From The Governor’s tyranny to a hospital controlled by cops who have turned pirate, to Terminus—a society of cannibals whose motto is “You’re either the butcher or the cattle”—every community Rick’s group of nomads encounters turns out to be corrupt, compromised, or contemptible, and the foundations of city life—from religion to agriculture to the pursuit of happiness—are treated as delusions. Andrea’s weakness, for instance, is not that she’s a coward—she’s not—but that she values the the pursuit of happiness more than mere survival. “Every one of us has suffered,” she tells The Governor’s followers at one point. “So what do we do? We dig deep, and we find the strength to carry on. We work together, and we rebuild. Not just the fences, the gates, the community, but ourselves, our hearts, our minds.” That idealism proves her fatal flaw.

To the degree that The Walking Dead does respect the city, its ideal is Sparta, not Athens. The creativity, innovation, democracy, and joy that the Greeks saw as proof of Athena’s favor are treated here as petty distractions from the bloody trials of “real” life. The series prefers the aristocratic values of warlord societies: violence, hierarchy, cleverness, honor, and physical labor. The characters never create, they rarely sing, and the only books they read are Tom Sawyer and the Bible. Their highest virtue is loyalty. Their worst sin is being slow on the trigger.

The Walking Dead’s Nietzschean indictment of bourgeois decadence begins with its scorn for religion. Its subtle jabs at a faith whose God rose from the dead provide a clever indictment of the longing for immortality that often inspires humanity’s worst. This is particularly effective in the episode “The Grove,” which ingeniously satirizes the suicidal nihilism of holy warriors by portraying a traumatized teenager so infatuated with the notion that zombies are “happy” that she slices her own sister’s throat.