'Wildfire' - The Walking Dead, Season One

The Walking Dead

Season One

Episode Five

'Wildfire' - 9.5

Best day to be an extra ever. 

The Walking Dead doesn't have main plots or subplots, instead it really is just documentary-like A-B storytelling. That is reductive, of course, because it is a complex show underneath, with some of the best characters on screen at the moment. What I find is best about them is that they aren't just likable or not, they have personalities with negative and positive attributes. Rick has detractors, and Daryl has benefits, for example.

After the horrors that drew 'Vatos' to a thrilling and distressing end, 'Wildfire' opens with a slow, reflective tone as the survivors deal with the zombie attack on the camp. Of course the most poignant of the characters right now is Andrea, who is mourning the death of Amy, who died of her bites in her sister's arms. As the episode begins, morning has broken on the camp and Andrea has knelt over the corpse for the entire night, without doing anything to prevent her from rising again. Lori, Rick and Dale all attempt to comfort the grieving woman, but the former two don't get any edgeways. Lori is entirely ignored as she tries to convince her to let Amy be disabled, while Rick gets a gun pointed at him before he could finish a sentence. Dale has more luck, relaying the sad tale of his wife's gradual passing to cancer, and he and Andrea have a sweetly written and very true - if a little trite - conversation about whether either is to blame for their respective loved one's deaths.

Something we learnt in the second episode 'Guts' was that Amy's birthday was coming up, and if you can remember Andrea took a small mermaid necklace as a present. Well of course, this very day is the poor girl's birthday, and Andrea chooses to be uber depressing by solemnly draping the pretty thing over her sister's blood-stained neck. It is touching, but I'm a bit tired of shows making sad events more tragic and cruel by ruining happy days.

Other characters get a little screen time to deal with the previous night's disaster as well. Carol says goodbye to her abusive husband the nicest way she can; by desecrating his remains repeatedly with a pickaxe. The onscreen destruction of the man's skull - a man we kind of met, no less - was incredibly gross, and even I have my limits. Sure, we aren't supposed to like this guy, but it is just plain disrespectful to anyone to show their brains exploding again and again all over the camera. DEAR GOD NOW IT WON'T GO OUT OF MY HEAD.

Things don't look good for our deranged psychic Jim either, who is discovered to have been bitten by some zombie in the attack. He seems OK at first, but it doesn't take him long to deteriorate, the effects of which are shown through sweat, retching and frightening Exorcist-like flashes of disturbing images. I don't know why this is, but flashes make scary scenes infinitely more frightening; i.e. the slow exploration of the abandoned space ship in the sci-fi Sunshine. And they were just flashes of pictures featuring the ship's original crew! Anyway, Jim's condition is a catalyst for Rick's idea to take the camp and go to the CDC, which is apparently near Atlanta. This sparks a debate amongst the entire group, with Shane and Rick both wanting to go completely separate ways from one another, but it is poor Lori who winds up in the middle of the alpha-dog humping match. Of course she ends up siding with her husband, but that isn't without a good talking-to for Rick. To be honest I don't really like Lori much, she seems a bit moralistic and pushy.

Rick and Shane's disagreement comes to a subtle head as they go to scour the woods for any lost zombies. With Rick up ahead, Shane spends a brief moment with his sights set literally on his former friend and colleague, and it is kind of tense for a second. While I never expected Rick to end up dead at this point, I wasn't sure if Shane would try or not, and it was pretty touch and go for second there. In the end Shane does come to his senses and lower the gun, but not before being spied by a very confused and concerned Dale, who doesn't really make a big deal or anything, but it does hint towards problems for Shane down the line. This short lapse of judgment is the first clear and explicit depiction of his growing anger towards Rick, and it looks like this is only going to get worse as things go on.

In my favourite scene of the show so far, Amy does finally rise from death. It is quiet, without music and scored only by the soft sounds of her body reanimating. I was infinitely impressed by the show's ability to turn such an iconic zombie-film trope into a scene of true cinematic beauty, and the shot of Amy's eyes slowly opening to reveal the pale, dead stare of a walker is absolutely stunning. This single event is what the episode had led up to, with most of the sequences involving Andrea keeping her dead sister just in frame, if only to make us tense while we wait for her to leap up and eat somebody, but her real rise from the dead is so anticlimactic, it's almost sweet. Laurie Holden is perfect, like really perfect, as she says goodbye to what her sister has become, before putting the gun to the side of Amy's head and pulling the trigger. I wish the zombie-genre did more amazing scenes like these, because it is a disturbing but oddly heartwarming  depiction of human emotion and love.

As the group finally agrees to head to the CDC (well, most do), we flash to the very place in question, where scientist Dr. Jenner gives a video diary about the spread and status of the disease. I don't know if he actually named it 'Wildfire', but 'Wildfire' was declared 194 days prior, but that would be like saying 'Cholera was just declared'. Do they say that? Anyway, what really interested me was that whatever-it's-called went global sixty-three days ago, which means it was contained for what, 131 days? You couldn't kill all the zombies in like four months? Seriously?

Jenner is a clearly disheartened individual, obviously stumped by the disease and unable to find a cure, or a reason to keep searching. His last specimens are destroyed when the lab goes into 'full contamination' and he is also left without a way of researching it further, and in presumably his last webcast he describes his desire to end his own life, maybe.

Meanwhile, Jim finds himself unable to take the voyage, and asks to be left on the side of the road to die. If there is one thing to love about this show, it's its characters. We only really met Jim last episode, but in just this one scene he makes his farewell from the group a memorable one, if not for shocks or twists, but for the emotion of it all. Most members of the group say a final, heartfelt goodbye to their friend and leave him under the shade of a tree as they drive into the distance. I did remember for a second that Jim was psychic last episode? Maybe he knows what's waiting for them at the CDC? I don't know.

Something that seems to prevail this episode is guilt. Rick is clearly guilty over his late arrival to the camp the night before, and he asks many other characters whether he did the right thing or not, and you could argue that guilt is fueling his need to try and save Jim. Jim himself notices Rick's tendency to blame himself for everything that goes wrong, and in a sweet piece of dialogue attempts to absolve him, explaining that he is being left behind according to his own wishes. Andrea is also incredibly guilty, describing to Dale how she had never been there when her sister needed her, and as Amy rises again all she says 'I'm here now' repeatedly before putting her down. Even Jenner seems a bit of a slave to guilt, and there are implications - not that he caused the disease, mind you - but that he at least feels like he could have done more to slow the spread of the pandemic. I don't normally like themes, unless they are as seamlessly integrated as they are in 'Wildfire'. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was always good at burying its themes and messages deep enough so that you could ignore them if you wish, and 'Wildfire' manages that type of thematic content immaculately, and it ends up adding to the story rather than detracting from it.

In the final scene Rick and the survivors arrive at the CDC, which is pretty dead. There is a brilliant performance from Andrew Lincoln, as Rick bangs on the doors of the building as a horde of walkers begins to move in while darkness begins to fall. Jenner watches from his security cameras, but for whatever reason is reluctant to allow them in. It is very tense, and for a while it begins to look like there might be another massacre on the cards, but we wouldn't have met Jenner unless he was going to be a little important. In the end he opens the doors for the screaming Rick and the crew, bathing them in a brilliant and poetic white light as the episode draws to a close.

I think a two and a half page review indicates my feelings towards this fantastic, touching episode that manages to mix action, emotion, a great script and some perfect performances effortlessly and subtlety. My  only concern is small, in that I found the pick-axe brain fuck of Ed by his wife very cathartic, but also entirely too long and disgusting. It was important for Carol, but the extent of the violence was too much, and rids 'Wildfire' of the perfect ten the episode should deserve.