A police car approaches a massive pileup. Truck Beds and cars flung indiscriminately around the street. The car stops and a man exits. As he approaches the scene your senses are seemingly attacked through the television. You see the first decomposing corpse, slouched in her seat. The man continues past her. The stench of fifty some other decaying bodies, and the corresponding sound of millions of flies buzzing, pervades the deepest cracks of your mind and drenches it with macabre awe. There is little you can do but to pray, that somehow there is redemption in this morbid madness. You hear the pitter patter of small, exhausted feet, dragging themselves along the pavement, as he ducks under a car to identify their owner. They belong to a girl no older than seven, walking towards a teddy bear on the bloodstained ground. For a moment, you believe you have found your reprieve from the gravity of the situation. Your sight narrows, your mind obscures the horrors surrounding this innocent child seeking comfort from the plastic bear still moist with red. He calls out to her, “Little girl… I am a policeman, I am here to help” hoping to provide her more solace than that toy. But the tunnel through which you viewed her shatters, as she slowly turns and her condition is revealed. She is pale, at least in places where her face had not fallen off. He lets out a single “oh god” before she begins accelerating towards him with hatred, or rather, hunger in her eyes. He pulls his revolver and with but a moment’s hesitation, fires upon her, just once, in between the eyes. Enter, The Walking Dead.

Well, to be exact, enter the first episode of The Walking Dead. After that scene the theme starts. A simple instrumental track accompanied by images of abandoned cities, flies circling in unison, crows eating some dead animal… and a single bloodstained teddy bear. While short and lacking lyrics, this theme creates an extremely powerful emotion of loneliness and isolation by not including people in the title sequence. This is important. The show is trying to continue the sense of hopelessness established in the first scene. That whole cities could fall to the zombies contrasts the image of a small girl being infected.

In a flashback, the same man from the intro scene is talking to another policeman named Shane in a cop car. Shane provides the man’s name, Rick Grimes. They get a call on their scanner and race towards a highway to set up a barricade. A beige sedan approaches them at breakneck speeds. It runs over the road spikes and flips into a ditch. In a display of excellent cinematography a camera is placed in the ditch under the side of the road, capturing the car as it flips. Two men exit the car and fire at the police. This scene is reminiscent of Star Wars as no one managed to hit each other with any bullets at first. Both the criminals are eventually shot, but as one goes down he shoots rick in the side.The screen fades to black and reappears from Rick’s perspective lying in a hospital bed. Shane walks in with healthy, colorful flowers and sets them next to Rick, but Rick is unable to respond at first. When he finally gets his words out it is revealed that Shane is no longer in the room. Rick tilts his heads to his flowers and they had all wilted. He glances at the clock and realises it is not moving. These events coincide with a stop in the soundtrack, creating an eerie stillness that can be felt vividly. He falls out of bed indicating a lack of muscle mass, and making the viewer ask themselves, how long was he in that bed? He stumbles outside his hospital room towards a gate, and it is all he can do not to vomit when he sees what is on the other side. A woman with beautiful blonde hair, torn to shreds on the ground, leaving a trail of red down the hall. He makes his way out of the hospital witnessing even more perverse and horrifying sights as an elevator with “DON’T OPEN, DEAD INSIDE” scrawled in blood, and large bulletholes indicating army interaction. Rick goes out the back of the hospital, and the entire audience holds their breath with him, albeit for different reasons, when he stumbles upon a massive mound of dead bodies wrapped in hospital bandages. Unable to react in any meaningful way, he continues on to the road. He finds a bike, and a corpse. Except, this corpse is moving… and groaning. He rides it to his house trying to forget what he just saw. It’s empty. His wife Lori, and child Carl, are gone, despite his best attempt at screaming their names. He goes outside and sits on the curb. He sees a man, slowly shuffling towards him. Rick calls out to the man hoping to find at least one individual who was ALIVE alive. Behind him a figure obscured by excellent camera work and use of focus creeps forward. After calling out one more time to the man in the street. The figure behind him hits him in the head with a shovel, and it is revealed that it is a small child. The child calls to his father who shoots the man who was walking in the street in the head, revealing it was a zombie. This expertly indicates to the viewer that although there are survivors, the rules to survival have changed.

Rick wakes up handcuffed to a bed with the man standing over him. This scene amplifies the individual struggle of the new world to the viewer. To take such precaution as to tie up a clearly (mostly) healthy man, shows that the man has clearly had experience with infected individuals. The man repeatedly asks Rick what his wound is, to which Rick recalls his his shootout and replies, “Gunshot.” Rick talks with the man and it is revealed that there is a refugee center in Atlanta with the CDC working on a cure. They continue to talk. His name is Morgan and his son’s name is Duane. They continue talking into the night. When Duane uses wasn’t instead of weren’t, his father corrects him. This is important because it reveals several things about Morgan. It shows that even though the apocalypse is upon them, he is adamant on making sure his son remains educated. This is perhaps a sign that he is forward thinking and wants his son to carry on correct human language assuming humanity survives. It also shows that he acknowledges the need to do simple repetitious behavior to preserve his sanity. A car alarm goes off frightening Duane. When Rick peers outside he sees hundreds of zombies. This sudden explosion in population contrasts the single zombies that Rick had seen before. A female zombie walks up to the door and begins to turn the doorknob. Duane cries and says “She’s here”. Morgan reveals that the zombie is his wife, Jenny, who became  infected with a disease that turned her. He goes on to say that he was by her side until her initial death. This draws the parallel between the start of the scene with Rick being handcuffed, and explains the extreme preventative measures that Morgan went through. The next day Rick finds keys to the police station in his house and grabs all of the guns and a car. They split up with the intent of both reaching Atlanta after Duane learns to shoot. It cuts to a scene later that day with Morgan practicing with a rifle firing into the horde outside the barricaded house. He spots his wife, but is unable to pull the trigger.

Rick departs from Duane and his father and heads towards Atlanta. Before he hits the main road he makes a pit stop. He goes back to that decaying corpse that was near the bike he rode home on, which had managed to drag itself a good half mile or so into the woods.. He tells her that he is “sorry what happened to [her]” and shoots her in the head. This scene brings the audience back down to earth, and reminds them that these were people, that they are shooting. In a very similar sense to Jenny, the audience must cope with liking a character, but having that character be completely changed. He drives onwards but begins running out of gas. He stops at a small farmhouse and begins calling out asking for gasoline. He peers through their window, and sees a couple who both committed suicide in a fashion reminiscent of Kurt Cobain. What he doesn’t see is writing on the wall behind them saying “GOD FORGIVE US”, which adds to the horror of the situation as it means that one of them drew that with the others blood. Rick steals their horse and continues to Atlanta, past a highway full of cars and trucks, devoid of any noise or movement. The massive scale of the scene gives it points in favor of its production value and depth, to have slow yet thought provoking moments between two people contrasted with scenes of hundreds of cars completely abandoned. He enters the city and notices that it is seemingly abandoned. A few zombies begin to move out of a tour bus but Rick continues on. He hears a helicopter overhead and spots its reflection in a building. He rides after it quickly but is suddenly overwhelmed by a massive number of zombies. He rides towards an abandoned army blockade of tanks. His horse begins to stall and the zombies grab onto it's legs. Rick is flung off his mount. While some of the zombies are distracted by the horse, rick manages to get himself under one of the tanks. The zombies close in on him from both sides and he pulls out his gun. He takes out five of them before turning the gun towards himself with the intention of killing himself. Before he does however, he realizes that there is a hole in the bottom of the tank. He climbs in and closes the latch. The camera follows him from under the tank and into it with expert smoothness and lighting. He sees a dead soldier inside of the tank. The body begins to move, and Rick takes the soldiers gun and fires a single shot into his chin. He peers out the top of the tank and sees that there are hundreds of zombies around him. It is incredibly impressive that on its first episode, a show managed to get so many people involved, showing the enormous production value of the series. As he begins to accept his fate, a voice is heard on the tank's radio. "Hey dumbass, can you hear me?"

In short, this pilot manages to establish a powerful dichotomy. First a sense of helplessness is exemplified, followed by a brief glimmer of genuine hope. From the reveal of the little girl’s face, to Morgan’s inability to kill his wife, to the voice at the end of the episode, the show vigorously wears down your confidence in a character only to bring it back in such a way as to establish their individual traits that are likely consistent with the rest of the episodes in the series. This first look into the universe of The Walking Dead puts on a display of brilliant storytelling, and excellent production value, especially considering it is a pilot episode, which all culminate to have the viewer anxiously anticipating the next episode. Simply put, much is told, but much more isn’t, and what isn’t, is very enticing.