The first season of the Walking Dead comes out on home video tomorrow, and this got me thinking of the another recent attempt at a serial zombie show that never quite got off the launch pad: CBS's Babylon Fields.
Being made around time the full-on zombie-saturation was escalating back in 2007, Babylon Fields never got picked up by CBS but the pilot found its way online (still available to view on Google Video). I think the problem a lot of the zombie stories that cropped up in that timeframe suffered from was the idea that the important part of the zombie stories was the zombies. What I think works best, what Walking Dead the comic nailed and has been present in its adaptation and a few others have managed, is to make the zombie outbreak the setting and focus on the human story. What Babylon Fields tried to do, instead, was make the zombies themselves the human story.
Starting one morning, all the dead folk in one small town (or possibly all the world, it's never really explicitly stated) start digging their way out of their graves. However, the further twist here is the zombies, aside from being a little dirty and roughed up, are much as they were when they were killed, quickly recovering their senses and attempting to pick up their lives where they had been left off. Among numerous little plot-holes that crop up, we're seeing people who have been dead for years (judging by some of the garb of the herd streaming out of the town's graveyard, for generations) still fully formed and mostly undecayed, Pet Semetary style.
The town's living residents react as one might expect; some embracing the return of their loved ones as a miracle, others freaking out and trying to kill every zombie they see. Although we see a few families, the bulk of the episode focuses on Ernie (Jamey Sheriden), a post-mortem schlub who digs himself out of a hole behind an abandoned factory rather than the graveyard like the rest of the zombies we see.
An ex-cop and seemingly a bit of a bastard, Ernie's story quickly becomes a murder-mystery with the victim back up and walking. Although, barring any twists that would have been laid down later on, it seems pretty obvious that his wife and daughter had done the deed, leaving open how justified they were. He tracks down his old partner, played by a soon-to-be-Punisher Ray Stevenson (whose acting may have edged out most of his zombie co-stars as most lifeless aspect of the show), who's trying to hold his town together while everything goes to (a network-friendly) hell.
Since the show never really got a chance to explain itself, you can't fault it for leaving a lot of questions unanswered in the pilot, but that does leave the zombies themselves a bit perplexing. As I often thought, the first wave of zombies is impeccably dressed as they somehow all dig themselves out of their graves together (how everyone including children got out of their coffins and through the dirt shall remain one of the biggest mysteries to me). Most of the zombies we see mention having been dead for a few years, so they're all suprisingly in-tact still, and are even harder to put down. To further subvert the usual expectations, we pretty quickly see two zombies dropped by headshots, only to immediate get back up and rush off terrified themselves.
As there are numerous references to faith and religion throughout the episode and not a single one to science that I can recall, I reckon this may have turned out to be a supernatural event (perhaps a Revelations tale) that could explain away a lot of it, which would admittedly be a bit of a cop-out but, unlike Walking Dead, in this case an entire lack of explanation may have been maddening. Plotholes aside, the pilot also suffers from some weak acting, clunky special effects and exceedingly tame zombie design; all problems that could have been ironed out in an actual series, or necessary concessions in the name of the gore and gruesomeness usually associated with the subject. Regardless, this had a lot more good going for it than not. Without the inherent danger of a more traditional zombie outbreak, and both living and dead aware enough to question what the hell is going on, the focus on the show would clearly have been zombies but still managed to have plenty of potential for story, drama and even comedy. I would have loved to have seen this grab at least one season, rather than become a horror-television footnote.
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