Z Nation: Zombaby! Review

This Z Nation review contains spoilers.

Z Nation: Season 2, Episode 5

Imagine you and three of your smartest best friends got really, really drunk and tried to think of ways to make The Walking Dead more interesting and less zzzzz-inducing. “Someone could get pregnant with a half zombie baby!” you might say, knocking over someone’s bottle of Boone’s Farm in the process. “Oh snap — they can use a giant wheel of cheese to kill a mess of zombies in Wisconsin, and then like, keep cutting back to it throughout the episode for lulz,” your friend would say before wandering off muttering something about “mmmmm cheese tho.” In the morning, you’d all wake up, hungover (and in same cases reeking of cheese) and forget the whole conversation ever happened. You’d just go back to watching AMC’s dullest program to ever air never knowing that your drunken fantasies were being made manifest on SyFy.

If you were — like me — worried that the addition of Serena, Murphy’s baby mama, was going to be a permanent one this season, you can now rest easy. Her craziness was a delight, but only in small doses. Maybe I’m doing her a disservice. If she hadn’t been giving birth in that barn this week I would have spent the entire episode pacing and worrying that 10K and Addie were both going to die of anthrax.

The massive cheese wheel of life keeps on rolling, crushing zombies and living cattle alike, and the gang must continue their quest to California. Even if that means roughing up some peace-loving Mennonites in the process. I’ve often praised the show for being true to life in one weird way — the characters’ refusal to sit around and ruminate in the face of tremendously high stakes. Conversely, it was pretty cool to see their skewed morality finally examined in the face of the beliefs of the Mennonites who do not fight the gang when it comes to protecting their dwindling store of antibiotics. Warren is an intensely sympathetic character, and watching her grapple with the ethics of this decision to save her people at the expense of other innocents was completely gripping.

Equally gripping? The eventual birth of Murphy’s blue baby-part-zombie girl named Lucy. This is a show that savors spreading on that cheese sauce nice and thick, which it did well, having the zombie hordes bringing the baby gifts in the barn — gifts like a zombie camel festooned with a pathetic garland. If you did not snort-laugh, check yourself for a pulse. It’s interesting to see that with Lucy’s birth Murphy seems to have lost his ability to control the zombies. Does this make Lucy the zombie Jesus, the zombie devil, or something in between?