THE WALKING DEAD Episode 1.2

"Guts"

Sundays 10pm AMC

"If bad ideas were an Olympic event this would take the gold"

If the first episode of The Walking Dead felt like a movie, the second episode definitely felt like a TV show. The production values are still high, but the direction, writing and acting have noticeably downshifted. This was to be expected, and it's certainly not a dealbreaker, but I expect more from this show and I hope it wastes no time in realizing it's full potential.

This episode picks up where the last one left off, with Rick being guided to safety from his hiding place in the tank by a group of survivors who have become trapped in a department store in Atlanta. Their escape from the department store makes up the bulk of the episode and lays bare many of the things that are very wrong and very right with this show so far.

Let's start off positive. I mentioned in the last review that one of the things Frank Darabont does best is scenes of people sitting around talking about what they're going to do. Even thought he didn't direct this episode, that aspect is still present throughout as the survivors meticulously hash out their plans for escaping the the department store. Rick actually ends up taking a back seat for the planning in favor of Glenn, a favorite character of mine from the comics, who makes his first appearence in this episode and is played with the perfect mix of humor and terrified exasperation by Steven Yuen. All of the plotting and action in this episode is a team effort by the characters and rings pleasantly true to a real life situation, rather than a movie plot where the protangonist would take charge and overshadow the other characters. In fact, this entire episode is devoted to "the clever escape", a fairly common sequence in zombie films (I just made up the name for it right now), in which the characters must go to extraordinary and unthinkable lengths to evade the undead. This scene would be about ten minutes of any zombie movie, so it was nice to see it stretched out to a full episode here.

This episode also does an excellent job of reworking scenes from the comic book into a more cinematic context. In the comic, Glenn and Rick utilize the zombie guts to mask their stench as they retrieve some guns and escape the city on foot. This fairly ghastly method is repurposed here into a episode-long escape sequence, incorporating everything from the slow-burn tension of them sneaking about amongst the zombies to a foot and car chase that was extremely well executed. This episode is also a great showcase for the zombies themselves. Given the recent resurgence in the genre, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some actors out there who make their living almost exclusively playing zombies. The people they got for this show are great, giving the zombies unique movement and expression and wringing plenty of terror from the whole slow/fast dyanamic they seem to be developing. Great stuff.

Other things are not so good. Of the half dozen characters that Rick encounters in this episode, only two are from the comics; the aforementioned Glenn, and Andrea (played by Laurie Holden, Darabont's leading lady from The Mist). Although Andrea is almost twenty years older than her comic book incarnation, her quiet moments with Rick in this episode and generally solid work from Holden have me convinced that they're going to do right by one of my favorite characters.

The other four characters? Ehhh. They pretty much scream redshirts. Morales and Jacqui are extremely flat and basically just mouthpieces for exposition. T-Dog is given a bit of pathos, but the actor is just as bland and Jesus Christ, T-Dog is a stupid name. The biggest disappointment, however, is Michael Rooker as Merle Dixon. Rooker is a solid character actor who is usually at his best when playing scummy bastards (Mallrats and Slither spring to mind as prime examples). So including him as a violent redneck seems like an obvious choice. Unfortunately, Merle is not so much a character but a caricature, a completely overblown stereotype of racist, crude hillbillies. The character is charmless with no redeeming qualities and it stretches the limits of credulity to not have the other characters just put one in his brain and be done with him. The character seems like a lazy way to shoehorn in tension amongst the survivors, which isn't particularly necessary given how much shit they're in to begin with.

Meanwhile, a scratchy radio conversation lets the people at the camp know that the other survivors are trapped and Shane makes the decision not to go after them. The scenes at the camp are being parceled out pretty slowly, which is a bit frustrating given that they include most of the characters I know from the book. Hopefully that will change next week. Props to the opening scene though which, despite having a pretty contrived set-up, made for the creepiest non-zombie-related shot of the show so far, with Lori and Shane having sex out of focus with Lori's wedding ring in the foreground.

So yeah. Not as good as the first episode, but not a sophomore slump. Tune it next week, when shit will hit the emotional fan.

Stray observations:

- Andrew Lincoln continues to kick ass as Rick, but I did notice his accent slip during his confrontation with Merle. Going from British to Southern is probably tough.

- The sequence where Rick memorializes the zombie they're about to chop up was...oddly timed but still kind of touching. Glenn throwing up was also hilarious.

- Rick grabs a grenade while he's inside the tank, but it's never brought up again. That doesn't happen in the comic so I'm very interested to see how that pays off.