The Walking Dead - S1E3, "Tell it to the Frogs". Human drama in a world of zombies. Cheesy post titles, too.

But seriously! I wrote that and then I was like, "Whoa. That sucks."

On to the Walking Dead? Good. We probably should be on our way by now anyway, seeing as it originally aired four nights ago already. Chill. I've been sick, okay?

The Walking Dead put out a really good episode this week. It was a great rebound from last week's mediocre "Guts", which I didn't even find interesting enough to write about. This episode was pretty cool because it focused, as I hoped the whole show would, on the human drama aspect of the zombie invasion. There were barely any zombies actually shown in this whole episode, but  it was still thrilling. It started with an absolutely heart-wrenching scene of Merrill Dixon, who we remember had been handcuffed to the roof of the department store last episode and seems to have become utterly mad and depraved since then, struggling to break free of his bondage as the zombies come closer to breaking through the chained door separating them from his flesh. We are then left to wonder what happened to him as we get back to our main group of survivors.

Rick has rescued the group, aside from Dixon, who had been living in the store, and they are ready to rejoin the main group of survivors, which, unbeknownst to Rick, includes his wife, Lori, and son, Carl, in the country. And how's that for a run-on sentence? So of course when Rick's gang comes back to the main outpost, there's a big teary reunion between Rick and Lori and Carl. Of course, lately, since Lori thought that Rick was dead, she's been sleeping with Shane, Rick's former partner and another survivor. So of course there's some awkwardness there, especially since Shane told Lori that Rick was dead. Now when we find out this little piece of information, I guess it's supposed to be a total bombshell, but I didn't find it that shocking or meaningful. I mean, wouldn't you expect him to be dead with everything that's been going on? The hospital he woke up in at the beginning of the first episode certainly seemed pretty ravaged. Lori's response to Shane's supposed deception actually seems pretty harsh to me. She obviously ends the sexual relationship, which I'd expect and would hope that she did. But she also tells him to entirely stay away from her and Carl, with whom he'd built up a good relationship. Again, this move is based on the fact that Shane supposedly lying to Lori about Rick's fate is so bad! But Shane is pretty torn up by this, and this is all part of the drama that will ensue at the camp later.

I should return to the main plot for a bit. Rick is feeling guilty about leaving Dixon in the city to die, and a not-too-warm greeting from Merrill's equally trashy brother Darryl doesn't help, so Rick gets some guys together to go back into the city and save Dixon, as well as Rick's bag of guns that he left behind. So they all go down there and find him gone, with only a hand left. This is definitely a big cliffhanger, and I'm eager to find out what happened to this guy, but it wasn't the most interesting part of the episode and I won't dwell on it much more.

At the camp, tensions are rising. Some of the women are upset about the division of labour, while they stand by the river doing laundry and the men are standing around doing nothing. Also, this one fellow named Ed seems to enjoy beating his wife. Shane is watching all this happen, and the great injustice of it all coupled with his indignation at his treatment by Lori makes his rash, and he leaps upon Ed and beats the living daylights out of him. I tend to think that Shane was justified in this, and Ed was a complete asshole, but it's clear that Shane went too far, and he might be a character to watch in terms of being on the edge.

So anyway, I stink at writing conclusions but this was a great episode. I hope the show continues in a direction that this episode took because, as high as the production value is for the zombies on this show, the lifestyle of the survivors is an interesting angle rarely looked at in the zombie genre.

"The Walking Dead" - S1E1 recap and review

Welcome to my new blog! Here is my first post, which is a review of the first episode of the new AMC show, "The Walking Dead":
My biggest problem with television, as opposed to movies, is the open-endedness of it all. The main point of the plot wouldn't realistically last forever, but the show keeps going. It doesn't make sense that it's taken the documentary crew seven years to make that documentary about Dunder-Mifflin, or that Leslie Knope has been giving all of her time in three whole years to build one park, and I see the same fate in new shows like "Boardwalk Empire", which has captivated me so far. The best shows are ones that have the kind of unfocused plotline that can keep moving indefinitely, such as "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia". But there might be no genre better for the television medium than the zombie.
When the zombie apocalypse finally occurs, it will not be a temporary situation. It will not be over in the time it takes to make a workplace documentary, or build a park, or set up an illegal alcohol distribution empire. When the zombies come, they will be here to stay.
When the zombies come, the lifestyle of the survivors will have to change, and it will never change back. This accentuation of the bleakness of LAZ (life after zombies) has never been focused on in zombie movies because movies have to end sometime. But the premier of "The Walking Dead" looked at these aspects of life like no zombie movie ever has. And it sure is bleak.
The show begins with the protagonist, Sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), walking through a huge assortment of abandoned cars up to an eerily empty gas station. It is there that he encounters the first zombie that we see in the show. It is a little girl, walking around in bunny slippers with a teddy bear, and Rick shoots her immediately. Right from this scene, I was struck by the quality of the zombie. The little girl is missing a cheek and has teeth hanging out, and her hair seems to be tangled in just the right way. Clearly this show isn't using any simple Halloween costumes.
After that introduction, we get into the main story. We start with Rick having a chat with his partner Shane (Jon Bernthal) about the differences between men and women. This ended up being the biggest chunk of dialogue in the whole episode, and I thought it was pretty well-written, and Shane's part was well-delivered by Bernthal. The cops are called away to stop a wild driver, who happens to be armed and willing to shoot at the police. They stop him, but Rick is shot and enters a coma.
Now here is where the timeline becomes ambiguous, because Rick wakes up in the hospital some unknown time later, and the environment he finds himself in is the classic zombie movie setting. We have the flickering lights, the frenzied messages written in blood on a wall, and stacks of bodybags overflowing everywhere. But one of my favorite parts of the show is how this scene was set up. Rick isn't like the survivors in other zombie stories. He doesn't get the chance to watch the civilized world's downfall and adapt to the new wild. Rick is thrown into this new world just like we, the viewers, all are. His confusion is palpable and relatable, and at the end of the episode we still don't know how all this destruction happened.
Not long after leaving the hospital, Rick, while searching for his missing wife and son, finds other survivors: Morgan (Lennie Jones), and his son Duane. They explain that there was a virus or fever of some sort that killed all of the people that got it, but they wouldn't stay dead for long, soon coming back alive as "walkings". Morgan and young Duane have had to suffer through this apocalypse the hard way, even suffering the death and subsequent return of Duane's mother. They tell Rick of a survivors' safe place in Atlanta, and Rick tries to get there.
On his way there, Rick sends out a radio message alerting any survivors to where he was, and that signal was picked up by who else but Shane, who is with Rick's wife and son. However, they don't recognize his voice, and are also unable to respond to his message. But they do give some ominous commentary, saying that the city is more dominated by the zombies than we or Rick would imagine.
This premonition turns out to be correct, as Rick finds a horde of zombies waiting for him in Atlanta. He comes close to death, but finds an opening in a tank and climbs in there for safety. While he was running from the zombies, Rick sees a helicopter flying above the city, and once he is in the tank, the radio blurts "Cozy in there?", presumably from the same person. That quip is the end of the episode, and the major cliffhanger of the show so far.
Make no bones about it, this show is bleak. Really, really bleak. But it was exciting too, unlike the uber-bleak, incredibly boring and radically overrated 2010 movie "Winter's Bone". I love the way the story was set up, with the time lapse. The zombies also looked fantastic, and if this show doesn't win the Emmy for best makeup it would be criminal (check out this lovely legless lady! http://screencrave.frsucrave.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/girl-zombie-The-Walking-Dead-AMC-la-10-25-10.jpg). I'm still undecided about Andrew Lincoln as the lead. He didn't really show too much in the premier, but then again there wasn't that much for him to do. I'm also glad that the show hasn't gotten too crazy yet. The creators of the show said before it started that they would not be afraid to make major moves such as killing off characters, and I definitely appreciate the bold ambition of that, but I'm glad they left the first episode to just setting up the environment.
Because if this show lasts, it's the detail of the environment that will set it apart from the rest of the zombie canon to this point.