The Walking Dead: A Strong Mid-Season Premiere

Season Seven Part 1 of The Walking Dead didn’t exactly help to bring in new fans, in fact, it pretty much-convulsed viewers every week. The expectation hasn’t been this low for a TWD premiere in years so it makes complete sense that we were so unenthused for the rest of this season that the newest episode was actually pretty good.

For a lot of reasons actually, This isn’t the sort of episode that everyone likes but really only serves as a full on zombie action extravaganza. In fact, It’s got only one scene of any zombies at all and only the voice of Negan over the radio. It’s everything else that makes it a winner.

From the more interesting score from Bear McCreary to the moments of self-referential humour Rock in the Road is a deftly crafted premiere that echoes last season’s The Next World.

It’s not perfect and sometimes feels too self-important to care about yet it holds it together by leaving out the sadism of Negan and relegating the saviours to background threats. The only scene we get is when Steven Ogg and his crew turn up at Alexandria looking for and later threatening the life of Daryl. It’s no secret that he’s a much more effective villain than Negan, so it’s nice that he exuded menace here without pushing his performance too much.

Then you have the bursts of humour, Rick and the gang hanging back when they first meet the tiger and Gregory playing up the slimy mayor image all help to alleviate the dourness of previous episodes. It helps that this episode also brings everyone together again with hopefully no plan to split the episodes into focusing on different characters. Our heroes get to interact and get along instead of going on drawn out adventures by themselves.

The prime set piece of the episode, involving dynamite on a highway and a herd of walkers is the tensest the show’s been in a while and displays the level of teamwork and determination that will help to bring Negan down. Rosita also gets a chance to shine, jumping at the chance to show off her skills.

The episode has other curious moments such as Carol’s continued isolation, Gabriel’s flight (kidnap?) and the group at the end (the 3rd allies?), which help to make it a solid and enjoyable return. It works because it makes some sense and doesn’t revel in despair, bringing the characters we love together and giving them hope.

As far as The Walking Dead cycle of destruction and hope goes, it at least makes a war/rebellion interesting. This is something the show hasn’t done completely and as long as they don’t just repeat the same patterns afterwards, it may work out for them.

As latter day The Walking Dead goes, this was pretty good. Then again, we’ve said that before.