‘The Walking Dead” is back on the air and, after Sunday’s first episode of Season 8, we now know how producers spent the off season: stocking up on every fake bullet they could find, the better to make the episode rain hot (simulated) lead.
The all-out war — spoiler alert — between the forces of good (Rick’s people) and evil (Negan’s people) is on. Cars have been armor plated. RVs have been weaponized. Trip wires have been drawn across little-used streets. Zombies have been lured into battle by the Pied Piper of a trail of planned explosions.
At stake, as Rick put it, is whether the new, post-apocalyptic world is going to celebrate “peace and fairness” or the other values, the ones more consistent with a hellscape overrun by formerly human flesh eaters.
Having a bunch of battle scenes in the early episodes of the season probably won’t hurt the ratings for AMC’s long-running zombie series, which has spent a lot of time tinkering with the motor but now seems determined to take the vehicle out onto the track and see what she can do.
With this 100th “Walking Dead” episode, titled “Mercy,” the series has stopped making sad faces and pining for the missing (I’m looking at you, last season) and is now into full-on, you-or-me survival mode. If the show is going to continue to be primarily about tribal warfare, then actually battling other tribes seems the prudent path to follow.
The “peace and fairness” line came from Rick’s big rally-the-troops speech, which was the other thing the episode had in abundance. When there wasn’t automatic weapons fire in the general direction of Negan’s Saviors, there was oration.
And wrapped around all of it were some chin-scratching scenes that showed Rick as an old man and Rick as either a teary-eyed man or a man who has run out of contact lens solution.
Let’s see if we can figure out what to make of it all. Here are five thoughts recapping “The Walking Dead” Season 8 Episode 1, the One in Which We Learned That Twizzlers Have Survived:
1. The triumvirate is in charge. Running the show for the good guys ‘n’ gals are Rick Grimes, former deputy sheriff and leader of the Alexandria community; “King” Ezekiel, former community theater actor and leader of the Kingdom; and Maggie Green, former Southern farm-girl-turned-steely head of the Hilltop group.
Before the big battles started, all three of them spoke from atop a truck platform, a locale perhaps more immediately familiar from party sequences in country music videos.
Rick talked about wanting to make the world right. Ezekiel demonstrated that he knows his “Henry V”: “For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother,” he said; he added “she today, my sister” because, while he may be a self-proclaimed monarch, he is a feminist self-proclaimed monarch. And Maggie promised that if their side holds on to its values, “the future is ours, the world is ours.”
Later, Maggie and Rick shared a good joke about her pregnancy, which was in the early stages at the beginning of last season and continues to be so. (Can you blame the fetus for not being in any hurry to enter such a world, or even to visibly demonstrate its presence?)
“They say you can wage war through the second trimester,” Maggie said. “I’ve been fighting since the farm. Can’t stop now.”
Then they had a little leadership seminar. “You showed me how to be someone worth following,” Maggie said to Rick.
“Good,” he replied. “After this, I’m following you.”
Here’s hoping this leadership plan works out better than the first Roman triumvirate did.
2. It was inevitable that Daryl and Dwight were going to end up pals. These guys have so much in common: crossbows, straggly hair, motorcycles and an in-depth knowledge (I am assuming) of the Molly Hatchet discography.
Sunday we learned that they’re trading secrets. At the end of last season, you might recall, it wasn’t clear whether Dwight, one of Negan’s top lieutenants, was a real informer on his boss or a pretend informer, a double agent or a triple one.
Well, this week, Dwight was minding his own business (perhaps singing “Flirtin’ With Disaster” in his head) when an arrow thunked into a tire beside him. Was he being shot at? No, he was being messaged to. “Tomorrow,” said the slip of paper wrapped around the arrow.
Later, Dwight fired back, and the camera revealed that Daryl, the all-purpose tracker/shooter/transplant from “Mad Max” on Rick’s side, is his partner in this game of steel-tipped post office. Dwight’s message gave the locations of Negan’s sentries, whom we then saw getting offed, one by one. The best was the one on the tree platform, who never saw the bullet that came up through the floorboards and toppled him like a sawed-off branch.
But the point here is that Team Virtue has a powerful ally in the enemy camp, one who helped make their battle plan go a lot better. (Also: They had a battle plan!)
3. The best part about the big Rick v. Negan battle scene was Rick’s fake countdown. Rick and crew dressed their vehicles up in makeshift body armor and convoyed on over to the Saviors’ place, somehow resisting the temptation to have a demolition derby first.
They assembled in their best mobile fortress formation. Negan came out to talk to them, unprotected, and didn’t get shot right away, despite Rick having reiterated earlier that he will kill Negan and “there’s only one person who has to die.”
So opportunity ignored, and they had a lot of back-and-forth marked by more tiresome Negan bluster, which is the only kind of Negan bluster. Negan brought out his hole card, which, ridiculously, was Gregory, the caviling, not-respected official leader of the Hilltop. Trying do convince Hilltoppers to lay down their arms, Gregory was, for the umpteenth time, ineffectual.
(We won’t dwell on the dubious strategy of having the triumvirate together in so dangerous a place at the outset of a war.)
The talking went on, and then Rick said he’d issue a countdown. Oh, boy, more of the talky-talk. But at only “seven” he just started blasting away. To make up for somehow missing Negan, he and his group spent their ammunition in this post-manufacturing-more-of-it world by shooting out most of the scores of windows in the Saviors’ HQ. Air conditioning! Take that!
But their real aim was to make the compound accessible to the horde of zombies his team was artfully luring there (thanks to good field work led by Carol, Tara and Tara’s ever-present Twizzler).
All the cars were supposed to take off just ahead of the zombies, but Father Gabriel inexplicably stopped to try to help Gregory, who, of course, took Gabriel’s car and left his rescuer behind.
When last we left the Saviors compound, Gabriel had scampered away from the zombie masses to find safety inside a construction trailer. But also inside, also hiding out, was a fellow with a familiar booming, self-satisfied voice: Negan, talking more potty-mouth stuff.
It will not surprise you to learn that Gabriel, holding a big, powerful gun, let the one guy who needs to die talk.
4. I’m a little worried about the Carl. Rick’s only son has been back and forth in the series between too soft to survive and really toughening up. Although his outfit these days makes him look ready to star in a remake of “Billy Jack,” Sunday’s doings seemed to put him back in the soft camp, and dangerously so.
Scrounging for gasoline, he heard a voice asking for food — and also sounding a little crazy — from somewhere in the shadows. Carl got mad when his dad showed up and shot in the air to scare the guy away.
Sharp-eyed observers online quickly pointed out that this scene of Carl with a gas can was almost a shot-by-shot remake of the first scene with Rick at the beginning of the series
It’s unclear what that parallel is going to mean, or if it was just the producers having fun. But later, when Carl was supposed to be protecting the home base with the injured Michonne and Rosita, he sneaked off to leave some cans of food for the guy and a note, “Sorry.”
The hungry man was watching, perhaps menacingly, from the shadows, and you wondered if Carl will, indeed, be sorry, or if his good Samaritan impulses will be rewarded.
5. Will the real Rick Grimes please stand up? The episode, shockingly, gave us repeated shots of Rick with a long gray beard, suggesting a future in which he survives all of this.
We saw him in bed several times, then we saw him out of bed in a pristine kitchen with Michonne, who apparently hadn’t aged, and then being led out of this decidedly non-wartime household into an idyllic community by daughter Judith, who had aged but not as much as Rick.
These moments were always followed by the red-eyed guy, and toward the end, Red Rick said, “May my mercy prevail over my wrath,” which is a reference to a quote from the Quran that had previously been uttered by Carl’s gas-station buddy.
The fractured human timeline in the graybeard scenes suggests it is merely Rick’s vision rather than the show offering a glimpse of the future. But to make the effort put into that imagery pay off, we’ll have to be seeing more of it, which should offer a fuller understanding.
The bleary-eyed Rick seems a more realistic figure. The quotation could fit into the storyline in so many ways. But it’s not spoiling too much to point out that it is widely believed among show followers that whatever happens in this season’s war, Negan himself could well be around into the future.
And if that’s potentially the case, in this instance I will cast my vote for wrath over mercy.
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
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