Vince Gilligan has openly stated that they’re trying their damnedest to subvert almost every zombie apocalypse trope. The people within the Joining are all happy and explicitly have all their faculties and want to be a part of it (if only because the psychic glue commands them to). They’re eating people because corpses are just a shitload of calories to allow to go to waste when your behavioral imperatives prevent harvesting food. Carol’s slow downward spiral in episode 7 does a pretty good job getting across that just as the tagline says she is the most miserable person on Earth, and the least popular by far. There’s essentially only 14 other people on the planet now, and the one with 7.7 billion bodies has been avoiding her while another 11 shun her and the last one seems to be a bit unhinged and is absolutely shaping up to be some sort of villain.
I don’t know why people say this isn’t going anywhere. It’s a heavily character-focused story, much like everything else Gilligan’s made. The guy is good at doing slow burns. He’s proven it. I have enough patience and trust in the story to want to see where it’s going. Every revelation about the hive mind so far has been substantial and painted a deeper picture of the world. Christ’s sake I have severe ADHD and I feel like so many people have media takes stemming from a miniscule attention span. Maybe it also helps that I spent years nitpicking absolutely every piece of media and ruining it for myself and now try to find the unique parts that shine through all the noise. I love this show so far. It’s fucking hilarious. It’s an intriguing premise. And I actually like watching Carol be miserable and slowly realizing she’s doing it to herself by being a raging bitch and refusing to see any other perspectives at all. And it makes it very easy to get into her headspace. She sees that the world has essentially ended and nobody else is concerned. Nobody else seems to understand it, as far as she can tell, but maybe it’s because her only real human connection died in the Joining and she’s extremely alienated by the Hive using her dead wife’s memories to try and butter her up while she’s still in absolute shock from both the Joining and her sudden loss and grief and total absence of anyone to share it with. Everyone else has family members who are still alive and are now suddenly nicer, smarter, and more capable than they’ve ever been. Diabate comes across as a man who probably had absolutely nothing before and now feels like he gets to play in Creative Mode.
I think what the show is about is just how these 13 individuals are dealing with an irreversible apocalypse. I don’t think it’s a certainty that Carol will reverse the Joining; this could be a Childhood’s End situation. I want to see where it goes.
I just want to point out that Ukraine was very obviously losing badly from the very beginning to the point they had to make up outright lies to obfuscate that (the Ghost of Kyiv!)