With just minutes before the new episode here’s my last-minute recap of last week’s The Walking Dead episode “30 Days Without an Accident”, the premiere episode for season 4.
After last season’s rather anticlimactic finale, we catch up with our group of survivors, who are once again, at the prison. Rick has stepped down from his role as group leader, and is now tending to the crops, and taking care of the livestock, including a pig named Violet who appears sickly. We see that he gets rid of a gun that he has, symbolizing just how far he has separated himself from his previous role.
The prison has integrated the only survivors from Woodbury which the governor abandoned in the finale. With Rick no longer leading, they’re run through a council committee of sorts. We see that Carl is much different from the rest of the young kids that are now living at the prison, as they name the walkers and try and talk with them. He tells them not to do such things, seemingly much colder and mature than these kids are, as they were much more secluded from the realities of this new world than Carl is.
Michonne spends time looking for supplies but in reality is out hunting for The Governor, who we just know will be making his return soon enough. She leads a group of people including Daryl, Glenn, as well as two new characters, Bob and Zach. Bob is a former medic in the army, while Zach is Beth’s boyfriend. They go out on a hunt of supplies, which Glenn sets out on in order to get a pregnancy test for Maggie.
Meanwhile Rick sets out on his own in the woods and encounters a woman who at first appears like a walker about to eat a dead deer, but it turns out its a tethered and weathered survivor named Clara. She claims she and her husband are abandoned and want to be integrated into their group. Rick is wisely cautious about her, as he should have been, as I didn’t trust her, not even for a second. She’s deeply disturbed and clearly not right, and once they get to the camp she attempts to attack Rick at the first chance she gets. She ends up then taking her own life when unsuccessful. It’s a reminder that there’s a lot of messed up things left out there in the world, but it left me more puzzled than in awe, which the writers sought to do. We see that her husband is really just a walkers head in a bag, but we never get to see it, as Rick doesn’t care to investiage any further.
Back with the group out on a supply hunt, things go down oh so wrong of course, after Bob toys around with some bottles of liquor (looks like he battled alcoholism back in the day, maybe why he went to the army?) the shelf fell causing the attention of walkers mindlessly shifting on the roof to the room. The roof has been weakened by rain, causing the walkers to fall through the roof, causing an absolute gory mess on the floor. It was a pretty cool action sequence that caused quite a bit of scare for our characters, and even took the life of poor Zach. Unfortunately we only knew him for a few minutes, so I honestly couldn’t care less. Either did Beth.
This is the problem with this episode of the show. I never truly felt engaged or interested in much happening. When it did (the Clara storyline), it ended up being a “so what?” moment. One of the more interesting moments came when Carl comes into the classroom where Carol is supposed to be reading children stories to the kids. He comes in and sees that she’s actually teaching them lessons in self defense, which doesn’t sit well with Carl. We also see a touching scene from Glen and Maggie who are relived to find out that she isn’t pregnant and in a touching exchange he tells her than being afraid is what kept them alive, but she says “its how we kept breathing.”
The episode did some decent table setting, but I wasn’t overly impressed with how the new characters were introduced, and the episode seemed to meander far too much than I would have liked. This premiere left me somewhat disappointed but here’s to hoping that things will pick up as the season progresses.
Carl’s friend Patrick, who we also only met for a split second, ends up getting sick later that night, coughs into their supply of water, and collapses ont othe floor, killing him and turning him into a walker. This won’t sit well for our survivors at the prison, who are in for a rough night of sleep. If you remember, Daryl liked his hand before shaking Patrick’s hand, so it’s likely that some new virus has been spread, which doesn’t look good for the prison. We shall see how it all pans out tonight.
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