figure out their hiding place.
Another thing about Black Summer is that much like Walking Dead it posits that humanity will break down into tribal factions that will quite literally kill each other over a can of beans. This is where I start to wonder about how a hypothetical zombie invasion would actually play out. Firstly I somehow doubt that it would spread terribly far at least in the region I live in where a large percentage of the populace is “packing”. I think armed militias of “good ole boys” would be all too willing to roam around hunting down packs of the undead. I mean my initial instinct would be to leave the city center and then ride it out with family in a small town with plenty of ammunition. There is more than enough open land to slow down the spread and each of these small towns would likely become a safe haven as the townsfolk protect against roaming packs.
The part that starts to conflict with me on a personal level when a post-apocalyptic fiction predicts chaos erupting around us, is that I have seen chaos first hand. I live in the area of the country lovingly referred to as Tornado Alley. We’ve gone a few years without a bad one, which means we are due for a significant tragedy at any point. The above picture is the aftermath of the Tornado in Joplin Missouri that took place on May 22nd of 2011, just over ten years ago. The thing is… we were there shopping with my mother-in-law the weekend before this took place. Had we picked a different weekend we could have easily been in the path of this disaster?
In the face of a tragedy like this, I have watched as folks who have nothing are all too willing to give what little they do have to help others. Ten years ago when the Joplin Tornado happened there was a mass volunteer drive to go clean up and pretty much every organization was doing some sort of food, clothing, and essentials drive to help the victims make it through the coming weeks and months. So in the face of ravening hordes of the undead, I do wonder if our response will be inherently selfish as our fiction predicts or if we will instead band together in defense of humanity? This is actually a conversation I have had with friends before. Sure my first instinct is to leave the city core just out of a sense of preservation in that fewer zombies equates to a higher survival rate. I fully expect however that once you reach the outskirts that folks will rapidly begin grouping together to help weather the events.
What are your thoughts? Does our zombie fiction get it right and that you think it will be self-interests over the needs of the many? Do you think we will instead band together to fight back? Drop me a comment below.