Jesse Petersen is the author of MARRIED WITH ZOMBIES and the forthcoming FLIP THIS ZOMBIE. Like many of us here at Orbit HQ, she’s also a fan of The Walking Dead on AMC. She’ll be offering recaps of each week’s episode here every Monday (she’s a few days late this week because she just returned from ZOMBCON, which takes a bit out of a girl, what with all the zombie action.) It should go without saying that this post has a giant SPOILER ALERT!

For months I’ve been salivating for the start of “The Walking Dead”, the new series on AMC that is based on the fantastic graphic novels by Robert Kirkman. So when Orbit asked me if I’d like to recap and review each episode here on the blog, the question hadn’t even been completely asked when I answered, “Yes… Yes… Yes… YES!!!”  There shall be spoilers,  so be aware. And my grade at the end, along with my comments. And so I give you, “The Walking Dead”:

Episode 1: Days Gone Bye
Recap:

The scene opens in an intersection where Officer Rick Grimes is in a wasteland. It’s obvious that something horrible has happened. He looks beneath a car and sees bare feet. He realizes it’s a child and tries to help, but when she turns around she’s a flipping zombie.

Switch to Rick in a car, no zombies. He and his partner Shane Walsh are called to a car chase. From their conversation, it’s clear that Rick and his wife Lori are having issues. When they stop the “perps” (um, short for perpetrators, thank you very much), Rick is shot and badly hurt. Through bleary eyes in the hospital he sees Shane with flowers for him but when he speaks to him, his friend is gone, the flowers are dead and he’s in an abandoned hospital. Clearly time has passed and some majorly bad shit has gone down. WAY DOWN. Like dead down.

‘Cause see while Ricky was sleeping, there was a big ol’ zombie outbreak. Of course he doesn’t know that at first. All he knows is that there are dead bodies littering the halls, locks on the doors, sprawled paint that says “Beware: Dead Outside”, you know, your basic signs of the apocalypse. He manages to escape the hospital, get a bike (nice choice of transportation, Rick!), escape his first zombie and make it home.

Only to find his family (wife Lori and son Carl) are gone. Rick is lost, which is shown with real emotion through his breakdown at the house. He’s confused and lost and groggy and scared. Sometimes zombie fiction forgets those things, but this one shows it with a certain level of rawness. As he staggers outside he is clocked by a kid and theatened by the kid’s father (Morgan and Duane), but after he passes out they take him back inside and take care of him. This is how he finds out about the outbreak and the zombies.

From the fact that all his family pictures are gone from the house, Rick believes his family might still be alive. Morgan tells him that they may have gone to Atlanta where there was supposed to be a survivor center. He gives the family some guns for protection, a radio and then heads out to find the ones he lost.

What he doesn’t realize is that his wife and son, along with his former partner are all right outside of Atlanta, and they know that the city is a deadzone, filled with “walking dead” but they can’t get their radio working enough to warn people (including Rick). Oh yeah, and the thing is that Shane and Lori are totally hooking up. Nice.

Luckily, Rick learns this himself when he rides into town, literally on a horse and nearly gets himself completely killed by a HUGE shambling horde of zombies. I HATE it when that happens. He escapes (horse: not so much) by a combination of good weapon use and luck (hooray for hatches under tanks) and we end with him hearing a transmission from someone who can obviously see he ducked into the tank. Friend or foe? I guess we’ll see next week.

Things I Liked:

It was freaking awesome! Just like in 28 Days Later the main character wakes up into the middle of an apocalypse with zombies. It’s a great way to let the viewer into the heart of the story without doing too much exposition. We find stuff out as Rick finds stuff out. I did feel he sort of accepted the facts pretty easily, but I’m all for suspending a little disbelief. Plus, he did see zombies, so I think he might be in shock.

Emotionally it hit so many points. Sometimes in zombie movies the characters lose their humanity. They kill zombies without it bothering them (I totally go there in MARRIED WITH ZOMBIES). But here, Rick struggles. So does Morgan. He can’t kill his wife even though he knows he must. She’s a zombie, but he still sees her as he looks at her through the rifle. And when Rick apologizes to the legless zombie before he kills it, I admit it touched me.

Finally, the way the show is filmed is interesting. For a great portion there is no soundtrack. Both ZombieBoy and I pointed this out and how effective it was in both heightening the tension and making the situation more real.

Bottom Line Grade: A