The latest season of arguably the best zombie TV series ever is back with a crash.
The story picks up just a month after we saw Andrea die on the floor of a torture chamber. Our favourite apocalypse survivors have been living happily behind bars with the good people of Woodbury, who are all eager to ‘earn their keep’.
Apart from the zombies at the fences that seem to pile up annoyingly, everything seems to be going well. They are hunting for food, growing their own crops and even keeping a sickly pig called Violet (more on her later).
So here’s what we missed: Rick has suddenly developed a green thumb, whereas Carl seems to have sprouted to twice the size that he was in the last season. Tyreese has a new girlfriend. Carol and Darryl are still being annoyingly flirtatious. Michonne is actively looking for the Governor, who escaped in a pick-up truck in the last season. Glen and Maggie aren’t pregnant (yet).
Although the story starts off softly with barely a scary walker to be seen, it picks up when Michonne, Daryl, Sasha and Glenn have a serious action sequence, hacking at zombies that fall from the ceiling of the supermarket because of a military helicopter wrecked on the roof, which is making the whole building cave in.
What about Rick? Whilst hunting in the forest, he bumps into Clara, a seriously creepy woman who says that she was in an airport when the apocalypse hit. She says she will take him to her husband, who (shocker) turns out to be a zombie’s head that she keeps in a bag. She has been feeding him whatever she has been able to find. Stabbing herself to “join him”, she still manages to answer Rick’s three important questions about zombie survival.
In this episode we are introduced to a few new characters, but saying that most of them don’t stay alive very long may be an understatement. Beth’s boyfriend Zach lasts all of five minutes before he gets eaten up and crushed by a helicopter whilst trying to save Bob, a mysterious man with an alcohol problem.
Patrick, Carl’s new geeky glasses-wearing friend from Woodbury, isn’t feeling too well and soon succumbs to a mysterious and bloody disease in the shower.
His death triggers my main theory. The show makes a point of writing in the Violet the pig’s sickness; either it’s the most random plot-line ever, or this has something to do with the mysterious infection that has claimed the life of our bespectacled friend.
We’ve returned to an accident a day in the Walking Dead camp. The show is back and it’s bloody marvellous.
The Walking Dead airs Fridays 10pm on FOX.
Image courtesy of AMC
