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The Walking Dead

Premiering on Halloween, AMC’s new original series, The Walking Dead, sets its tone very quickly in the first episode. Kentucky Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes approaches a little girl on an otherwise empty street. As he follows her among the many abandoned cars in the street, she slowly is alerted to his presence, and turns to face him … well, almost, since half of her face is missing. She is a zombie, and sets upon Grimes, forcing him to shoot her between the eyes. The audience sees this scene in full, nasty detail, and that is not the last of the zombie-killing head shots featured in the first episode. It won’t be the last difficult decision Grimes has to make to live another day.

An early flashback informs us that Grimes was shot in a shootout and slipped into a coma. He awakens an indeterminateDead amount of time later in the hospital, and finds that something horrible and bloody has happened since he was first admitted. A walk down a silent, dark corridor ends at a chained set of doors, warning “Don’t Open/Dead Inside” … yet, as he approaches, hands and moans begin emerging from between the doors. Grimes quickly stumbles out of the hospital, and out into a world that has hellishly changed since left it. With very little explanation as to how or why, he learned that most of the human race has succumbed to a mysterious fever, literally burning them out from the inside, and turning them into zombies.

The pilot episode sets up what will be the storyline of the show: upon retuning to his old house, Grimes is convinced that his wife and son survived the zombie apocalypse, and he is determined to find them. Another survivor and his son, holed up in Grimes’ former partner’s house, inform him that there is a refugee center in Atlanta, and the deputy sets off for Georgia.

AMC, home to such Emmy-draped shows as Mad Men and Breaking Bad, may seem like an odd home for a violently gory zombie show, but based on the first episode, The Walking Dead seems to share the pedigree of excellence of its forebears. Shot in 16mm, the show has a number of sweepingly cinematic scenes and set pieces, that the camera lingers on to create a realistically believable sense of a world gone to rot. Owing more to the unrelentingly bleak The Road than to the tongue-in-cheek Zombieland or the B-movie splatter of the Land of the Dead series, The Walking Dead takes place in an America of empty stores and buildings; abandoned cars; dead humans on the ground and undead human shambling in their place. The survivors are forced to band together, and make increasingly desperate choices to survive.

Series preview of The Walking Dead

Executive produced by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption; The Mist), the show deftly juxtaposes ghoulish images with quiet, human touches. The impressive effects render the walking dead in various states of decomposition, including the first zombie Grimes comes across after leaving the hospital – a crawling torso, missing its lower half and legs, but determinedly continuing on its path to nowhere. Yet elsewhere in the episode, we find survivor Morgan Jones (Lennie James) faced with an otherworldly decision: with the zombie of his dead wife in the site of his rifle, should he “put her down” and end her misery? He tearfully contemplates this for a long moment, and ultimately decides that he cannot, condemning her to roam the empty streets of their former neighborhood.

Painting a creepily realistic vision of a world gone dead, The Walking Dead is ultimately the story of humans, banding together to survive.

AMC’s Official The Walking Dead page

3 thoughts on “The Walking Dead

  1. Steve Pec November 3, 2010 at 10:28 am

    ahhh scary

  2. Ryan G. November 4, 2010 at 1:57 pm

    This was such a good show, just like the comic. 🙂

  3. rachel noto November 5, 2010 at 9:37 am

    this makes me laugh lol

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