The Walking Dead Premiere ‘Days Gone By’ Review

Horror fans have been telling me for months that I ought to be excited about AMC’s adaptation of The Walking Dead, an acclaimed comic book series by Robert Kirkman, which is being produced by Frank Darabont (director of The Shawshank Redemption). Having now watched its premiere episode I can see what all the hype was about.

In the first 90-minute episode we follow Police Officer Rick (Andrew Lincoln) as he wakes up from a coma to discover that the hospital he is in has been deserted and that lines of decaying bodies have been left outside. Returning to his home, Rick finds it deserted with no clue as to where his wife or son has disappeared to. Though he does not know it yet, a terrible virus spread while he was asleep that turned people into zombies and society lies in tatters. Rick runs into another human who begins to explain the situation to him and gives him a possible lead as to where his wife and son might be. Determined to find out what has happened to them he sets off in search.


Lincoln, best known here for his part in the British rom-com Love Actually, manages to convey his character’s drive to find out what has happened to his wife and child as well as his disbelief at what he sees. His situation is easy to empathize with which is just as well for he travels alone for a sizable chunk of this premiere episode.

We see relatively little of the other regular cast members so I shall hold off any comments about them for future episodes. I will say though that they appear to be an interesting group of people and that I am looking forward to seeing some of their tensions hinted at in this episode realized in future installments. Instead, we get a nice guest appearance by Lennie James (The Prisoner) whose character helps Rick understand what has happened whilst he was unconscious and what the zombies are, in addition to having an interesting story arc in this episode that somewhat mirrors Rick’s own.

Speaking of the zombies, they look suitably horrific with decayed faces and dull, dead eyes; their tattered clothes providing a suggestion of who they once were. As shiver-inducing as they can appear however, the graphically-mutilated corpses they leave behind cause even greater chills and offer a real sense of eeriness and foreboding.

Zombie confrontations do provide thrills but used too frequently they could easily overshadow character development and lead to the series becoming stale and repetitive. Smartly, Darabont establishes a pace that can be sustained throughout the course of a series, favoring long moments of quiet tension, ghastly reveals and empty surroundings over frenetic action. Like Rick, we have little idea what lurks behind that next corner and when we are finally shown a large scale conflict it becomes all the more satisfying for that suspense.

There are a few occasions though where the tension is unnecessarily broken much earlier than it needed to be. For instance, we quickly learn the fates of several important characters that could easily have been held back for future episodes, especially as the characters in question did not directly impact the events. In doing so we learn that something Rick believes is actually incorrect, removing the shock we might otherwise have felt at a development at the episode’s end had we been solely following his character’s journey in this episode.

These frustrating missed opportunities aside, overall this first episode proved to be a highly promising and entertaining introduction to The Walking Dead. The show should prove to be gripping viewing over its next five episodes if it can retain some of this episode’s tension and begin to develop the cast of characters.

– Aidan Brack

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