The Walking Dead is back with a whole new enemy plaguing our survivors as we kick off season 4 in bloody style…
By Scott Harris
There was a story in Greek mythology about a zombie. His name was Antaeus, and he was, it seemed, a fully unbeatable wrestler. In the end, the only person who could defeat him was a guy named Hercules, who lifted Antaeus off the ground, and in so doing robbed him of his apparent power source.
He always had to be touching the Earth, you see, and the undead man who was theretofore undefeated was suffocated by the very much alive Greek hero.
The Walking Dead, especially in the fourth season premiere of the AMC series, stays similarly grounded. Its own key strength is, and always will be, killing bad guys by the bushel. But as with Antaeus, its true power source is more subtle. What may appear at a glance to be just a trend-humping zombie gorefest is actually a spectacularly executed series fueled by statements on life, love, death, and the forces that direct a society when the GPS blinks out.
Production-related case in point: In the premiere, out comes the hero, Rick, accompanied by some crackling blues dirge. Pretty good song. Try to Shazam it, though, and all that pops up is a commercial for the show. Interesting.
The episode, called “Thirty Days Without An Accident,” is similarly calm on the surface, but contains more depth than you might notice. It seems like just a re-introduction to the characters and storylines, but then the walkers start to show up. In droves. Juxtaposed with the masses along the fences is the camp’s evolution toward a self-sustaining community, less and less reliant on taking runs into walker territory for supplies.
But those runs still happen, and in the first one of the season Zach is bitten—a kiss of death in this post-apoocalypse. The commotion happens when an otherwise uneventful store raid attracts walkers literally from the ceiling down, thanks to Bob’s wrangling over whether to snatch a bottle of booze. When the camp hears of Zach’s demise, his girlfriend, Beth, remains stonefaced. She’s numb to the pain. That’s not good.
At the same time, the ever-popular Daryl appears to be farther down the road in a potential relationship with Carol, who has sweated him for quite a while now. Could that crossbow be the very same possessed by the god Cupid? Ah-ha. Ha. Very good.
Meanwhile, Rick takes a foray into the woods that ends with him meeting a bizarre, almost walker-like woman. Praise for her then-unseen husband rings hollow when it’s revealed that the woman adores the man despite his relatively recent walker conversion. In a fit of guilt that, to me, contained more than a bit of foreshadowing, she stabs herself to death so she can keep him company in the realm of the undead.
Back at the ranch, a pig and a person (Patrick) appear to come down with walker fever, despite not having any apparent bite marks. Don’t tell me this thing is airborne.
And so ends the episode. In typical fashion for the series, it keeps the viewer current at the same time that it gently uncovers new storylines, just as Rick, digging a garden in the opening scene, uncovers an old pistol in the dirt. He looks up, sees a drove of walkers quietly drooling at him from the other side of the prison fence, and tosses the gun aside, unneeded but not forgotten.
