She turns out to have been under the noses of the protagonists the entire time-what remains of hope lives in a barn, and is a zombie child. The entire second season was about the loss of a child, a young girl named Sophia, the search for whom was also clearly a metaphor for the search for hope. Bush’s Presidency, certainly-social disillusionment in the nation. The zombies here are also a metaphor for a new and profound-stemming from 9/11, no doubt, and George W. Romero’s great bleak satire Dawn of the Dead (1978). The cyclical, neverending hunger and blankness of the zombie is once again an apt metaphor for a mindlessly consumerist America, recalling George A. In the second season episode “18 Miles Out,” the dark, hotheaded Shane (Jon Bernthal) stares out from a car window at an immense field in which one solitary walker makes his lurching way on the way back, Shane sees the same zombie, still moving in the same indefatigable and hopeless manner. Overrun by the titular creatures, this America is mostly empty and depopulated, barren, a vast, sprawling, and desolate landscape.
The Walking Dead, a thrilling, somber zombie show that is AMC’s biggest ratings draw, presents an image of a bleak zombie heartland America in which very few human being exist.
