Review: The Walking Dead ’Infected’

As we begin this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, bad stuff is about to go down.  We were shown the death of one of the prison’s residents at the end of last episode and when someone dies, other people must soon follow to the zombie bloodlust.  And so does it progress, with the dead kid making his way through and munching on people as they sleep.  Of course, everyone is secure in the knowledge that the prison is safe from walkers, so the cell doors are open and there is no one on guard (the one bit of it that doesn’t make much sense to me) and people are easy prey.

More than a few people fall to this breech of security, but the mess is quickly mopped up and things almost return to normal.  Of course, when one thing goes bad on The Walking Dead, plenty of other things will follow.  As it turns out, the walkers are accumulating at one point on the fence and, as is eventually discovered, someone has been feeding them to achieve exactly that purpose.  So in addition to having to take care of an almost collapsing fence, the group is now aware of a traitor (or a crazy) in their midst.  Add to that the presence of a disease (that which killed the aforementioned zombie-kid) and the prison gang has their work cut out for them.  Oh, not to mention a rather traumatic surprise ending that I’ll not spoil for you.

Once again, new showrunner Scott Gimple is proving that he’s got the chops to take over the series.  This episode was, in my opinion, better than 75% of all the episodes from season one to season three.  There was tension, a steadily progressive movement of story and action, a distinct reduction in the improbability factor that has plagued the show on many occasions and they even spent time developing the characters.  The writing has gotten so much better that this is once again becoming one of my favorite shows rather than “the only zombie thing on TV worth watching”.

The one thing that really surprised me is that even though the show did the “everything bad happens at once” routine - a writing tactic that usually bugs the living crap out of me - they did it in such a way that I didn’t feel it was artificial.  Yes, disease is going to hit a population that lives in confined quarters.  And the zombies trying to knock over the fence was not there to give us more action, but to hint at things to come.  Thus, the coincidence felt like actual coincidence rather than a compiling of dangers in order to generate false tension.  Kudos to Gimple and the writing staff for doing it right.

Next week, ‘Isolation’ will no doubt drag us deeper into the mystery of who in the prison has gone crazy (or is it the Governor somehow sabotaging things?).  Check out a preview of that one at this site here.

Photo Credits -           

Zombie hordes courtesy of comicbook.com