Say what you will about AMC's The Walking Dead, it does two things very well: season premieres and season finales. The middle episodes may lurch and stumble at times, but in the season bookends everything is going at a gallop. Between a geyser-like explosion of zombie bodies, impressive levels of badassery from Carol, a tearful reunion or five, and an end of credits teaser, last night's premiere seemed to have it all.
With one exception. In one of the worst jokes in TV drama history: 13 heroes walk into a cannibal death camp, and all 13 walk back out alive. Doesn't it beggar belief (as much as you have any belief left to beggar in a show about zombies) that not a single one of our heroes left Terminus with more than a slight head contusion? That none of our survivors got caught in all those explosions, gleaming abattoirs, and hail of gunfire?
Nowhere is their bulletproof status in this episode more laughably obvious than in the scene where eight bodies are lined up to a trough to be bled and then butchered. Four of them are random faceless characters, the other four are our heroes. Four end up getting their throats slit, four walk away relatively unharmed. I'm surprised the prisoners from Train Car D weren't wearing red shirts.
Fan favorite Glenn is saved, at the last second, by some tedious cannibal-death-camp bureaucracy. Ugh, paperwork, am I right?
They tried to fake us out a little bit by including Bob, the newest and, sorry Bob, most expendable member of the survivor crew. Doesn't it make more sense for the Terminus butchers to take Michonne with Darryl, Glenn, and Rick? But even Bob was safe.
And I don't mean to sound bloodthirsty or nitpicky with this observation. Who lives and who dies isn't the only point of the show. What's equally important is how they survive. And even if death were the only point, there were certainly plenty of deaths at the tail end of last season, including the devastating kicker of Lizzie and Mika. Perhaps we needed some good news, some sanctuary of our own, before another round of beloved character deaths started to kick in. And there is, no doubt, plenty of bloodshed left to come.
But when deaths are reserved for the end of the season (or, in the case of the ever-split The Walking Dead, mid- and end of season), then death isn't a harrowing reality of post-apocalyptic life: it's a predictable cycle. And the show is better than that. In last year's premiere, a run-of the-mill scavenging trip to a grocery store cost us a new character played by Kyle Gallner, Beth's boyfriend and someone the writers indicated would be around for awhile. I wasn't exactly rooting for anyone to die last night, but when a trip to the grocery store has a more personal cost to the group than a daring escape from Terminus, something's out of whack.
Are the writers just more attached to our main characters at this point? Or is this just the start of another endless cycle of grief and relief? For the threat of this world to be credible, death needs to lurk around every corner. Safety and a complete victory for our heroes last night just feels wrong because, as we all know, in this world, the zombies aren't the only dead men walking.
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