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The Walking Dead

I’m just going to start off by stating the obvious: TIGERS ARE AWESOME. That’s really not up for debate. Tigers look cool. They make for great mascots for high-school sports teams (let’s go Bishop Timon Tigers!). Famously awesome tigers in popular culture include:

Hobbes
Tigger from Winnie the Pooh
Shere Khan from The Jungle Book
Tygra from Thundercats
Battle Cat from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
Children’s entertainment character Daniel Tiger
The tiger from the short story The Lady or the Tiger
Cereal spokesfeline Tony the Tiger

Oh, and also a little character called RICHARD PARKER FROM LIFE OF PI. Only the greatest tiger in the history of major motion pictures. Ang Lee won himself a Best Director Academy Award in part because the CGI creation of Richard Parker was so impressive. It’s hard to argue. That was one expensive, painstakingly crafted jungle cat.

And then there was last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, which was rightly hailed by viewers and critics alike as a welcome breath of fresh air after the violence and dread and ugliness and crushing inevitability of last week’s Negan-palooza. Indeed it was great to take a week with Carol and Morgan and explore this interesting new community where they found themselves. The Kingdom isn’t exactly idyllic, but fruits and vegetables are being grown, children are going to school in gazebo classrooms, laundry is being neatly folded. It’s not bad. But it’s The Walking Dead, and Carol in particular has been on The Walking Dead for a long time, so she knows to expect the bottom to fall out at any moment. She’s understandably guarded when Morgan wheels her in to see the leader of this new community and rightly skeptical when said leader reveals himself to be King Ezekiel. Who sits on a throne. And wields a tiger named Shiva on a chain.

So about that tiger …

The story of Carol and King Ezekiel as told in this episode is honestly pretty great. He seems at first to be rather ridiculous, speaking in hyperbolic regal tones and aggrandizing pronouncements. Carol put on her customary wide-eyed friendly-suburban-mom persona, which is just an indicator to the rest of us that she’s going to bolt this freak show of a community as soon as her legs can manage it. But the worm turns further, and Ezekiel calls Carol out just as she’s about to leave town. And the two characters end up having some real talk between them, which ends up changing their relationship entirely end setting some interesting (if shrouded) things up for the future.

But that tiger, though …

Look, we’re all adult enough to admit that as good as last night’s episode was, and as cool as the idea of a leader with cool dreadlocks and a pet tiger is, the actuality of Shiva the CGI tiger of Ezekiel’s Kingdom, was pretty terrible, right?

RIGHT?!

The thing is, it should be cool. The idea of a leader of a self-appointed king ruling with a tiger at his left hand objectively a Cool Idea. In fact, it’s such an obviously Cool Idea that it starts to become less cool the more you think about it, because you imagine the writers of the comic books saying to each other, “Dude: what if he has a tiger? How cool would that be?” “SO COOL!” Which actually makes the tiger seem super lame. BUT THEN the episode is smart enough to know that a tiger is self-consciously so-cool-it’s-uncool and actually makes that a part of the story. Which makes it cool again.

But the tiger itself just looks SO stupid and fake. Is the thing.

Obviously, it would not be practical to have used a real tiger for these scenes. And the tiger is an integral part of Ezekiel’s character. So there was no way around the necessity of using a CGI tiger for these scenes. That doesn’t make it any less cartoony when a very obviously faked-up tiger roars right up in your face and expects you to be scared of it. The Walking Dead producers have compared their use of CGI Shiva to the dragons on Game of Thrones. The crucial difference being that the audience at home has never seen a real-life dragon before, so they can’t tell the difference.

That proud and preening collection of pixels right up there might as well be a dragon hanging out in the middle of post-zombie-apocalypse Virginia, for all tangible presence it creates on the screen. Careful, Morgan, there’s a cartoon kitty-cat on the porch!

I’m not asking you to reject last night’s Walking Dead out of hand just because of one flagrantly computerized tiger. All I’m saying is that as we praise the episode we not go overboard. Let’s not make Shiva our new Barb. Barb, for all that she may have been overhyped, was a creature of flesh and blood and prescription eyeglasses. Shiva is a poor facsimile of the real thing. Cool idea, though.

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