So who lives? Well, it’s not Pajama Boy. In zombieland, there are three kinds of people: those who know how to use guns, those who learn how to use guns, and zombies. At the beginning of TWD there were a few characters who stubbornly clung to their pre-apocalypse fear and hatred of firearms. Those people are now dead. Yes, one can learn to use other weapons. TWD’s beloved Daryl — the most admired redneck in television history — uses a crossbow as his weapon of choice, while his friend Michonne is adept with the katana, but the gun is still king. (How beloved is Daryl? There are millions of TWD fans who begin every episode with aching concern for his safety. If the show killed him off, cities might burn.)

Oh, and the zombie universe has no use for idealism. Indeed, TWD has made a cottage industry of finding and destroying tiny post-apocalyptic utopias. Season 2 wrecked an idyllic farm, where a family hoped to ride out the crisis. In Season 3, the fortress town of Woodbury — led by a homicidal maniac called The Governor — is the scene of a bloodbath. The list could go on. The utopias fail because living people are far more dangerous than the zombies themselves. They kill through naïveté and wishful thinking, and they kill through sheer bloody-mindedness. The groups that survive are the ones whose members understand that trust is hard-earned and there is no such thing as a “safe space.” In other words, man is fallen, and you either remember that fact or you die.

Yet despite these premises, the Left loves this show.