Other than in the poisonously boring, execrable episodes that made up sizable portions of The Walking Dead‘s second and third seasons, when things seem relatively normal on this show, they don’t stay that way for long. So when we saw that the prison environment had become a peaceful routine in the first half of last week’s premiere, it was a lull into a sense of security that had to be patently false. And while the threats we saw materialize in the second half were dealt with swiftly – the walker attack in the supermarket, the crazed woman Clara who tried to feed Rick to her undead husband – they were reminders of the chaos that reigns in this world. The center cannot hold.
So, this week’s threat – PLAGUE! The poor boy Patrick was its patient zero, and after less than three minutes, he’s made his way into a habitated block of the prison and snacked on the neck and guts of a sleeping resident. (Like really tore into the dude. Naaaaasty.) Soon enough, word is out, and Daryl, Glenn, Carol and Sasha take care of the new walkers in short order, but not before they kill several of the cellblock’s residents.
While a traditional disease raging amid an active zombie plague might seem redundant, it actually adrenalizes the threat. It makes it more palpable than it’s been in ages, raising the stakes by positing that about a half-dozen of the main characters are directly exposed – Rick, Daryl, Carol, Sasha, Hershel and Glenn.
In the middle of all this, the character stuff is better than it’s been in a while. The conversations are starting to approach actual conversations, not monotonous debates and bland quasi-moralizing. The romantic stuff between Glenn and Maggie is handled as realistically as it could be in this context. Carol is becoming one of the show’s most interesting people, a mouse who has grown into a lioness. The scene between her and the little girls who are forced to watch the mercy killing of their infected father is brutal, and it treats the moment with respect and pathos – it has none of the gore glorification that is so often a crutch of The Walking Dead. Michonne is given her most human moment to date, suddenly bursting into tears while holding Rick’s baby daughter Judith. Hopefully, this indicates that there’s more to her storyline than the glowering katana-wielder she was in most of season 3, who’s super-cool to fanboys but kinda cardboard in most other ways.
Carl remains one of the show’s weakest points. He’s undoubtedly turning into either a posturing faux-hardass or a genuine sociopath, and he just sounds ridiculous all of the time. But Andrew Lincoln, who originally excelled as the show’s center and quickly became bogged down in the plot’s more asinine machinations, plays well off him. If nothing else, I buy their interactions as a father and son in this environment. Rick is slowly returning to normalcy – he’s neither “the Ricktator” of season 3 nor the passive, indecisive waffler he was in season 2.
Tyreese, who’s interesting by default because he used to be on The Wire, also gets a decent chunk of screen time. In the cold open, he’s given a sweet moment with his girl Karen, and because this is the show that it is, it’s bound to be spoiled. Karen shows signs of the new plague in the middle of the episode, and is discovered dead just outside the prison not long after.
Which brings us to the other threat within the prison, aside from the plague and Beth’s inferior performances of awesome Tom Waits songs. (She actually has a pretty singing voice, but I mean, this show has all of the money. It can afford to give us the real shit on the soundtrack!) ANYWAY, someone in or around the prison is clearly sabotaging it from the inside, leaving rats to lure walkers, killing people (like Karen) and dragging their bodies out to put them on display. I don’t know what would make me more mad – if it turned out to be one of the main characters gone crazy or if this is somehow The Governor’s doing, because he is still out there somewhere. I suppose it’s all about the execution, but I don’t relish the inevitable return of The Governor, who was one of the worst things about season 3, and a surprise twist with a character we like – or a random person – turning out to be bad would probably be cheesy.
As was true of last week’s premiere set-piece in the supermarket, the action sequences in “Infected” are on point, both the walker attack in D Block and the herd’s rush on the fence. The former is quick but has the mad-rush intensity of a riot. The latter affords Rick an opportunity to be the pragmatic thinker he once was, using the pigs he’s raising (which were the infection’s likely vector) as zombie bait and buying time for Sasha and Glenn to reinforce the fence’s weak spots. Hopefully, him finally strapping his gun back on will allow him to be a man of action again without forgetting the lessons he seems to have learned in the time he spent calming down.
I know that The Walking Dead will, most likely, never be the horror masterpiece I thought it was capable of becoming when I saw the first season back in 2010. I don’t throw that word around lightly. Those six episodes weren’t flawless, but that pilot and the CDC storyline were truly chilling and also entertaining, as was “Clear,” the season 3 episode that I won’t shut up about, because Jesus it’s fucking great. My point being, the ball-dropping that’s been done on this show behind the scenes is fucking epic. Frank Darabont fucked up the first chunk of season 2 when AMC nickel-and-dimed him on the budget and forced him to limit the action to the stultifying farm, and he didn’t do well in that setting as a creator. Glen Mazzara, a consummate TV pro and veteran of The Shield, similarly botched the back half of season 3. The rumor mill has whispered that AMC and comic creator Robert Kirkman hamstrung him from being creative on his own and he pretty much ruined the show as revenge.
At the same time, what novice showrunner (and writer of “Clear, “This Sorrowful Life” and “18 Miles Out,” all great to good episodes) Scott M. Gimple has already done in these first two episodes is extremely promising. While he hasn’t yet nailed the characters – who are, minus notable exceptions like Daryl, all essentially archetypes in one way or another anyway – he’s granting them more humanity than any of his predecessors. He also imbues the show’s post-apocalyptic setting with a sense of real, emotionally affecting darkness without leaning too heavily on dime-store nihilistic tropes.
So we’ll see where it goes next week. In the meantime, break out the Purel and get them hands sanitized, because diseases be spreading, yo.