The Walking Dead Ep 4.1 Reviewed

Once upon a time it was the boys and girls who got dressed up as ghouls with boils and demanded protection money from their neighbours each Hallowe'en... nowadays the zombie genre is an all-year-round activity enjoyed with just as much enthusiasm by adults. If there's a Christmas for the undead, then it's Hallowe'en, but if there's an Easter then the rising-from-the-dead must be the premiere episode of a new season of The Walking Dead.  

Season Four opens with Rick, his companions and the survivors of Woodbury still ensconced at the prison where the primary characters spent most of the previous season. The main exterior threat has returned to being the undead, rather than the psycho-cyclopian adversary personified by David Morrissey's Governor (who is nowhere to be seen for the moment at least). However, while the reinforced fences are holding for the moment, the sheer weight of numbers pushing against their boundaries means they are still a potential danger to those within... though just how safe are the 'inmates', really?

The prison is now very much a community, complete with a 'school' for the children to hear stories with a nice side-line in survival skills, a garden in which Hershel can help human-condition metaphors bloom and where the inhabitants attempt to hold on to the new normality and continue with their lives. The premiere is essentially a scene-setter, showing that time has passed but setting out a mission statement that the events of the recent past have still taken a serious toll. Rick, who was largely the poster-boy for PTSD for Season Three is still mightily troubled and Andrew Lincoln continues to project a weary, weathered persona - surviving rather than living and continuously assessing where he goes from here. His outlook isn't helped when he grows suspicious of a fragile survivor he finds outside the grounds who believes 'you can't come back' from your experiences. Elsewhere, a group heads to the local supermarket only to find that the cash and carry has had something of a crash and the roof is about to  - literally - fall in on their world.

For a series that seems to be going through its showrunners faster than it is its black supporting characters, this is the first season under the full control of Scott Gimple. On the basis of this first episode he intends to keep the tension high and make the threat of the undead on a par with the dysfunctional dynamics of the survivors. For action fans there's plenty of hacking, slashing, stabbing and hitting things with pointy sticks, but the character-building is also still strong. Perhaps that's the one element of the show that could be a positive and a negative - you're constantly wondering if the show is merely building up its individuals only to slay them before your eyes. Will your favourites will survive another episode (because, let's face it, there's bound to be a couple of significant deaths before the season has its half-season break just before Christmas)?  

Though there are elements cherry-picked from the Kirkman/Adlard/Moore Image-published comic from which the series sprung, there's a growing feeling that though there are characters from the pinted page, this is a wholly different reality where anything could happen. You certainly don't need to be familiar with the 120 issues of the comic to be enjoying the series and there's an argument it works better if you do not.

In short, the premiere episode of the 2013/2014 season  - entitled '30 Days Without an Accident' - works successfully and bodes well. It may not be the most intense episode to date (that is a high benchmark to duplicate) but it hits all the right beats and it feels that the show is in safe hands. Possibly severed, bloody, twitching hands, but decent digits nonetheless...  

The fourth series of The Walking Dead debuted on AMC on 13th October to record ratings and comes to the UK via FOX on October 18th at 10:00pm...