Warning. This review contains several spoilers about the second season of the series “The Walking Dead”!

On March 18 the second season of the show “The Walking Dead” ended.

Adapted from a series of comic books by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, the TV show “The Walking Dead” airs in the U.S.A on TV channel AMC, on which it made its debut on October 31, 2010 with the first of the six episodes that made ​​up its first season.

“The Walking Dead” is a story set in a post-apocalyptic world where an infection turns corpses into zombies, causing the collapse of civilization. The only way to permanently kill a zombie is to hit its brain.

A group of survivors in Georgia tries to get to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in hopes that someone has managed to create a safe area and also to find a solution to the zombies problem. At the end of the season, hopes prove unfounded and the group of survivors must find another place where they can hope to find some safety.

After the huge success with audiences and critics of the first season of “The Walking Dead”, a second season of 13 episodes was produced: 7 of them aired in October / November 2011 and the other 6 in February / March 2012.

The second season is very different from the first. The first episodes of the series are set almost all the urban area of ​​Atlanta and see a constant struggle for survival by the people who are still alive. Zombies are everywhere and to move from one place to another it’s often necessary to use weapons to permanently kill them.

Instead, the second season is set in the countryside where the amount of zombies is much lower and it’s therefore possible to clean up some areas in order to move around while maintaining only a moderate caution. The group of survivors find a farm where a family that saved from the apocalypse lives but the welcome isn’t very warm.

“The Walking Dead” second season cast consists of:

• Andrew Lincoln (photo ©Angela Natividad) as Rick Grimes
• Sarah Wayne Callies (photo ©Angela Natividad) as Lori Grimes
• Laurie Holden (foto ©MingleMediaTVNetwork) as Andrea
• Steven Yeun as Glenn
• Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon
• Chandler Riggs as Carl Grimes
• Jon Bernthal as Shane Walsh
• Jeffrey DeMunn as Dale Horvath
• Lauren Cohan as Maggie Greene
• Scott Wilson as Hershel Greene
• Emily Kinney as Beth Greene
• Jane McNeill as Patricia

My problem with the second season of “The Walking Dead” is mainly due to the impression that there was material for six more episodes which was then diluted in thirteen. The setting in the countryside takes away part of the first season’s very fast pace but the element that in my opinion is the worst is the love triangle Rick – Lori – Shane, which has a soporific effect on me!

To me slow pace is fine if action is replaced by other interesting content. For example, I’m OK when the survivors acknowledge that the world has changed and they have to decide about new rules. When another group of survivors attacks Rick, Glenn and Hershel and eventually Randall, one of them, gets wounded and captured, I’m OK when they discuss what to do with him.

Unfortunately, I think that the subplot about the Randall’s fate was overshadowed because it was included in the one concerning the clash between Rick and Shane, which in my opinion wasn’t handled the best way.

In some moments, Shane acted as a psychopath, as if sometimes he got taken by a sudden rampage that led him to kill someone. I’m OK with seeing people in extreme situations react in even extreme ways but if Shane’s behavior had been more ambiguous in my opinion it would’ve been more interesting.

For example, if Shane had shown a greater interest in the welfare of the whole group rather than essentially showing concern for Lori and Carl, he would’ve given the impression of being a man ready to do anything to defend his group, not only to take the woman he fancies.

In some cases, even the action parts have left to be desired. In one episode, Lori feels the urge to go and help Rick and Shane and that is already puzzling. As if that weren’t enough, she leaves on her own in a car and drives watching a map instead of the road. Obviously, she runs over a zombie, ends up off the road and risks being eaten by a couple of zombies. Frankly, I struggle to think of a lamer scene I’ve seen on TV.

On the other hand, Lori’s scenes seem to be written by misogynists because she usually acts like a deficient. For example, she purposely seems to say the perfect phrases to put Rick and Shane against each other.

Dale’s death could’ve been handled better too. He’s in a meadow in the silence of the night but a zombie arrives behind him without him noticing. Unfortunately that’s a cliché used in too many TV shows. To make things worse, the zombie literally opens his guts with its hands, by far the largest demonstration of strength shown by a zombie in “The Walking Dead”, even more by the same zombies already seen in the same episode stuck in the mud from which it struggled hard and long to escape. Couldn’t they find a more decent way to kill Dale?

Luckily, the season finale is more like the first season: finally, the “Little House on the Prairie” arc is over and the story is back to being a fast paced struggle for survival. There are still flaws in it, starting with the fact that the protagonists discover a huge horde of zombies only when they practically reached the farm. I accept the use of the cliché of the danger that pops up from nowhere because it lays the foundations for a new arc that can’t be worse than the previous.

For those and other reasons – but I better not dwell too much with the examples otherwise I’d become boring too – I found this second season of “The Walking Dead” written in an altogether mediocre way and therefore disappointing compared to the first.

Among the first and the second season there was a change of authors and showrunner Frank Darabont was fired by the AMC network, apparently due to differences concerning the budget cuts decided for the second season. The results aren’t very encouraging.

However, the series was renewed because the audience even increased since its first season and also during its second season. Some bits about the third season have already been published: if you’re interested in those spoilers you can easily find them on the Internet, I’ll just say that some developments in the story of the survivors seem interesting. Therefore I’ll give “The Walking Dead” another chance hoping that the quality of its scripts gets better.