The Walking Dead - "What Lies Ahead"

Season 2, Episode 1

More zombies than you can shake a stick at! (And not much else.)

“I want to hold off the ‘needs of the many, needs of the few’

argument for as long as I can.”

-Dale

“I just need a sign. Any sign will do.”

-Rick

Let’s just get this out of the way: I didn’t think that The Walking Dead’s first season was all that good. Sure, like most I was blown away by the pilot, but none of the episodes thereafter were able to turn out the same amount of suspense. Similarly, and perhaps not incidentally, these episodes saw a rise in character study, as the focus shifted from the zombie apocalypse to a group of people who are trying to survive. In terms of television, this makes sense. Not only does the audience need to care about these characters for their deaths to mean anything, but shows have to deliver a lot more story than a 90-minute to two hour movie does, and just showing wave after wave of zombies every episode can get old (and expensive) real quick.

Unfortunately, none of the characters were really all that well-defined, and none of the stories told about them were all that original. There were some good moments sprinkled throughout those first six episodes, but there weren’t enough of them and none of it made for really gripping television. Because let’s be honest – the show’s hook is zombies, and zombies are going to be the reason that people tune into the show, and that probably doesn’t motivate the show to try all that much harder. Regardless of the quality of the source material (I haven’t read it), I’ve always felt that TWD as a show is more heavily influenced by zombie movies than the comic book it shares a name with, and those kinds of movies aren’t always big on characterization or plot.

So perhaps it’s for the best that “What Lies Ahead” started with a zombie attack and mostly dealt with the aftermath of said attack for the rest of the hour. While I should be irked that the producers decided to open the second season with the showiest element, as if saying to the audience “We both know why you’re really here”, but I must admit that it is what the show does best. And yet as exciting and tense as those first twenty minutes were, TWD can’t be zombie attacks and/or hunts all the time; it will get old fast, and we’ll see more of that ridiculous circular plotting that kept the group stuck in the camp (and for some reason, returning to the city from which they escaped) last season.

Which is where I suppose all that other stuff comes in. I’ll admit, I don’t remember a whole lot from last season – when a show only airs for six weeks out of year, it tends not to make the biggest impression, and I wonder if this can’t be a good thing for the show. While the time with the CDC felt a bit too large of a reveal last year, like the show was trying to introduce mythology elements that were out of our heroes’ capacity to deal with, there does need to be some sort of ongoing plots or themes for the show to tackle. Given the audience numbers, this show will more than likely go on for years (probably past the point when most of us want it to end) and at some point the show’s going to need to find a believable arc to latch onto.

So instead, what I would like to see the show focus on was the kind of stuff that was prominent in tonight’s episode following the zombie attack. While ideas like Andrea’s possible suicidal streak, Shane’s plan to leave the rest of the group, Carol’s blame of Rick for losing Sophia, and various characters’ turn toward religion are fairly standard zombie-genre fare, it at least provides a way forward for the characters. What’s more, a lot of this, especially the group rallying around to find Sophia and then breaking apart for various reasons, has that “building a new society” vibe that much better shows have gotten good mileage out of (like Deadwood, for instance). Whether TWD has the artistic chops to pull this angle off remains to be seem, but given how much the show supposedly wants us to care about the survivors, this would be a good backdrop on which the characters could be given better shading and nuance.

What I don’t want to see are the more soapy elements of the show, which for now consist of Shane and Lori snapping at each other over their now-dead-but-soon-to-be-revived-probably affair. There’s not much to say about this other than it’s the kind of small-scale complaint that doesn’t really fit the far more epic problem of zombies, so the show should probably just cut the melodramatics right now.

But really, if we’re being totally honest, what I’m really interested in going forward is how the show changes with the show runners. As you’ve no doubt heard already, Frank Darabont was fired and/or quit a few months back when the show was roughly halfway through production, and because of that, the second season is going to split into two parts. The first seven episodes will air in the fall, and the back six will be broadcast in the spring. I can’t be sure how much of the story was mapped out before Darabont left and/or what Glen Mazzarra, the new show runner, changed in his absence. Even if season two can be turning point for the show, I doubt that’s really going to happen until Darabont’s fingerprints are wiped away, and that process might not even be complete until next season (because you don’t need a crystal ball to tell you there will be one).

But tonight’s episode ended on a positive note, at least in the narrative sense, with Carl getting shot and Sophia still missing, which gives the first part of the seasons an shorter arc to follow through while it hopefully sets up some of the larger stuff it can play around with. Again, it’s not high minded, and “children in peril” is a really easy way for a show to hook an audience, but it’s also a hook that works more often than not. Nobody has grand expectations for The Walking Dead; we don’t expect the deep themes of Mad Men or the brilliantly nuanced characters of Breaking Bad. It’s a zombie show, and it should figure out how to make those simpler elements work like gangbusters week in and week out before it can try doing anything deeper than that.

Next Week: Won’t somebody think of the children?

Other Thoughts:

Even though this was a supposedly 90-minute premiere, I counted a lot of commercial breaks, at least more than AMC forces on shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, which leads me to think that this cut of the episode wasn’t all that much longer than a standard episode to begin with. (I recognize that the show went the first 20-odd minutes without a commercial break, but so does Breaking Bad.) I’m trying not avoid being cynical about this, but considering that this is AMC’s BIGGEST HIT EVER and the budget cuts that took place for this season, I wouldn’t be surprised if AMC tries to cram in as many commercials as possible. (On that note: We get it. We’re in the middle of Fear Fest. You don’t have to announce it every commercial break.)

So apparently the group (and/or the show) just forgot about that whole “don’t get zombie blood in your eyes” rule? Because even if Rick and Darryl used gloves to dissect that zombie (which was just unnecessarily gross), we also saw Andrea and Daryl take down zombies at close range with a screwdriver and arrow, respectively, and the blood was really flying when Rick and Shane put the beat down on those zombies in the church. If the show wants to forget this rule, that fine, because it never made that much sense to me, but I fear this is just the first step of many in poor continuity and storytelling.

Lori’s hesitation to salvage stuff from the dead was kind of interesting, especially considering that that’s probably a recurring problem in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Too bad the show probably won’t do much with it.

So apparently Rick was leaving Morgan a message over the walkie, which was really just a way to sum up what happened last season. But if Lennie James doesn’t end up coming back, does it really matter?

So about Andrea possibly being suicidial: I get that she’s sad over the loss of her sister, and that she tried to stay behind when the CDC got blown up, but does that make her suicidal? There’s a quite a big leap between taking an opportunity to die and actively killing yourself, and I’m not really sure if the show has earned going there with her character. Frankly it just feels a bit stupid.

What do you call a pack of zombies? Cause “herd” just doesn’t cut it for me.