Abstract

To treat The Walking Dead as if it were only a zombie apocalypse story is to miss the deep and fundamental questions about society that the story raises. By looking past the immediacy of the zombie threat that drives the main narrative of the story – survival – it is possible to tease out important questions about community, social organization, leadership, utopian and dystopian world building, and, most importantly, morality. By focusing on the communities that come together in The Walking Dead, this chapter examines how societal questions of utopian and dystopian world building frame important questions about how society functions, how it ought to function, and what it will take to get us beyond the problems plaguing contemporary society.