Zombies, eh? For decades they've been the obsession of horror aficionados and just regular obsessives alike. What self respecting human being who's seen Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later doesn't have a zombie survival plan? Doesn't have that one building in their area they look at and think 'Yeah, I could probably gather up everyone important to me and hole up in there!' For the record, Shaun of the Dead led to me keeping an old cricket bat by my bedside for years. You know, just in case. Well, I've got good news for anybody waiting for the flesh eating apocalypse with bated breath, it already happened, and we seem to be coming out the other side okay! Or at the very least, it happened to our media.
For years it seems like the shambling vestiges of humanity have been shuffling, walking and running at a variety of speeds across our popular culture. Exploding into television, comic books, movies, literature, you name the medium, it got a taste of the undead. Not even Jane Austen was safe! In the midst of all this insanity, even the BBC jumped on the bandwagon with a three episode television drama called In The Flesh. Airing on BBC3 in March last year, I think it's my favourite piece of zombie related media that I've ever been exposed too.
The series takes place after 'The Rising', and featured a world where the uprising of the undead had actually been quelled (for the most part) and humanity were back on top again. Instead of taking all the zombies and lining them up to be put down like rabid animals, their condition came to be treated like a mental illness. They were given drugs to control the blood lust, make up and contacts to hide the ravages of being a walking corpse and then returned to their families and communities after an intensive psychological course had taught them how to behave like regular human beings. Of course, this is a world where people had spent years locked in a vicious kill-or-be-killed struggle with the walking dead and the men and women who pushed back the hordes and kept their communities safe by killing them off like the vicious, predatory beasts they were are still praised like heroes. So not everyone is particularly happy to forgive, forget and have them back.
The premise alone is pretty great, but how it was handled elevated it above that into some truly engaging television. It featured very complex characters, including a main character who was as meek and mild as you please, yet still struggling with what he was and what he did during his time as wild undead. This becomes even more of a struggle when his best friend, a soldier killed in Afghanistan and found wandering around the foreign country and brought back home, is refused to be allowed to acknowledge that he's dead because his father is the leader of the local militia that pushed the zombies back from their small village in the first place. In denial, he treats his son as a war hero who survived, one hundred percent alive, even though anybody with eyes, ears or a decent sense of smell can tell otherwise.
These kinds of characters allowed the story to touch on both sides of persecution, and explore the various aspects of what it's like to persecute and be persecuted very well. The persecuted, even though there is a very strong argument that they had no choice in what they're being persecuted for and truly had no control over it, are often left felt like they deserve every bit of it and there are definitely pressures in society that back this up. Of course, this doesn't apply to every undead character in the series. For example, a trend springs up where the a few zombies shrug off the make up, shrug off the contact lenses and just decide to start walking around au-natural. Even though it potentially leads to a much harder time for them.
On the flipside, the persecutors aren't just there as a bunch of utter bastards for us to shake our fist at as we sympathise with the zombie protagonists. True they can can often be a big sack of knobs, but you can understand their fear and their reluctance. While our main character, and most of the other zombies we meet, may appear cured, it's not a clean cut, black and white situation and there are certainly still wild zombies wandering the woods. When they capture them they're supposed to turn them over to the government, but if you'd seen people you loved being chowed down upon by the grinding teeth and cold, splintered eyes of the undead, would you want to just save everyone the trouble and put a bullet in their brain? Of course, it goes deeper than that. As with most groups that hold a grudge against another, hypocrisy is rife. As I mentioned above, the leader of this militia is one of the most ardent supporters of putting them all back in the ground that we meet, but when his own son turns out to be one of them...
I feel like this series has a lot to say to anybody who has ever felt like they've been an outcast, for whatever reason. It also doesn't hurt that all these characters and elements were pinned together by a story that I wound up finding absolutely riveting. In the last episode there was an excellently executed twist, that I feel like I should have seen coming but didn't because I'm kind of dumb like that, which revolved around the main characters death and put a lot of the themes of the series into a whole new perspective. Not to mention it just took me completely by surprise and felt absolutely perfect. It's one of the few times I've had to pause a TV show to digest and wrap my head around what I'd just seen, but I commend them fully for it.
And I honestly thought that would be it. Some of the best, most thought provoking and relevant drama that the BBC has produced in years, gone after three episodes. I thought that if the zombie trappings hadn't put people off, which I wouldn't blame them after years of not being able to look anywhere without seeing a walking corpse chewing somebody's guts out in the corner of your eye, the decision to hide it away on BBC3 would. BBC3 is a channel that's long been fading away into irrelevance, assuming it had any to begin with, and if it wasn't for Being Human I'd never have realised this show even existed. At the time I saw no buzz for it, nobody seemed to be talking about it and I thought this was just another piece of quality entertainment that had slipped under the radar.
Turns out, I was wrong. Much to my surprise and delight, the BBC have commissioned a second series for In The Flesh and it begins to air on Sunday 4th of May at 10pm both in the UK and in the USA. It's going to be six episodes long, and among other things is going to be picking up the storyline involving 'The Undead Prophet', an extremist group that urges the undead to shrug off not only their make up, but also the drugs that keep their condition under control. I'm hugely looking forward to it, and I urge you all to catch up with series one and jump right on board! Because while BBC3 itself might be going down the pan, I wouldn't mind seeing In The Flesh shuffle on forward for a few more years to come.
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