Sunday 17 December 2017

The Walking Dead: The Gregory Character is Driving Me Crazy

One major character in The Walking Dead for several seasons now has been Gregory. In my opinion, Gregory is pretty much a summary of why the show is terminally stupid and literally makes no logical sense.

Gregory is the ruler of the Hilltop Colony. He is the leader of a whole group of survivors. What else do we know about Gregory?

1. He's cowardly and useless at combat.

Gregory has never killed any other humans before. On top of this, we saw last Season that he hasn't even killed a single zombie before!

That's right, in THREE YEARS of the whole world being infested with deadly zombies, he has not once grown the balls to kill a single one. When he tries to do so he almost dies and has to be saved!

In the most recent episode, he fled when the preacher attempted to save him from a zombie horde, leaving his saviour in a potentially fatal situation - again showing what a massive dick he is.

2. He's a traitorous, sycophantic scumbag.

Gregory has sold the group out to Negan's men more times than can be counted. We've seen him doing this in dozens of repetitive scenes.

Every single "negotiation" he makes with them makes him look incredibly weak and completely passive. He will happily trade the lives and well-being of his friends for his own life.

3. He's useless at administration and apparently rather dimwitted.

Not only is Gregory worthless in the field, he never makes any sensible decisions about running Hilltop either! The people are poorly equipped, not trained for combat and are barely scraping by.

4. He constantly asserts his authority over Hilltop and grows angry every time he is reprimanded for his useless incompetence.

He shouts at Maggie, threatens her and in general threatens characters much tougher and more competent than he is with constant regularity. He does this merely because they bring up sensible solutions to problems that he couldn't think of himself.

5. He's even hinted to be an alcoholic.

As if all his other flaws weren't enough... 

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So given that Gregory is stupid, cowardly, deceitful, physically weak and not even good at book work, this leaves one glaring question: how is he still alive? And how is he running Hilltop?!

In an apocalypse I'd like to think I'd be a pretty good person where possible in terms of morality. And yet I can tell you right now, Gregory would be a person whose skull I would not hesitate to smash in with a crowbar the first time he provoked me. Or at least I'd forcibly exile from my group at minimum.

Seriously. In a life or death world filled with shambling horrors and murderous psychos a lily-livered good-for-nothing pompous arsehole like Gregory is a huge liability. He could easily get you or your friends/family killed or enslaved.

The first thing that would happen in reality is that someone in Hilltop who was tougher than Gregory (and there must be quite a few candidates, since they're out there killing zombies to survive rather that sitting safe behind Gregory's desk) would kill or imprison him once he started being such a dick. Then they'd take over and run things much better.

If Gregory screamed at me and raged at me like he did with Maggie, I'd kill him on the spot. She even has a gun to do so!

No one would miss him, no one would lament. People would probably throw a party.

And yet the characters just time and time again save him, treat him well, act kindly to him as he yet again betrays them and treats them like garbage.

The Preacher going out of his way to risk his own life to save him again makes practically no sense. Let the zombies eat him if he's so stupid he runs towards them! Why was Gregory even taken along on a combat mission anyway?

The impossibility of the character of Gregory in this apocalyptic scenario is a neat summary of how the show just seems to ignore logic in favour of writing poorly scripted and irritating characters. He's been in multiple seasons now - either have him redeem himself or die, but this tedious nonsense of watching him do the same routine indefinitely while other characters just let him off the hook all the time is starting to get stupid.