By Jess Wind (Cascade Alum) – Email
Print Edition: October 15, 2014
Caution: this review contains spoilers from the first four seasons of The Walking Dead and the season five premiere.
The Walking Dead is back and ready for a fight.
By season five the part-time fans have gotten bored and the hardcore fans are salivating for certain characters to return. Knowing this, the show’s crew gave us the emotionally charged and fast-paced premiere we needed.
The episode opens with a time-lapse scene hinting at the backstory of the not-so-friendly Terminus residents. The scene suggests they were once in the same kind of captivity our gang find themselves in now. Maybe they’re not the cold-blooded killers we assumed they were at the end of season four?
Scratch that.
Rick, Glenn, Bob, and Daryl are dragged inside and bent over a steel tub alongside four other unknowns. As the enforcers line up furthest away from the familiar faces, it quickly becomes evident they’re about to be bled out like cattle. Generic extras get their skulls bashed with a baseball, throats slit for drainage — images reminiscent of the Saw series. The camera is slow to cut away as blood pours into the drain below. The gore feels more pronounced than in previous episodes, but is that a marked shift in direction, or is it the slaughterhouse quality? Regardless, it’s not just zombie gore anymore.
Just as the bat wielder takes aim behind Glenn, an explosion rocks the room and the scene ends. By this point we’re all wondering how close these folks can get to death before they finally lose the fight.
Then the action shifts to Carol. Between her and Daryl, it’s a hard pick for most badass character growth. Carol has been faced with some of the hardest decisions in the series and her remorse seems only to make her stronger. Her time spent with Tyrese and Judith has cemented this and, like Rick, she’s more focused than ever on what needs to be done to survive.
Carol blasts her way into Terminus, shoots anyone with a gun, and slips out while the place is overrun with zombies. How does she know Rick and the others escaped safely amid all the chaos? It doesn’t matter because she finds them in the woods, and Daryl wraps her into the genuine bear-hug that makes us forget about that little miscommunication.
The writers (and actors) nailed exhausted, unencumbered emotion with the Carol moment, but then you remember Rick still thinks his baby girl is dead. Now that reunion is a tear-jerker.
After season four’s midway decimation at the prison, followed by enough walking to make anyone change the channel, the season five premiere delivered. We are left knowing it’s not the end of the Terminus story (because of another flashback late in the episode). We anticipate the return of forgotten characters and Eugene’s apparent cure in DC.
But it was the episode’s underlying message that sealed the success of the premiere. Subtly crafted into Glenn’s few lines, we are left with hope —hope for their survival, hope for their humanity. Without it, how do we tell the villains from the heroes?
