The Walking Dead does something it rarely does to begin its fourth season – it keeps quiet and free of violence. Rick, shoveling, ostensibly farming, deep into the domestic life that the prison – divorced from the threat of the Governor now – can enjoy. He unearths a .45 pistol, one that seems to have been buried for long. An old country tune plays on the soundtrack – Rick is using headphones to keep out the sounds of the hissing, ravenous walkers outside the walls. Something about him seems less haunted, but more weary, and he quickly tosses the dirt-encrusted handgun away. It’s arresting in a fashion that seems uncommon to this show, suggestive of some artistic growth.
Such growth would be desirable, to say the least.. The last season of The Walking Dead went like this: five decent-to-good episodes, three meh-to-OK ones, one awful one (mid-season premiere “The Suicide King”), three more meh installments, one bottle-episode masterpiece (“Clear,” which I’ve written on at length), two more meh, one decent and then a fucking mess (the finale, “Welcome to the Tombs” – how you gonna waste that awesome title on such a piece of shit?). The only characters to be developed were the ones who were already interesting in some way. (MOSTLY DARYL, BECA– USE HE’S ONE BAAAAAD DUDE, Hershel, who went from an annoyance to a valued adviser, and Carol, once a battered woman, now a powerhouse.) Rick proved that he was not fit to be an autocratic leader. The Governor shapeshifted from an intriguingly dark character to an idiotically scenery-chewing fuckwit within 9 episodes of a 16-episode season. The clash between these two characters and their camps – the prison occupants vs. Woodbury – never really manifested itself the way it should’ve to engender proper dramatic conflict. The Woodbury citizens who weren’t arbitrarily slaughtered by the Governor came to cower at the prison.
Life seems to have fallen into a peaceful la-la-land in Chez Prison. Animals and produce are successfully being farmed. The prison’s O.G. occupants – Rick, Daryl, Hershel, Maggie, Glenn, Carol, etc. – are being treated as royalty by the dozens of Woodbury refugees that they welcomed in last season, browbeaten whitebread folk used to the dictatorial thumb of the Governor. (The kid Patrick asking to shake Daryl’s hand as gratitude for killing a big deer, and getting our main dude’s chicken-grease-covered-fingers in response? LOL. God, he’s the best thing about this show.)
Little seems to have changed for the characters. The ones we mostly like – Daryl, Carol, Tyreese, Glen and Maggie, Hershel – remain interesting and at times fascinating. Rick? Michonne? Carl? Well…not so much.
The main development with Rick is that he seems averse to carrying a gun and is no longer “leading” the prison survivors. Instead, a council made up of Darryl, Hershel, Sasha, and a few others who’ve proven to be level-headed is in charge, which makes more sense than the Ricktatorship of last year, at least. Carl is still kind of a little shit – his attitude might be understandable (dead mom, being a typical moody adolescent in the middle of a zombie fucking apocalypse) but it doesn’t make it any less annoying to watch. Michonne is perfectly fine to watch when killing zombies, a major badass, but so infrequently is she anything more.
A few new faces have come along. Larry Gilliard, best known as D’Angelo Barksdale on The Wire, plays Bob, a loner who wandered into the prison, seems above board, wants to contribute to the group’s efforts. He also seems to have a past as an alcoholic, which will probably become conflict later on. Given Gilliard’s talents, hopefully new showrunner Scott M. Gimple will give him some interesting shit to do. Other new characters seemed barely there as of now, aside from the dorky kid/Daryl superfan Patrick. (We’ll get back to him in a minute.)
Let’s talk about Gimple for a second. He’s only written five Walking Dead episodes counting this premiere, and only one of them has been meh (season three’s “Hounded”). The rest have been good, decent and even great – namely “Clear,” one of the best TV episodes of the past few years. “30 Days Without an Accident” wasn’t bad – it was much more solid than I expected. Gimple will have to work hard to undo the damage done by former showrunner Glen Mazzara, AMC’s executives and Walking Dead comic book creator Robert Kirkman – who, like most comic nerds who find themselves with Hollywood success, is simultaneously dedicated to fan service and ego-stroking. But the work he’s done in this episode and past installments is indicative of a vision for this undead-ridden world that can truly disturb and fascinate, rather than simply gross us out.
Two key sequences in this episode are promising and point to something more in line with the quality of this show’s initial six-episode run. The first is something it has done before – an action-horror sequence in an enclosed space, with tons of ill zombie kills (Daryl’s cranium-squashing boot and Michonne’s nimble sword-dicing are the best). What’s different is the execution and scope. Daryl, Glen, Maggie, Michonne, Sasha, Tyreese, Bob and some red shirt dude run through a supermarket on a supply run, not knowing that a crashed helicopter, countless corpses and two dozen walkers are on the roof, soaking through it with their blood. The zombies begin falling through, making for good jump-scares and providing immense tension for the scene – eventually that copter’s coming down as well. It also sets up some interesting character moments – Bob attracts walker attention by dropping wine bottles after barely resisting the temptation to stuff them in his pack, Glen and Maggie debate (briefly, realistically – no long-winded bullshit in the show’s usual mode) the possibility of having children in a world where near-death situations like that happen every day.
The second is something a bit different. Rick, out on some task or another, finds a woman named Clara in the forest who looks worse off and more pale than the average zombie. The things she alludes to having done to survive – eating rotten fruits and leaves, dead animals, probably robbing/killing passersby – made me scoff at the prison residents for their lives of relative ease. She asks for Rick’s help, telling her she has a camp with her husband but they’re out of food. Rick agrees to bring them to the prison if he can meet the man in person first. Along the way, Clara tells a loopy story about being waylaid in Georgia on a connecting flight to Puerto Vallarta. (Given her Irish accent, this might well be true, but that’s not the point – she’s so clearly damaged there’s no way to tell.) At the encampment, Rick discovers the sordid truth that we might’ve guessed – her husband is long dead and she was so desperate for food she was willing to kill and eat Rick. She’s on him like a wraith in seconds but isn’t built to fight, and Rick is. After overpowering her, he tries, briefly, to convince her to come with him. It’s in vain, as she clearly has little real desire to live. Clara stabs herself, and Rick stumbles out of the woods, back to the prison.
What haunted me in a way this show hasn’t in some time was the stark contrast between Rick’s hard attitude and Clara’s madness and hopelessness. When she asks him if he thinks that survivors like him and her can get past the things to do to survive, his reply is boilerplate – a blase delivery of “I hope so.” When Clara admits her truth, after stabbing herself – “You don’t ever get past it” – he remembers, as he should, that there’s always something more you can lose – humanity. Being alive is a step up from being a walker, but it’s not life if you take it for granted.
The episode ends with Patrick, sick with a fever-like affliction. Stumbling into the prison showers, he crumples and dies, blood pouring from various orifices, and the final shot shows his dead eyes opening again as he turns into a walker. Things do not bode well for the next episode.
The Walking Dead is at a crucial point in its run. It could either stick to its core action-horror strengths and resign to being nothing more, or finally evolve into the artful, intelligent apocalyptic nightmare that its first season suggested it could be. Only the next several weeks will tell.
Liam Green can be reached at lgreen@thoughtpollution.com or on Twitter (@liamchgreen).