A Review of "The Walking Dead" (season 1)

Bonjour. Welcome back to my funhouse of pain. Or painhouse of fun. One of the two, anyway.

Today, I'm going to take a look at the first season of the hit AMC TV show The Walking Dead. Now this is a show that's been on the air since I was a senior in high school, aka "what feels like a long time ago, but really wasn't". It debuted Halloween of 2010 with a short, six-episode first season that was pretty much stellar, and I'm here to take you through each episode briefly and provide feedback, plus a whole season review, plus my own two cents...as usual.

The Walking Dead is based off of a popular comic book series that debuted all the way back in 2003. It follows Rick Grimes as he suffers a near-fatal gunshot wound, falls into a coma, only to wake up in a post-apocalyptic world surrounded by zombies. His family's missing and so begins the quest to find them and reunite. Both the show and the comic start off with basically the same premise, only they both take it in different, similar-feeling directions. I can remember hearing about the premiere episode from my peers and hearing nothing but insanely good things, so I did the only logical thing I could think of...I ignored the show and waited until it was about three seasons in to start watching it for myself. Smart, right? Anywho, let's dive in.

Episode 1: "Days Gone By". Rick Grimes, our protagonist, finds a random zombie girl whilst searching for gasoline. She chases him, but he kills her. Interesting enough to keep me entertained. Come back from opening, we see Rick and his buddy Shane Walsh chase two guys down on the highway and corner them with guns. A man springs out of the car and shoots Rick while he's not looking, sending Rick into an injury-induced coma. Rick awakens and finds that the world is radically different, and that everyone's a flesh-eating monster with rotting flesh, bad dental hygiene, smelly clothes and ugly faces. Rick is captured by two living beings, Morgan and his son Duane. Rick takes them to the police station, let's them take showers and have guns. While Morgan struggles to shoot his undead wife, Rick ventures into Atlanta and finds that city completely overrun with the undead. He corners himself in a tank (like a goof) and a voice calls to him on the radio asking if "he's comfortable in there".

Episode 2: "Guts". The voice on the radio is revealed to be Glenn, a pizza delivery boy with an attitude. He navigates Rick out of the herd of "walkers" (get used to that word) and leads him to regroup with his other friends, with so many colorful characters (that is of course a notion of personality diversity, not ethnic appearance). Andrea, the blonde bitch. Morales is the good guy who turns evil by season eight. The most colorful one of them all is Merle Dixon, played by "Rowdy Burns" from Days of Thunder. Merle tough talks everyone and basically votes himself leader because he's the one with a gun, but Rick overpowers him and literally handcuffs him to the roof. With Merle detained and walkers bearing down on them since Rick loves to fire guns and cause chaos, Rick and the others hatch a hair-brained scheme to dress themselves up in guts and sneak toward a truck big enough to carry them all out of town. The plan works and they leave Merle to die on the roof because T-Dog, who had beef with Merle earlier, hastily trip and drops the key down a pipe on the roof...

Episode 3: "Tell it to the Frogs". Rick is taken by the others to their camp, found to house his wife Lori, his son Carl (or "Coral" if you ask Andrew Lincoln's British accent) and his partner and best friend Shane. Shane has mixed feelings after this, as it now means he can no longer pork Lori thinking that Rick is dead. After the reunion, Rick tells Shane that he left a bag of guns in Atlanta that could prove useful. Plus, they find Daryl Dixon, Merle's little brother, and inform him that they left Merle on the roof. Daryl, along with Rick, T-Dog and Glenn, lead an expedition back into Atlanta to find Merle and Rick's bag of guns. There, they find Merle's sawn off hand and Merle missing. Daryl descends into weird wailing on the roof in angry tears.

Episode 4: "Vatos". Rick and company follows Merle's trail into a building and through a street where they find Rick's bag of guns. They decide to go after it, but a group of Latinos intervene and take Glenn in the confusion. Rick manages to make off with his guns and a member of the Latino gang, which Daryl interrogates. Rick decides to have a prisoner exchange, the Latino kid for Glenn. When talks break down over the bag of guns, Rick saddles up, locks n' loads, and returns to shoot up the gang and take Glenn back. Just before chaos and bloodshed break out, an elderly woman intervenes and breaks up the violence. Rick and them learn that the Latino gang is really a group of nurses who take care of abandoned retirees. Rick leaves them the bag of guns and ventures back to the group, finding a walker horde attacking.

Episode 5: "Wildfire". Rick and the others help defend from the camp, but at a heavy loss. Carol's husband Ed is killed, as is Andrea's sister Amy. Jim is found to be bitten, but doesn't fess up to it right away. The group debates what to do about both Jim and the grieving Andrea. As Amy reanimates, Andrea puts a bullet in her head to put her out of her misery. The group, against Shane's wishes, sets out for the CDC, seeing their current location as no longer safe. With Jim dying, they leave him on the side of the road and continue onward. They arrive at the CDC and demand entry as walkers bear down on them. At the last possible second, the door opens to the CDC and Rick and his group enter. There, they find a bewildered and exhausted Edwin Jenner, the last doctor inside.

Episode 6: "TS-19". Inside the CDC, Jenner introduces them to some inside intel as to what the sickness is and what it does to the human brain. He also provides them with a feast and alcohol, both of which they haven't had in a long time, as well as hot showers and rooms to sleep in. As life continues, the group thinks they can remain safe inside the CDC forever. However, Vi (the control computer) starts shutting down systems and prioritizing its power usage. Jenner explains that Vi will soon set the air on fire to decontaminate the entire building (basically explode). Rick and company then spend the next ten minutes fighting with Jenner to let them out and let them have a fighting chance. Jenner concedes, but Andrea refuses to go. Dale stays behind with her, so she agrees to leave with him so that he doesn't die. The group escapes the CDC as it explodes.

As far as my favorite characters go, I prefer Shane for his no-holds-barred attitude on the whole outbreak. Regardless of his crazy nature and how dangerous he was with certain things (or how dangerous he was going to be) Shane Walsh is a guy you would want on your zombie apocalypse survival team. The guy who knows hot to put a walker down with no remorse, no matter what. Rick is a tad overrated. He would, in later seasons, turn into a Shane-esque vengeful killer that took no prisoners, but even then he showed remorse for some of the things he did. Shane was just all balls, all fury, no rules. He almost even shot Rick behind his back when Rick came back, as Shane and Lori (Rick's wife) were sleeping together while they thought Rick was dead. So that must've been pretty awkward. I would also have to say Glenn is up there for me. I was genuinely sad to see Glenn go in season seven when Negan bashed his head in, but this first season Glenn was a pretty funny guy to have around. He was fast, agile and knew his way around town so that he made a very valiant cohort for Rick and the gang.

I've found the joy behind Daryl to be pretty well-earned. I used to think he was overrated, but I've lightened up on it. Daryl's pretty cool. Not a whole lot more to say that hasn't already been said. I find Lori to be pretty useless, but she's not exactly a 'damsel in distress' type either, she's somewhere in the middle. Dale, the older man with the RV, is pretty cool. In the first season he's that way, but in season two he loses traction with his constant whining. I enjoyed Morales, and even though he would later return as a bad guy in season eight, here he's a cool guy to have around.

See that? Short but sweet. The first season of The Walking Dead, in my opinion, is the one that feels the most "zombie apocalypse", as later seasons would develop more into a human-versus-human aspect and kind of lose sight of the whole "let's fight walkers" thing. It turns into a human warfare with zombies being the background ambience characters. As George Romero, aka "Mr. Zombie" used to say: "It's just a soap opera with an occasional zombie thrown in". Plus the later seasons get confusing with their usage of gasoline even though gasoline should be bad and unusable by that point, but hey its just a TV show. I like how this started a whole "zombie apocalypse" craze where people actually wanted this to happen. People were so fascinated by the aspect of bouncing from place to place fighting zombies and staying alive through extreme measures. It was a weird time to be alive. As for the first season though, it's still got a lot of rewatch value. Give it a try if you haven't. You're guaranteed to at least enjoy the first season.