Once the new group feels confident, they kit up and decide to go their own separate ways. The fishbowl effect of the lens distorting her face and movements which somehow both make it insanely nerve jangling and also quite sad. However they soon sympathize with his situation, Morgan has lost his wife to the zombie outbreak and she now still comes round to the house to check at night, in one of the episode’s creepiest moments before we know her true identity, her zombie peers through the look whole on the door. The characters are initially very suspicious of Grimes, tying him to the bed and holding him against his will. Grimes moves in with a father and son, Morgan and Duane, who are surviving every day as it comes and trying hardest at night where the dead swarm to feed. One of the many reasons for taking this to AMC, the home of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, is not only because the quality and standard of the Walking Dead is high but because at its heart, the show sets itself up as a character driven drama. He then flashbacks or forward to Grimes, as county sheriff going out to do a road block, which results in a shootout from which he is mortally wounded. From that moment on, you’ve either invested entirely in what Darabont wants to do or you’ve switched off. He knows what he has to do, and he shoots her through the head. However, unlike many protagonists usually do in a zombie situation, Grimes doesn’t hestitate. A young girl, reminding us zombie fans instantly of the zombie child at the end of Night of the Living Dead. Slowly and surely building the tension, Darabont then throws a spanner in the works by presenting us with a lone, child zombie. There is nothing on the soundtrack apart from a low hiss of the heat and a few bugs floating in the air, and for a whole 3 minutes we are left to wonder. The episode opens beautifully, Andrew Lincoln’s Frank Grimes walks through a lonely landscape filled with abandoned cars and everything is dead despite no signs of corpses. Grimes’ family however is alive, living in a commune somewhere in the wilderness where a new extended family unit has been established. At first he is taken under the wing of a struggling father and son before going out on his own to find his missing family and eventual salvation. The pilot, written and directed by Darabont, sets up the post outbreak world from the point of view of Rick Grimes, an Atlanta sheriff who wakes up in hospital from a coma to find the world completely overrun by the Walking Dead. Based on the graphic novel of the same name by Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead is an attempt at redefining and reconfiguring the conventions of the zombie narrative but at the same time keeping it very classic, stripped down.
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