Fans of The Walking Dead if you recall yesterday I promised you that i'd cover the first episode of The Walking Dead and well i'm a man of my word. I will admit that I got into The Walking Dead TV series a little late into it's run like around season 6 or season 7 as such I never got the chance to see what the show was like when it was at it's best and so here is my review of the pilot episode of The Walking Dead Dead TV series not called pilot thank god but instead the episode is called "Days Gone By" enjoy the review everyone.
The plot of the episode is Sheriff's Deputy Rick Grimes wakes up in a hospital after being shot by a criminal only to discover not only his wife and son missing but that a zombie apocalypse has started. I will admit I fully enjoyed the story of this episode alot more then I did the story for the first episode of the prequel series Fear The Walking Dead mostly because here there was actually a strong story holding everything together where as with Fear The Walking Dead it felt like the story was only very freaking loosely connecting everything together.
Starring in this episode is Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes , Jon Bernthal as Shane Walsh and Sarah Wayne Callies as Lori Grimes. Also starring in the episode is Jeffrey DeMunn as Dale Horvath , Steven Yeun as Glenn Rhee , Chandler Riggs as Carl Grimes , Jim Coleman as Lambert Kendal , Linds Edwards as Leon Basset , Keisha Tillis as Jenny Jones , Adrian Kali Turner as Duane Jones and Lennie James as Morgan Jones.
For those wondering yes Glenn does technically appear in this episode since his voice is heard at the end of the episode which is why I credited Steven Yeun as Glenn Rhee in this episode. As for what I thought about the acting in this episode it's alot better then the acting in recent seasons of The Walking Dead i'll give it that and that's because they have this thing called a good script for you see when the script is good and gives the actor alot to work with then there going to do there best work but if the script is bad like in recent season of The Walking Dead then the actor can only do so much to make the script work.
One of the bad things about this episode is that we don't get to spend much time with alot of the other survivors in fact excluding Rick we only get to spend time with three other survivors in the entire episode. Those survivors being Shane Morgan and Morgan's son Duane Jones which for an ensemble show is pretty bad since you have to make us love all of the characters and when you don't feature all f them in your debut episode then you make it pretty hard for us to love these characters and yes i'm not counting Lori or Carl since we only get one scene with them at the episode and other three we spend time with get more scenes and more screen time.
This wouldn't be an issue if the show was thirty to forty minuets long however the show is well over an hour long and so there's really no excuse. They very easily could have had scenes at the end of the episode with the group of survivors just working out what they should do and if they should go and help Rick this way you could get across what the group's current dynamic is like as well as get across what most if not all of the characters are currently like.
If you recall in my previous post I put across the theory that Fear The Walking Dead at least for it's first season was set during the time that Rick was in hospital. Well I still think that this is true simply because we don't know how long Rick was in hospital and by the end of episode we see then pretty much the entire city of Atlanta has been wiped out and is full of zombies and so there for it is possible that the events of at least the first if not first few seasons of Fear The Walking Dead could have taken place within that small amount of time.
Out of the two pilots that i've seen for this franchise this is the better paced one since I didn't find myself checking the internet while I was watching this episode. I honestly feel that every scene in this debut episode lasts just as long as it needs to and then moves on as such we get a better paced episode and one that flows better but at the same time the end scene with the group of survivors with Shane really isn't needed since it adds nothing to the plot of this episode and nothing is missed if that scene was t be removed.
The zombie makeup for this series has always been top notch and the same is also true for this episode which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone since Greg Nicotero a legendary makeup artist provides the zombie makeup effects for this show. I honestly cannot praise the makeup effects in this episode enough because they look so freaking good and alot of the zombies look so creative simply because for some of them you can actually see how they died when they were human which is something that you very rarely get to see in any piece of zombie media.
This episode is an hour and seven minuets long which makes it three minuets longer then the pilot episode for Fear The Walking Dead which clocked in at an hour and four minuets. So it amazes me that even tho this is the longer episode it actually the shorter of the two and that might be because there's stuff actually happening in this episode where as in the Fear the Walking Dead pilot nothing really happens until maybe the last twenty minuets but here there's alot of things happening and because of that you the audience never get bored.
Now I actually lost count of how many on screen kills not including zombies that we actually see in this episode I do know tho that it's not a high number. Which yeah is honestly to be expected since this is a zombie show and so the scare doesn't come from the kills but rather the situations that are characters find themselves in and the threat that one of them could die at any minuet and in that regard is pretty creepy but at the same time I would have loved to see some kills.
Overall out of both this pilot and the one for Fear The Walking Dead i'd say that this is the better one simply because it had a stronger story among other things. As i've listed in this review this isn't a perfect episode but it is a good example of what this show could be like when it's at it's best and honestly based of this episode I can very easily see why AMC chose to keep this show around as long as did hell the next spin off series is premiering in a few days and as you all know is called The Walking Dead World Beyond as for this episode tho it gets an 8 out of 10 from me.
All of the images tat I used in this review were gathered from either the official The Walking Dead fandom wiki page or Google Images. Since all of the main episode images I got were gathered from the official The Walking Dead fandom wiki page I have no choice but to recommend the official The Walking Dead fandom wiki page for high quality and high definition images from anything to do with The Walking Dead franchise and as always we end this review as we always do with our true goddess Elvira wishing us all some very unpleasant dreams.
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