Let's do away with any preamble this week because guys and gals, I am here to tell you the news. The news is Z Nation.
Let me be the first to welcome you to the Z Nation Nation. Trust me, you get a little taste of this show, and you're gonna become a member for life. Let's get something absolutely clear right up front - Z Nation is terrible. There's not a single moment in this show that's well done. Not one. And that's perfectly okay. It's a Syfy stinker in the most glorious of ways. At some point in this show's production, everyone must have decided, "You know what? Fuck it. We can't compete with Walking Dead, so let's not bother. At all. Let's shoot for the moon. Wait. That's perfect. Moon zombies." Which aren't actually a part of season one, but I guaran-fucking-tee you someone producing Z Nation is thinking it.
That kind of pervasive sense of no one giving a shit gives the show a great big set of brass balls. Since there's no end to the list of C-list actors Syfy can pull in (seriously, when do we get Casper Van Diem on this show?), anyone on the show at any point can die. That kind of uncertainty in something with weight like Walking Dead or Game of Thrones can lead to powerful scenes, rife with emotion and tension. Here, it just leads to me cramming my face with popcorn, a gleeful devilish grin stretched across my face.
It's a fairly standard setup for the survival horror genre - three years after the zombie outbreak, the lone hope for humanity must be brought across the nation to a lab in California where a vaccine can hopefully be created. This man, Murphy, is guided by Harold Perrineau (Michael from Lost), hamming it up here as a Special Forces soldier. The two are also accompanied by a group of eclectic survivors, including Tom Everett Scott (the poor sap who starred in American Werewolf in Paris, among other late 90's movies).
Every episode sees the group dealing with new threats, and in the usual shitacular Syfy vein, these are often natural or man-made disasters or straight-up knockoff scenarios out of popular apocalyptic culture. One episode sees them dealing with radioactive glowing zombies straight from the likes of Fallout, while another sees them dealing with a cannibalistic cult not entirely dissimilar to something you'd see in House of 1000 Corpses or, well, just about any and every apocalyptic tale revolving around the trope.
These are all delightfully absurd, and if I've got your attention and you want to watch this grand display of delightful idiocy, STOP READING RIGHT NOW. Go watch the show, preferably with good friends and a lot of alcohol. Otherwise, keep reading, because I'm about to tell you the show's gold-winning moments.
The season's two "best" episodes are pretty clear. The first comes at about the midway point, when the group of survivors are forced to take shelter in one of their leader's home towns in the Midwest. A storm's a-brewing, you see, and they need to find shelter before the shit hits the fan. The plot is, as always, forgettable and unimportant. Lead protagonist is looking for her long-missing husband, yadda yadda yadda. What makes this great? A motherfucking zombie tornado. I'm not really sure this needs much more explanation, but the brewing tornado cuts a swatch through a herd of zombies, picking them up and flinging them in a spectacularly shitty SFX session at four of our plucky heroes as they're out on the town. A zombie tornado. It's just as great as it sounds.
The second episode, and the clear winner of the King Of Television Award, goes to the second to last episode. One of the group is kidnapped by a group of thugs hoping to get into a pharmaceutical company's warehouse. Upon arrival, it's explained that zombies love drugs, apparently, especially Ritalin and - get this - Viagra. Yep. Viagra zombies. This show could not be any more perfect.
And there are so many other little moments, too. I want to print some of the bad one-liners on shirts. The show's title card often crops up in poorly edited moments. The gleefully stupid idea of everyone in the show referring to killing zombies as "giving them mercy" is shoehorned into semi-serious situations (though you can't take anything this show does seriously). The character Doc might just be the worst played and written character to grace TV, but like everything else in the show, the actor is enthusiastic and takes on the role with gusto. Stinking gusto, but infectiously charming gusto nonetheless.
And that's not even getting into DJ Qualls's character, an NSA agent operating out of a remote base and overseeing everything across the world. Qualls has many of the shows supposedly more somber moments as he goes stir-crazy, but this is Qualls we're talking about, so those moments are played up with all the nuance of a dump truck giving a back massage. He's over-the-top, his lines are straight-up horrible, and he's given sparse few moments to interact with anyone else in the show directly. It's great, because in his awfulness, he's kind of the perfect figurehead for this show.
This is precisely the sort of show I want out of Syfy when they aren't capable of doing a Battlestar Galactica (and it's become abundantly clear that one was a flash in the pan for them). I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who revels in the B-movie garbage Syfy pumps out. It's on Netflix streaming, and it's been renewed for a second season. Here's hoping for eighty more.
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