The Walking Dead S01E04 Review: Death

The Walking Dead, Season 1, Episode 4: Vatos

Yep, shit goes down as we get two on-screen deaths. Granted, they aren't really the most important of characters -- Ed the wife-beater is hardly going to be mourned by anyone, and while Amy did get an extended bonding scene with her sister at the beginning of this episode, she really hasn't been that much of a presence in the show to really impact that much. Yes, her death scene is sad, especially after the oh-so-tragic moment where Andrea was about to give her that gift, but overall, y'know they're minor characters in the grand scheme of themes.

But the fact that people die, and the fact that all the death happened smack dab in the middle of the safe zone camp where no one thought the walkers were going to attack... hell, they were having a party after the whole successful fish catch by the Andrea-Amy siblings. And so far, other than that one deer-eating zombie, the problems at Camp Lori has always been internal -- the love triangle, Ed being a jackass, Jim being crazy in this episode -- whereas the zombie problem was always focused in the city. This is the inevitable crash of the wall dividing the two settings apart. 

Other than that, though, the episode mostly follows Team Rick's attempts to get Merle (who's MIA at the moment, but the trail they followed confirmed that he at least survived and is in possession of a van) and ends up tangling with this apparently-stereotypical Latino gang that's actually a bunch of nurses and dudes that are protecting a hospital of elderly who couldn't be evacuated out of the city. We get some stuff down at the camp, too, with some interactions of the minor characters -- Dale gets more things to do, Andrea and Amy had their moment, Jim calls Shane out on his apparent 'rule with an iron fist' behaviour, Shane proves he's a better man, Jim has his weird... thing with digging holes and prophetic dreams what the hell is this Game of Thrones or something

A nice little running theme in this episode is how people change thanks to the apocalypse -- Glenn goes from being a pizza boy to an awesome stealth soldier thing, Guillermo the Vatos leader goes from a custodian to basically the leader of a small community, Jim breaks down thanks to apparently leaving his family to be eaten by the zombies, et ceterea.

The Vatos are the main point of interest, though. The apparently stereotypical gang is a facade, and while they do play though and threatened to throw Glenn off the roof and whatnot, they're apparently, well, just faking it. They were a bit of a distraction from the established plotlines, but a welcome one. The sight of other survivors is a nice world-building moment, and for what little screentime he had, Guillermo was a nice little foil to Rick as the leaders of their respective groups. The backstory was pretty cool too, as impractical as it ended up being. Also pretty cool to have Rick's bag of guns be a proper plot device to string this whole thing along. 

Daryl, by the way, is still a bit racist and trigger-happy, but nowhere to the extent that Merle was. A couple of times he managed to be talked down by Rick, and while he might just be angry on principle, he was still pissed that the Vatos abducted Glenn. Yes, he suggests that taking the guns are far more important and practical than saving one man, but in the end Daryl does go ahead with the proposed plan of go in and shoot them all. Or maybe he just wants to shoot people in the head. Hard to say. 

Good thing abuelo was there. It's kind of an anticlimatic resolution to the faceoff between the two groups, but, well, to compensate for that we got the zombie attack on Camp Lori. I think it's a nice take on having proper human antagonists before we dip into the whole 'the worst enemies in a zombie apocalypse are other humans who are still gigantic assholes' territory that literally all zombie genre movies go to. Or maybe we'll get sentient zombies, or demonic zombie masters? Eh, too D&D for this show.

Overall, though, a pretty decent episode. It's pretty much filler -- though I don't know how big a role the Vatos is going to play in future episodes -- with some neat character moments for the B-list characters until the nice confrontation between Rick and Guillermo, and the zombie attack at the end. But it's still a pretty decent episode. There are some weak points, like Jim randomly digging graves for the sake of unneeded foreshadowing.