The Walking Dead, Season 1, Episode 2: Guts
Still quite decent. The show's clearly trying to settle in, introducing a slew of new characters (which, considering the genre that this show is, won't probably all survive the season) and lets Rick run around more and stretch his legs while impressing the viewers with a crapton of zombie swarm action. We get a bit more development on the side of the survivors on Team Shane, and we get a couple more zombie-apocalypse tropes, among others the siege in a department store, a speech about how the rules have changed and an irredeemably jackass human character who suffers a karmic fate. Mind you, pretty impressively enough the show has shied away from killing anyone on-screen barring Rick's horse... at this point in most zombie apocalypse movies you have a couple of redshirts biting the dust already.
Rick himself is still proving to be, well, gruff enough so as not to be a boring perfect action hero, but still mostly your generic protagonist with strong values and great skills in the face of adversary et cetera. He does get a bit of a flaw in causing every single zombie to home in on the department store, but that's chalked up to his inexperience in dealing with the walkers than anything. The newer set of survivors in the mall are far more varied and while we don't get to see all of them get adequate screentime, it's a nice enough introdump episode for most of the characters to get adequate screentime and not overwhelm us so much. We've got your generic insane gun-toting racist drug-snorting sexist Mr. Hateable, Merle Dixon, who pretty much ticks off every single one of the tropes necessary to get an audience to hate a character short of actually killing someone or kicking a puppy. Dixon is honestly just there to be a villain for Rick to beat up, cuff to a pipe, and get a karmic fate -- he doesn't die and get devoured by zombies, but the keys to the cuff get dropped in what is undoubtedly an accident, rather ironically after the black man he assaults, T-Dog, wants to come back for him. Even if the zombies don't break through the chained-up door, Dixon's doomed to die of starvation or something, though that tool box did drop and stuff might clatter around...
T-Dog is a nice, chubby black dude who gets assaulted by the racist Dixon, and mostly spends a good chunk of the episode just playing off other people's dialogue, while trying to contact Shane's camp. He gets a nice moment near the end as Rick quite literally places Dixon's fate in T-Dog's hands, and he was quite ready to save the racist fucker except, y'know, he dropped the key. The Asian Glenn basically serves as Rick's lancer, being the one to guide him out of the tank by guiding him as 'eyes in the sky', being smart enough to discuss strategy with Rick and the others, basically is Rick's partner during their attempt to blend in with the walkers, goes off on his own twice while Rick is unsuitable or otherwise occupied -- to investigate the sewers and to distract the walkers with that sexy sports car. I honestly thought that the last shot would cut to Glenn's camaro with horns blaring and him being devoured by the walkers, but nope. He got away. Good show, Glenn. Glenn's pretty awesome, isn't he? He apparently can run around a city undetected and is savvy enough to analyze the situation of a battlefield, yet nice enough to throw away his mission to save this random stranger trapped in a tank.
Andrea is a blonde girl who's far more emotional and talks about his kid sister -- who, as fate would have it, is the only other named character at Shane's camp, Amy. Andrea herself didn't really do much, I think, other than have a bit of a bonding moment with Rick over not actually knowing how to use the gun she used to threaten Rick with, and a moment with a necklace she thinks would suit her sister and generally helping out. The Hispanic dude Morales and the black woman Jacqui (?) are the least developed out of the lot, basically there to provide extra muscle and extra dialogue bouncers whenever needed. Jacqui does get a bit of a Chekov's Skill moment with how her old job relates to knowing about the building layouts and whatnot, but the two have a fair bit to go.
Overall, other than introducing the new characters, there's a fair bit more action and chaos in this episode than the pilot. There's a car chase, there's more zombie hordes banging on windows, there's the little scuffle between Rick and Racist McDouche, and far less quiet drama scenes compared to what we got in the pervious episode. None of the other characters really got as much attention as Morgan did last episode, but then with the sheer amount of new characters it's to be expected. We've got some fun moments figuring things out with the absolutely gory and disturbing corpse-hacking scene in order to create Glenn and Rick's disguises. The moment where Rick reads aloud all about the corpse's former identity and pays respect to the man that he used to be was poignant.
Though honestly that rain really couldn't have chosen a worse timing, could it? Yeah, there's been clouds in the sky and rumbling in some of the previous scenes, but it's honestly quite comical when their disguises work, and then whoops inconvenient rain comes in and they have to do a mad dash for the truck.
Also I'm mildly disappointed that the tank from the pilot's cliffhanger didn't exactly come into play in this episode -- I honestly thought that the mysterious voice was going to teach Rick how to drive a tank. Alas, Glenn isn't that well-equipped with skills.
Over on Camp Lori, which is apparently the real survivor's base that's totally no longer in Atlanta, well, we get a rather long sequence of Lori and Shane bumping uglies -- though we don't see any real nudity. They think Rick's dead, though, so there's that -- probably will still end up being a big ugly drama, though. Shane's also quite nice to Caaaarl, and Shane's pretty much Mr. Perfect, being able to identify dangerous herbs and everyone takes orders from him and shit. He's also smart enough not to charge into a city infested with zombies to save just one girl, though Amy is quite pissed at him for that. Amy herself is probably best remembered in this episode as 'the girl upon whose ass the camera focuses on for a good minute at the beginning of the episode'.
Overall, while the previous episode was far more moody and emotional, this episode does its best to drive home just why a horde of zombies are a threat to our main characters, whilst introducing a group of survivors. It's a non-stop chaotic action tension scene, and it's pretty decent. The plot's still mostly focused on Rick with occasional flashes to Camp Lori, but it's still in its early stages and this rather average episode certainly does its job setting the mood.
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