By: Brandon Wolfe
Given ‘The Walking Dead’s’ present status as the most popular series in all of television, it was bound to spawn some imitators sooner or later. The only surprise is that it’s taken this long for a true rip-off to emerge. ‘Z Nation’ is the SyFy Channel’s spare-every-expense answer to the AMC phenomenon. Spearheaded by The Asylum, the brain-trust behind the ‘Sharknado’ films, ‘Z Nation’ also centers around a world plunged into a zombie apocalypse and the survivors struggling to get by. ‘The Walking Dead’ has a lot of problems as a series, many critical and seemingly in no great hurry to be resolved. After sampling ‘Z Nation,’ these problems maybe don’t seem so bad.
The ways in which ‘Z Nation’ is similar to ‘The Walking Dead’ are so myriad that it will be easier to delve into the handful of ways in which the two shows differ. The greatest difference is that ‘Z Nation’ plugs us into the grander scheme of its world more in its pilot than ‘The Walking Dead’ has done in four years. Rick Grimes and his crew never really have much of a grasp of what is going on outside of their little pocket world of rural Georgia and neither does the audience. Apart from a brief sojourn to the CDC in Season 1, the series has kept us almost entirely in the dark on what the status is with the chain of command and the outside world. ‘Z Nation,’ on the other hand, follows characters who are very aware of how the world feebly continues to operate. Our lead character in the pilot is Lt. Mark Hammond, a Delta Force soldier played by ‘Lost’s’ Harold Perrineau. Hammond loses his entire team while defending a testing facility where unwilling human subjects are forcibly administered various serums in an attempt to develop a cure for the zombie virus. When zombies break in and kill the both the soldiers and medical team, Hammond makes it out with one of the subjects, Murphy, in tow. While the other two test subjects immediately succumbed to the deadly effects of the serums they were given, Murphy did not, and even sustained multiple zombie bites without turning. Hammond recognizes that Murphy might be the last, best hope for a cure. Hope for a cure, that’s something else ‘The Walking Dead’ doesn’t offer.
Hammond escorts Murphy by rowboat to Camp Blue Sky, a small community of survivors in upstate New York unofficially headed up by a man named Garnett (Tom Everett Scott, perhaps best known, if at all, from the serendipitously titled ‘90s comedy ‘Dead Man on Campus’). Hammond imparts upon the camp that he needs to get Murphy to a medical facility in California so that a vaccine can hopefully be created from his blood, in an operation that the government has hilariously labeled “Operation Bite Mark.” Hammond asks the group to escort Murphy and himself to a rendezvous point with other military personnel using the camp’s trucks, a task the camp members accept with no small amount of reluctance. Shortly after Garnett, Hammond, Murphy and a few other Blue Sky denizens embark on this mission, the camp is overrun by a large herd of zombies, who were all – I’m not making this up - found napping in the river before awaking and rampaging in unison. With no home left to return to, the group arrives at their destination to find zombies have killed all the Bite Mark operatives, the only survivors found on-site being a baby and a woman who has locked herself in a huge cage to keep the swarming dead away.
While investigating the premises, zombies attack our heroes and the baby becomes infected, even though it’s not at all clear how since it wasn’t bitten. The lack of budget really shows in this sequence, as the baby menaces the group while either inartfully being left unseen or quickly glimpsed as a horrible bargain-basement Chucky effect. While the group manages to escape and lock the zombie baby inside, they decide, for reasons that bypass reason altogether, that the baby cannot be left in this state and needs to be put out of its misery. Hammond agrees to return inside to finish this job, spitting out the episode’s closest thing to a decent line (“God, I hate moral dilemmas”) in the process. Once inside, ‘Z Nation,’ which up to this point has operated as gravely straight-faced fare, finally descends into the unintentional (or is it?) hilarity that one expects from a Syfy schlockfest, as Hammond calls out “Here baby” to his adversary while it giggles ominously from the shadows. He is then almost instantly overtaken by a stray zombie and the baby, as they chomp away at him before the group enters to put Hammond and his attackers down with a hail of bullets. While Perrineau isn’t exactly a McConaughey-level star, he did seem a bit too much of a name to headline a show this low on the totem pole, so I can’t say I was too surprised to see him done away with so abruptly, but points to the show for setting up a lead just to immediately knock him down.
Left without their leader, the group turns to Garnett for guidance, but he’s as lost as anyone. But guidance arrives in the form of the voice emanating from Hammond’s walkie-talkie, which belongs to Simon (DJ Qualls, another veteran of ‘90s comedies being repurposed here), an NSA tech nerd left stranded alone way up at the snowy Camp Northern Light and now operating as the remaining eyes and ears of Operation Bite Mark. As the episode ends, Simons pops on a pair of shades and takes to his new duties by becoming Christian Slater from ‘Pump Up The Volume,’ because why the hell not?
Though ‘The Walking Dead’ is obviously ‘Z Nation’s’ primary touchstone, the show owes an equivalent debt to the deluge of zombie flicks released in the mid-‘00s, particularly ’28 Days Later’ and the 2004 remake of ‘Dawn of the Dead.’ The zombies of ‘Z Nation’ are runners, not shamblers, and the series employs the quick-cut editing that ‘Dawn ‘04’ in particular utilized. You watch this show constantly expecting “Down With The Sickness” to start up. The series also follows these films by having infection and transformation occur instantaneously, with no incubation period. You get bit here, you’re doing the biting five seconds later. But one area where ‘Z Nation’ differs from all of its inspirations – almost certainly the only area – is that it isn’t afraid to allow its characters to actually refer to the zombies as “zombies” (“Z’s” for short), something that ‘The Walking Dead’ and virtually all zombie movies have been inexplicably reticent to allow. If you want to stretch and say that ‘Z Nation’ breaks any new ground, that’s where it happens.
I suppose ‘Z Nation’ could have been much worse. Considering its pedigree, it gets some credit simply by virtue of not being purposefully laughable rubbish designed to be live-tweeted by morons. The acting is mostly competent. No one commands the screen, but neither does anyone embarrass themselves. Perrineau’s exit likely makes Scott the lead from here on out, and that’s a tall order for the actor. He doesn’t have much presence and his attempts to convey rage and determination come across as goofy. He’s like a cut-rate Jason Segal. Other than Qualls, no one else strikes a memorable first impression at all. “Puppies and Kittens” is an all-business affair, so desperate to set up its premise in under an hour that it leaves its characters as blank spaces waiting to be filled in at a later date. There’s also the issue of the look of the series, which is very drab and cheap. We’ve been spoiled by ‘The Walking Dead’s’ production values, and the shoddy headshot effects on display here don’t cut it. And that’s the real problem with ‘Z Nation.’ We don’t need it. We already have a ‘Walking Dead,’ we don’t need its non-union Syfy equivalent.
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