[Originally posted on October 17th, 2011.]

Oh boy. Yay? It’s all our old friends! Look, there’s Half Face! And Gut Bucket! And who could forget about old White Eyes?! We begin the new season with Grimes (GRIIIIIIIIMES!) on some Atlanta rooftop reading some epic poem into his Walkie Talkie, hoping that that one dude he met one time a hundred years ago can hear him. What? Grimes! Let’s GOOOOO! If I was waiting downstairs, I would be so pissed. What is he doing up there? Oh, he’s just delivering a free association rumination on the tenuous morality and the fading hope of a Post-Apocalyptic world into a Walkie Talkie with a 50-yard range hoping that a dude 200 miles away who is probably dead can hear him. “Is he at least pausing every once in awhile to give the guy he hopes is listening a chance to get a word in edgewise so that if they can hear each other by some kind of miracle then it’s actually towards some kind of purpose like regrouping and helping each other?” Nope! Just delivering it all in one exhausting rush and then signing off real quick. Gotta run! Hope you liked my episode of The Moth! Grimes also says “The CDC was a dead end.” (I’ll say!) And then he says “I met a man there, he told me…well it doesn’t matter what he told me.” HAHAHAHAHAH. Oh Grimes. The world as you know it is gone forever, and your ragtag gang of weary survivors faces death and dissolution at every turn, but thank you, as an audience member who enjoys intrigue, for keeping the, like, one secret this show has suggested exists, from us for another 9 episodes or whatever. Meanwhile, downstairs, it is time to hit the road. ROAD TRIP!

Everyone is getting into their cars and their RVs and their motorcycles. Wait, really?

It seems to me that in a world ravaged by zombies who are particularly sensitive to noise, maybe blazing a noisy trail down the road in your completely unprotected chopper isn’t the smartest mode of transportation? Dude is not even wearing a leather jacket. What if he skins his elbows?! Also, in Grimes’s sign off to the Walkie Talkie, he says to stay off the road, but then immediately him and his buddies are just driving down the road? What’s up, Grimes? Which is it? Do we stay off the road or do we just drive straight down the road with a motorcycle? I guess maybe he is just confused. His hat does look a little tight.

And off they go down Green Screen Highway!

In the car, Grimes and Lori are reminiscing about a trip they took to the Grand Canyon where baby Carl got sick and they had to turn around and they never even did see the Grand Canyon. “Well that sucks,” Carl says. Good point, Carl. But Grimes and Lori are giggling and they are like “No, it was actually the best.” Was it? Was the road trip where your brand new infant child got so sick that you had to take him to a strange doctor in a strange city and cut the trip short THE BEST? That was the best? Because having been on a couple of vacations in my life (not bragging), I have had some that were way better than that. Poor Grimes and Lori. They are almost as bad at taking vacations as they are at dealing with the sexual volcano that is Shane.

Can we just skip to the Shane part real quick? Like, Carl keeps trying to buddy up with Shane, and Shane keeps being very short with him, so Lori gets mad and is like “you crushed him,” and Shane is kind of like, “What do you want me to do, Lori?” And Shane actually has a point. What DOES she want him to do? We know she doesn’t want him to rape her, but that’s about it. Shane reminds her that she just told him the night before to stay away from her and her family, and it is a pretty powerful reminder of how SLOW this show moves. How long have we been hanging out with these guys? Three days? I think it has been about three days. In real time. 72 hours of The Walking Dead on nine DVDs. It turns out later that Shane is planning on leaving the group and starting a new Terra Nova on his own with no Lori and NO DINOSAURS. So he is trying to put some distance between him and Carl so that it will be easier for Carl when he disappears. Haha, uh, guys? I’m pretty sure Carl is a little boy struggling to make sense of a world that he barely knew collapsing into a perpetual nightmare of rotted corpses killing everyone he knows. I feel like he’s going to be able to “handle” Shane driving away in a Subaru hatchback.

Trouble on the road! “This traffic is worse than LA,” says the stand up comedian who just joined the group. Luckily, the carburetor on the RV gives out JUST as they are approaching a massive pile up of cars. Everyone is complaining about the pile of cars when it clearly doesn’t even matter because the RV doesn’t work? Whatever. They get out to take a look around and start taking much-needed supplies from the abandoned vehicles. Lori says that this is a graveyard and she doesn’t like the idea of taking stuff from the cars. Grow up, Lori. Seriously. Someone shoot Lori in the face please? Because that is crazy nonsense. YOU LIVE IN A HORROR WASTELAND! TAKE WHAT YOU CAN GET WHEN YOU CAN GET IT OR YOU GET SHOT IN THE FACE! Search search search. Trunks trunks trunks. That lady from Lilith Fair finds a dress, but doesn’t take it because Lori gives her a stink eye and she’s all out of bullets. Shane finds some water. Take it easy on the water, Shane.

Just then, a million zombies show up. Uh oh! Everyone get under the cars. (It’s a well known scientific fact that car smells mask the scent of human brains, just like coffee beans and cocaine or whatever they said about coffee beans and cocaine or something in Beverly Hills Cop 2 I feel like?) Except for T-Boz who just GUSHES his arm open on a rusty old car. Whoops! Don’t you hate it when you are running away from some zombies and you trip and sever your radial artery on a car and you have to look around you and laugh just in case anyone saw? The zombies almost get him but then the racist overcomes his prejudice to kill the zombies and dump some of their bodies on top of T-Bone to save him from the new zombies and later he will just have, like, a piece of sweatpants taped to his arm, so I guess he’s fine. False alarm. Oh, and that one lady gets attacked in the bathroom and stabs a zombie in the face with a screwdriver.

She’s fine too. She wants her gun back! (Boring.) You know who’s not OK, though? Some little girl that I barely even knew existed.

Sophia gets chased into the woods by two zombies and Grimes is hot on their trail, Classic Grimes Style. Run run run. Trees trees trees. Grimes catches up to her and hides her in the river and makes the zombies chase him instead. He tells her that when he’s lured the zombies away, she should just go back to the road. I’m sure this will work out fine and she will be back with her mother in no time. Grimes runs away. The zombies chase him. He kills them. It’s one of those situations where it turns out that it’s actually super easy to just smash two zombies with a rock, so I don’t even know what all the fuss was about. “Let’s make this really drawn out and pretend like it is scary when in reality we just need to hide behind a tree for two seconds and then kill the zombies really easily no problem.” CLOSE CALL! Grimes goes back to the river and Sophia is not there. She is also not back at the road. And thus begins the next 45 minutes.

The dudes go looking for Sophia. The redneck is very good at tracking. He learned everything he knows from Kate on Lost. (Seriously, I have never met a single tracker in my life, but apparently 1 out of 10 people is an expert tracker. FUN FACT.) They cannot find her. What they can find is another zombie, who they kill and cut open. Wait, why are you cutting him open? They want to see what he ate for his last meal. So they are both expert trackers and surgeons and half-digested zombie food experts. Sure.

They cut him open and it’s so gross, I guess, and then they are like “he ate a woodchuck,” which is hilarious, to imagine some zombie just chasing a woodchuck around for two hours. Should have caved their heads in with a stone, woodchuck, it’s simple. I’m also still pretty confused about this whole cutting the zombie open thing. Like, let’s pretend they DID find pieces of Sophia in the zombie’s stomach. Would they really just go back to the road and be like “Sorry, dudes, we cut open a zombie and Sophia was in there, so let’s just take off”? The mom would be like “Oh well, it was fun while it lasted,” and the old man would be like “I found some foreign language cassettes in one of the abandoned cars. I’m going to learn Italian!” No, they still would have had to find the mangled body, or whatever. It just seems like a whole lotta cuttin’ up a zombie’s butt for nothin’. They take a break for night time. Sophia’s mom is sad that her daughter has to spend the night in the forest. Well maybe your daughter should have found the fucking road then. Everyone goes to bed.

The next day, it’s back 2 tha woodz. This time around, the boys are joined by the girls and also the child. They find a tent. Is Sophia in the tent? Well, the best way to find out if Sophia is in the tent is to stand crouched right outside the tent door with a knife drawn ready to stab the first fucking thing that walks out of there.

Yikes! Guys? You can kill two zombies with one rock. I’m pretty sure pointing nine guns and a crossbow and a knife at a door that might have a little girl come running through it is a bit much. Anyway, Sophia is not in the tent. It’s just another dead body. Cool. I wish this scene was longer? Is she even in the woods? Did she ever even exist in the first place? I hope we don’t see Sophia again until the season finale so that we can just always be looking for Sophia. It’s almost TOO fascinating. Anyway, suddenly they hear church bells and run towards the bells. BELLLLLLLLLLLLLLS! They find a church and Shane expresses some concern that the church doesn’t have a steeple and couldn’t possibly have bells. You guys, I’m starting to think maybe Shane should be Group Leader instead of Grimes because that is some VERY observant shit to pull out in the middle of a child hunt on Zombie Earth. They go in the church and kill the zombies in the church using these horrifying knives that Carl found in a truck (boring story). The bells ring again, and they discover that the bells are just an Mp3 of bells that play on the church’s Zune. Whoops! Sophia probably doesn’t even know how to work a Zune, she’s so lost and innocent! Shane and Lori have another argument. Sheesh, you guys. Get a room. Like one of those soundproof rooms at the bottom of the ocean. What’s her name wants to leave with Shane. He’s like why should I? Hahaha. Oh brother. These two deserve each other!

Meanwhile, everyone takes turns in the church praying to Jesus Christ. A quick word about that: NO. Sorry, no. It’s over. No more praying to Jesus Christ. It’s nonsense! Like, even in the world we live in right now without ANY zombies in it, it’s kind of nonsense, but somehow the idea that millions, probably billions of people have become brainless zombies with horrible skin, but God is punishing Sophia’s mom by making her run away, that is kind of insulting. How self-absorbed can you be?! “O’ Lord, I know that you smited down basically everyone on Earth, but what wisdom am I to gain from this new lesson you are teaching me by having my daughter be in the woods?” Ridiculous. And then Grimes goes in there and asks for a sign. YOU WANT A SIGN? Here is a sign, it is hanging in the RV:

Just because it’s the Zombie Apocalypse doesn’t mean we need to lose our sense of HUMOR!

The ladies go back to the road. There is some argument about a gun and growing up and Grimes and zombies. It’s pretty boring. You know how you will, like, go to a dinner party at some couple friends’ house and they will start having some argument about some old issue that they clearly argue about all the time and they just have it out right there at the dinner party and you’re like surely you guys could have kept this private and it’s not really interesting for the rest of us but it does make us kind of uncomfortable and dinner is practically ruined? That’s what this is like. Unless this dinner party ends with a traditional party game of Russian Roulette. Lori first! No, Sophia’s mom first! No, Andrea first!

Carl stayed with Grimes and Shane who are making one last sweep for Sophia. Just then they see a deer. SHOOT IT! Oh wait, don’t shoot it, because Carl wants…to touch it? Grimes is making his “This is the sign I was asking for face!” And even Shane seems like he is about to cry. Am I missing something? If I had a son, and we were walking through the forest, and we saw a deer, I would be like, Son, remember what I taught you, now KILL THAT DEER. But I definitely wouldn’t be like “It’s totally fine for you to go pet that deer,” because it’s not and that’s weird. Carl makes a bunch of Klassik Karl Faces.

Right before he gets shot.

YESSSSSSSS! Hahhah. Gotcha! FUCK YOU, CARL!

Next week: the plot is advanced another two inches!

[Originally posted on October 17th, 2011.]