Last week's episode was near-perfect; this one was less so, but was still very well-done. I think the difference is because of two factors: 1) it was a half hour shorter and felt a little rushed because 2) it had a lot more characters to introduce us to in that smaller time-frame.
That meant we were given as much action, but much less of the quiet times that made the first episode so haunting -- the single, haunting zombie in the grass, the one-on-one conversations, the scene where Morgan had to try to kill his zombie-fied wife, Rick by himself in the wreckage of everything he knew -- these were the strongest moments of the pilot, and there wasn't time to linger much in the second episode.
Andrea and Rick's conversation in the jewelry store almost got there, but we didn't have much time to get to know Andrea or that the blonde from the camp was the sister she was talking about. Was that mentioned before? I must have missed it because of all the zombies. I missed the pace and the personal tone of the pilot, but I wasn't sorry that the episode was all action.
So much was brought up that will enrich the rest of the season: Glenn is an under-appreciated logistics man, Shane and Lori have some sort of sordid thing going on but she still cares for Rick, Shane's kind of a jerk in a potentially violent way, the survivors have a camp, make forays into the city, and have learned how to survive, T-Dog is kind of a hysterical coward when it comes right down to it, Merle is severely pissed and that will likely come back to haunt them.
The zombies aren't exactly smarter than they are in other zombie movies (and this show is more of an extended movie than a regular show, so far), but they're not only reanimated corpses -- they can smell out the living, they aren't entirely taken in by disguises, they look... creepily aware when they're hunting. And they're fast. Combined with the lingering bits of old personalities that they showed in the pilot, this could get really tense and really emotionally murky before the end.
This episode had the obligatory 'we have to stick together' scene, which was to be expected, but what was much more affecting was the scene where they took the zombie as camouflage and paused to point out that he was once a person. Not that old a person, either. And then that pause was counterpointed by a really gross scene with an axe. I think the sound effects guys and the foley artists are having way too much fun here, but the grossness was that much grosser because he wasn't just a Walker, he was once an unfortunate person, and that's what they were going for.
In the final show-down, they picked the best car to make into a noise-maker: flashy, loud, and also really fast. It was brilliant and exciting and I'm glad Glenn got away -- I thought maybe he wouldn't -- but I hope he had a way to turn that thing off before he had to stop somewhere. Overall, successful, if not as together as the previous episode, and just as pervaded by the crawling creepies as the first episode: even when nothing bad was happening, there was always that expectation that something horrible would come at any moment. And they're building up a nice juxtaposition between human monstrosity and actual monster monstrosity that should drive the rest of the series quite nicely.
What did you all think of it?
