With all the events making national and international news right now, let’s discuss something really important: the exceptionally enjoyable zombie apocalypse series Z Nation which airs on Friday nights on the Syfy channel and subsequently on demand.

“I give you mercy” is Z Nation’s signature catchphrase when one of the principals puts an about-to-turn victim out of his or her misery. In this context, mercy has also become a verb.

Now in Season 5, the quirky and campy series which some have described as a horror comedy is a far more entertaining flesh-eater opus than The Walking Dead. The latter, now in its 9th season on AMC, could be a dead show walking as its viewership continues to drastically decay.

Former fans apparently don’t even want to hate-watch the show anymore. According to Deadline Hollywood, “the future is increasingly bleak” for TWD as a result of the ratings hitting all-time lows since its October debut.

The action-packed and lower budget Z Nation is simply a lot more fun to watch than TWD, given the latter’s mostly dour characters with their repetitive, tedious moralizing about zombie apocalypse ethics, a narrative that treads water for episodes in succession, inexplicable and absurd plot developments, and self-righteous characters who ping-pong from pacifism to stone-cold killers and then back to pacifism. Then there is the disproportionate face-time for a peripheral character who you know won’t be alive at the end of the episode.

Despite ongoing hand-to-hand combat with zombies, it was only in TWD Season 8, moreover,that the show revealed that a survivor might get sick from being covered in zombie blood or guts.

The departure of stars Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan (who play Rick Grimes and Maggie Rhee, respectively) isn’t helping matters any. It also calls into serious question why the showrunners decided to kill off Carl, Rick Grimes’ TV son (Chandler Riggs) who was poised to become the next-generation leader of the survivors. [AMC subsequently announced that it was planning several original Rick Grimes-focused movies for the TWD universe.]

With that in mind, TWD has received criticism online for too much chat and not enough splat.

Filmed in Washington state, the “cheesy” Z Nation has featured the following that you will never see on Georgia-based The Walking Dead: a giant zombie-killing cheese wheel, zombies on Viagra, zombie pole dancers, the iconic Liberty Bell in Philadelphia pulverizing zombies, a communicative zombie named “grandpa,” Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin as an autograph-signing zombie, a struggle with a drug cartel which trafficked in “Z weed,” and the birth of a zombie-human hybrid zombaby, who aged after a very rapid, apocalyptic growth spurt, and who was played by several different actresses.

Is Z Nation‘s tone getting too serious?

In its first two seasons, Z Nation featured many stand-alone episodes with a Max Mad Max road trip vibe as a group of survivors attempted to bring Murphy (or “the Murphy”), a zombie bite survivor and reluctant savior, to a government lab where researchers could develop a vaccine from his blood. In fact, the last episode of Season 2 could have been the series finale (and maybe that was the original plan if the series wasn’t a hit) when Murphy was transported to the medically equipped submarine, which subsequently led to the Zona subplot.

Seasons 3 and 4 of Z Nation seemed to depart from its irreverent and cheesy roots and got too serious and dark with zombie whisperer Murphy (Keith Allan) orchestrating his human/zombie hybrid disciples, the Zona sequence, and then the protracted Black Rain hallucination suffered by team leader Lt. Roberta Warren (Kellita Smith).

While it’s a big improvement that the main group (with the exception, so far, of Addy, played by Anastasia Baranova) has been reunited in Season 5, among other things, Z Nation never fully explained how about half the cast survived the literal cliffhanger of jumping off a cliff in the Season 3 finale.

The whereabouts of the Season 3 Mr. Clean-looking villain The Man has never been revealed. Moreover, the kidnapping of some of the survivors in Season 4 was explained, if you call it that, in a very off-handed, unsatisfactory manner early in Season 5.

Fortunately, fan favorite Doc, the 60’s hippie with the one-liners expertly performed by Russell Hodgkinson, is still on the show, as is 10K (Nat Zang).

Too much junk in the trunk?

The addition of Mario Van Peebles (Cooper) to the cast was an upgrade in Season 5, but apparently it was just a two-episode gig.

Life lesson: Notice how Warren’s demeanor went from love to hate in a matter of seconds when she found out that Cooper had locked Murphy in the car trunk. And was it an overreaction to leave Cooper, who after all nursed her back to health, in said trunk which was shortly surrounded by zombies?

Viewers may have noticed that Season 5 has also borrowed two beats from The Walking Dead: Zombies locked up in a barn as a humanitarian measure instead of mercying them, and a main character whose hand is chopped off (which occurred in the TWD comic rather than the TV show).

Last Friday night, Z Nation also unexpectedly lost a member of the core group in a zombie attack that could have been avoided, TWD-style.

Season 5 introduced a new concept, zombies known as Talkers transformed by exposure to Black Rain with the ability to function alongside humans peacefully as long as they have access to the calming influence of brain-matter-containing biscuits.

It has yet to revealed where the biscuits come from or who makes them, but it is already evident that chaos is around the corner with a biscuit shortage.

Although the show portrays those humans expressing distrust with the Talkers as villains, don’t the dissenters have a point in terms of the danger posed to the community by a biscuit deficit?

A talker known as Pandora who wears a Richard Harrow from Boardwalk Empire mask appears to be new villain. She may have masterminded the explosion right before the election results were to be announced after humans and talkers voted on a Newmerica constitution.

Z Nation also telegraphed that the Altura beta male administrator with the Zona bar code was not what he seemed.

Ironically, Lydia Hearst (from the Hearst family), who plays Pandora, is married to Chris Hardwick, the host of The Walking Dead after show Talking Dead. And the Newmerica leader, Georgia “George” St. Clair, is played by TWD alum Katy O’Brian.

Are the zombie fighters becoming social justice warriors?

Hopefully the Z Nation showrunners aren’t subliminally engaging in a form of of lame PC political allegory with the humans vs. talkers plot thread as alluded to above.

Memo to showrunners: Just focus on the gore, guts, and the guffaws so that the audience can escape the concerns of everyday life — including politics and “discrimination,” and so on. As movie mogul Sam Goldwyn once said, ““If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

With any luck,  Z Nation can thus avoid  going in the SJW direction and return to its original vibe. Otherwise, could mercy be in its future? In the meantime, it appears that The Walking Dead faces the danger of cancellation.

That said, It’s interesting to note the Z Nation recognized the possibility of voter fraud in the apocalypse. Each person voting in the constitutional referendum was required to dip their finger in ink after casting a ballot similar to what was obligatory in real-life Iraq and Afghanistan.