‘The Walking Dead’ Returns With Eye-Popping Opener (TV REVIEW)

[rating=7.00] “No Way Out”

As was repeatedly promised by AMC throughout the weekend, it’s zombie-filled soap opera came back to deliver a midseason premiere filled with unprecedented death and carnage, quenching the bloodlust of fans left disappointed with the prior episode, “Start To Finish.” Airing back in November, the fall finale felt little more than a cold-open stretched out to fill a 44 minute runtime. As has become the norm under showrunner Scott Gimple, things picked up exactly where they’d left off two months back, with everyone’s bad decisions landing them in the worst possible circumstances.

While some characters fare better than others, fan service seems to win out over everything. Starting, obviously, with Daryl’s explosive surprise in the cold open serving as a pandering re-introduction of everyone’s favorite character who was conspicuously absent most of the first half of season six, except when he was nearly done in by a burlap sack. It wasn’t a terrible moment in itself, though it means that a particular member of The Saviors, played by Christopher Barry, won’t be showing up in future episodes. It’s too bad, really. The delivery of his lines — particularly when he mouthed the words ‘Thank you’ to Abraham — had a perfectly absurd levity to it.

With everything else taking place within the now-fractured walls of Alexandria, the blood-and-guts camouflaged members of the group, pushing ‘the buddy system’ to unprecedented stakes, somehow find a spot to reconvene amidst what was implied to be an insurmountable zombie hoard so they can further discuss their plan. After Father Gabriel offers to take Judith, granting him a temporary stay of invincibility, we follow up on the member of The Wolves who has taken Denise as a hostage, while Tera, Rosita, Eugene hover helplessly around Carol and Morgan, who are still at odds with one another.

Once they get the filler out of the way, (though there seems to be some truth behind Morgan’s philosophy as the Wolf seemingly redeems himself before being shot — by Carol), we return to the main group, who are now suddenly shrouded in darkness. Honestly, for a show that set almost all of season six over a couple of days, this felt incredibly abrupt. It’s also the second-most blatant moment of fan service, with Sam succumbing to the terror of his surroundings while narrated by Carol’s warning to him. He stops, traumatized, and unable to go any further. Everything manages to (again) quiet down long enough for Jessie to try and help her son before a perfectly-timed walker attack, who once more wait just long enough for a prolonged reaction from Jessie before devouring her as well.

Granted, the Saving Private Ryan approach of letting the battle quiet down long enough to squeeze in some heartfelt dialogue is irksome, but when Rick has to make a decision to save his son (still caught in Jessie’s iron grip despite her dying or being dead by then) is when director Greg Nicotero comes to shine. As Rick’s momentary flashes of Jessie are played back with an increasingly red hue, it contradicts his ferocity with an almost foreign sense of humanity.

Moments like this also play well given the show’s increasing longevity of its core cast, meaning the newest to be introduced are usually the quickest to meet their gruesome end. That doesn’t mean that the other Anderson kid, Ron, made it out alive — he didn’t — but not before he got a shot off and caught Carl in the eye. Yes, just like in the comic!

While getting Carl to the infirmary shifted the group’s priorities, the most edge-of-your-seat moment came as Glenn, along with Enid and her sudden 180-degree personality change, work together to save Maggie. Given how much negativity the Glenn’s entire storyline was handled in the first half of season six, as his poorly thought-out plan has him increasingly overpowered by massive herds of zombies, this was looking to be a particularly cruel moment in the show’s narrative.

Of course, this was avoided thanks to a suddenly whisper-quiet gas tanker that made its way back inside, and a last-minute save by Abraham and Sasha. Daryl then draws the zombies into a giant gas-filled pond in the center of the community, a technique that, like the zombie guts camouflage employed in the first half of this episode, come and go at random.

After Denise proves herself capable of handling emergency care, Rick goes out to do some grieving over Jessie the only way he knows how — zombie killing. Seriously, we haven’t seen Rick this hell-bent on a suicide mission since he lost Lori in the prison and disappeared for a few days to kill zombies and occasionally chat on the phone with his imagination. As everyone else, thanks to a convenient line-of-sight, watches Rick’s rampage, they all have their own personal “I am Spartacus” moment. As they join Rick in a tight zombie-kill formation, another throwback to the Glenn Mazzara’s showrunning days of season three, they stand together proving their worth as a zombie extermination unit. As the finely crafted edits quickly grow more and more frantic, it culminates into a kill-crazy montage that plays out like a flipbook roster of who’s left standing (hint: basically everyone but the Andersons).

Add to all this a quiet moment at the end where Andrew Lincoln tries to chew a little scenery as Rick musing about standing together in a new world, recalling himself waking up in a hospital having been in a coma through apocalypse, you’re left with an episode of The Walking Dead that approaches the show at its best. It’s schlocky, ham-handed entertainment with soap opera-grade scripts set amidst a world full of zombies. When this approach pays off, it’s some of the best pulp entertainment out there.

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