After surviving a long conflict with the one-eyed Governor—who is still at large, bee-tee-dubs—it appears as though things haven’t sucked too badly for our friends in prison. As the episode title indicates, they haven’t seen much danger since the end of season three. The Woodbury refugees have been integrated painlessly and put to good use stabbing fence-walkers in the head to keep them from piling up against the prison’s defensive perimeter. Overall, it’s growing into what Woodbury should have been.
It’s a smart move to start season four off in an area of apparent comfort and prosperity. It’s really going to suck when we see it get violently ripped away from our heroes. The impending doom of their situation is represented by a supply run to an abandoned department store that is buckling under the weight of a crashed helicopter and a pantload of walkers. Though food and supplies are free for the taking, at some point the walkers are going to fall through the ceiling and turn a simple salvage mission into a death trap—an apt metaphor for life during season four of a zombie apocalypse.
One possible pitfall that a show about zombies is likely to have is a lack of creativity concerning the times when zombies show up and try to eat the people we care about. The writing team behind The Walking Dead has managed to punch things up with this scenario as the thought of being stuck inside a department store with zombies plummeting from the ceiling is all kinds of terrifying. It’s also a prime example of how the showrunners will cast a semi-well-known actor as a new character, fool the audience into thinking that character will be around for a while, and then feed that character to zombies moments before dropping a helicopter on him. In this case, it’s Kyle Gallner who you might know from Kevin Smith’s Red State or the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. I was personally not happy to see him on the show, and was subsequently happy to see him meet a brutal end.
During this botched supply run, Rick makes a solo trek into the woods to check on some traps that he’s been setting. Before he ships out, Hershel raises the concern that Rick hasn’t been taking his gun with him on these trips outside. I thought this was an interesting conversation because it revealed two possible aspects of Rick’s character: Either the trauma of losing his wife and the stress of leadership have given him a latent death wish or he’s actually feeling so comfortable with the life they’ve set up that he’s becoming less cautious.
While outside the perimeter, Rick encounters a survivor who is so haggard and unkempt that he initially mistakes her for another walker. As they discuss her situation—she and her husband have been living badly, scavenging what they can—she asks if she and her husband can find refuge with Rick’s people. At this point, I was all, “Like hell, lady! Rick Grimes isn’t running a charity here!” But to my surprise, we are introduced to a kinder, more diplomatic Sherriff Grimes. He agrees to meet her husband so he can ask them three questions (How many walkers have you killed? How many people have you killed? Why did you kill them?) to make sure they’re mentally fit to join their community. It turns out that she is quite far from mental stability, and Hershel did Rick a solid by convincing him to take a gun along.
Though this subplot was a bit predictable—never follow a feral woman to a second location—a part of Rick needed to see that this murderous woman represented a shadow of what he would have become without the support of his friends and his family.
The final minutes of the episode raise some disturbing questions for the group. We see one of the Woodbury refugees wake up coughing and sweating. He wanders into the showers and coughs into the communal supply of bath water before keeling over. We are left with a close-up on the poor sap’s blood-drenched face and see his eyes open to indicate his recruitment into the ever-growing zombie horde. Does our Woodbury friend have an advanced strain of the walker virus? If so, does the fact that he horked all over a communal water supply bode well for the folks living within the prison walls?
Despite not really knowing what to do with Rick in this first episode, the promise of the group’s idyllic life coming to an abrupt end—most likely because of a walker virus that is becoming more deadly—is more than enough reason to keep watching.