The Walking Dead, Season 2, Episode 1: What Lies Ahead
I'll try to be shorter with reviews of episodes that are five years old. Ahem. Anyway, season two starts off strong. We have a tighter focus on the survivors, and a simple yet engaging plot for this episode. Basically Team Atlanta runs into a pileup, and while scavenging for supplies (including an arsenal full of melee weapons courtesy of Carl) they are beset upon a 'herd' of zombies... and while we get some terse moments like T-Dog being injured and helped by Daryl, a nice character moment for the pair, or Andrea's moment of vulnerability while she was too obsessed with cleaning her gun, ultimately the main driving force of this episode was that Sophia ends up being discovered from her hiding place by a pair of walkers, and chased into the jungle... and by the end of the episode still hasn't been recovered, so whatever happened to her is probably gong to be the status quo for the foreseeable future.
There's a bit of chaotic moment as Rick rather selflessly leaves Sophia in a hidden grove while he goes off and distracts the two walkers with noise... but Sophia wanders off, and for nearly half of the episode, the rest of Team Atlanta goes off to find her. We get a couple of strong character moments. Carl wanting to be an adult and joining up with the others is fine enough, as is Daryl's maturity as he cooperates with Rick (that scene with them double-teaming the zombie and subsequently ripping the corpse apart to confirm that Sophia wasn't eaten was cool). Daryl also gives that gun he recovered from the camper's corpse to Andrea when she asks for one, even if he seemed to be hiding a piece from Rick and Shane when he first pulled it from the corpse. Shane apparently wants to bugger off, gets into a silly spat with Lori, and apparently Andrea is considering going along with Shane. Dale gets a nice scene with Andrea, gets shouted for it, and him subtly 'pantomining' so the entire group would focus on finding Sophia is great.
Andrea, in addition to getting some nice moments fighting the zombie, apparently is still pretty suicidal, sort of. She gets into a big argument about Dale revoking her gun privileges, and basically tells Dale to fuck off since she didn't run away from the CDC bomb because she had an epiphany, she just didn't want Dale's blood on her hands. Some nice follow-up to the season one finale, and Andrea in general is getting to be quite interesting of a character. Lori also gets a nice speech, telling Carol off for guilt-tripping Rick, and telling everyone to fuck off for depending on Rick and then blaming him for apparently failing. Carol's own guilt-trip and her prayer for forgiveness because she prayed for Ed to die was decent as well.
Oh and Carl apparently gets shot when they were all hanging around that deer. And here I was expecting a zombie deer! Well, all in all a pretty decent episode. The only real weak bit was Shane and Lori's argument, which felt off. Lori was telling Shane off for being rude and brushing Carl off... when previously Lori has been angry at Shane for getting close to Carl. Also, um, rape, y'know? You'd think Lori would want Shane as far away as possible form her son.
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