Episode 1: Days Gone Bye

Whenever I get to talking about comics with anyone I always bring up one specific title. The Walking Dead. To me, it's the most ambitious, rewarding, and well-written comic being released today. When I heard that they were making a TV show out of it I couldn't have been more excited. Then the good news started pouring in: AMC would be broadcasting it and Frank Darabont would be at the helm. AMC has a flawless track-record when it comes to TV (as we all know) and Darabont can handle the character development that is essential to the success of the story. So I waited patiently for Halloween night to see if my dream of the perfect adaptation was to actually come to fruition.

It did.

The Walking Dead proves to be everything that fans wanted and more. The story opens with a bang with our hero, the Gary Cooper-esque Sheriff Rick, blasting a child zombie in the head. Then it flashes back to before the outbreak to a scene between Rick and his partner Shane that not only tells us about their relationship, but the relationship that Rick has with his family. He loves his son and his wife, and while his marriage is not without its rocky spots, Rick is the type of man whose main concern is raising his family in the right manner.

Frank Darabont creates the perfect atmosphere, allowing us to get to know Rick and the world he has found himself in before cutting to the action. In fact, this episode is quite light on the action--that is until the last twenty-or-so minutes.

The scenes between Rick and Morgan were fantastic. Morgan and his son Duane are squatting in Rick's neighbor's home unable to move on. I mean this both literally and figuratively. One, there are plenty of zombies outside and they are not armed well-enough to defend themselves, and two, the matriarch of the family is a zombie, roaming outside trying to get in the house. Morgan cannot bring himself to shoot his wife because when he sees her, he still sees the woman he loves. He looks a photographs of his wife and sees that everything that his wife was is now gone, but he just can’t bring himself to shoot his wife. There is a rather beautiful scene cutting between Morgan attempting to put his wife to rest and Rick hunting down a suffering woman in a park that he had run into earlier. The music and the tension created in this scene is perfect. We as the audience needed to see the pain and confusion that our characters are going through. These zombies used to be human, and in our characters minds it's difficult to understand that the spark behind their loved ones eyes is out. There is nothing left of them except for their bodies and basic primal instincts.

"I'm sorry this happened to you," Rick says as he puts the woman out of her misery. A beautifully simple line that says more about Rick than anything we had seen before it. Rick still has compassion for these people. He recognizes that while they need to be dealt with, they were once human just like he is now.

I want to take a moment to point out that the cinematic style for this show is perfect. There isn't a single shot that is wasted. Darabont shot the show in 16mm film which adds a filmic grain to the picture--which is perfect for the apocalyptic feel that the series is going for. The look of the show is striking. The flickering lights and scruffy details on people's faces only enhanced by the shows gritty appearance.

We see later on that Rick's family is indeed alive and being taken care of by Shane, Rick's old partner. They are with a group of strangers and they have a CB radio with which they are searching for other survivors. The big reveal of the scene however isn’t that Rick's family is alive--but it's that Rick's wife, Laurie, has become romantically entangled with Shane. Of course, she doesn't know that Rick is alive, and probably assumes the worst, but still it's pretty rough. We only get a small glimpse of Rick's family, but a small glimpse is all we need because for now, our main focus is on our hero.


The end scene shows us what kind of pulse-pounding action (and gore) we can expect from the series. Darabont has told us that AMC put little to no restrictions on what kind of violence they will be able to show, and the last twenty minutes proves it.

The show ends with a cliffhanger, our hero trapped in a tank, surrounded by zombies. It's obvious that he is contemplating suicide until a voice comes from the tank's radio: "Hey you, dumbass in the tank, cozy in there?"

The voice not only gives a relief to Rick, but provides relief to us as well, as it's the first bit of humor we get. The camera pans to the zombies devouring the horse (in graphic detail)and zooms out to an aerial shot showing hundreds of zombies zooming in on Rick's position. All this to the tongue-in-cheek tune "Space Junk" by Wang Chung.

We are definitely in for a ride.

Final Verdict: 9 out of 10 Head Shots. Days Gone Bye sets the standard for which the rest of the series will measured up to.