548: "Days Gone Bye" (TWD S1E1 Rewatch)

[00:00:00] Laurie, Laurie, Carl, Carl, Laurie, Carl, Laurie, Carl. Hey Zed Heads, welcome to the podcast. I'm Jason. And I'm Lucy. This is The Cast of Us, episode 548. And this episode, we're covering The Walking Dead, season 1, episode 1, Days Gone By. I bet you're wondering how we got here.

[00:02:07] I can't believe we survived. I know. Welcome everyone to our Walking Dead rewatch, to all the longtime listeners, to anybody who's new and just finding us, to anybody and everyone else in between. It's been 13 years since the show started. I was in my 30s.

[00:02:26] It's a long ass time ago. I was in my 20s. Yeah, I think I'm now the age Andrew Lincoln was when he shot the pilot. So that makes me feel old. Even though he looks young. He's three years younger than me. I think something like that.

[00:02:45] No, two years. Yeah. Two years. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, oh, fuck him. He's two years younger. We were watching it last night and I said, hey Peter, and he's like, well, Andrew Lincoln's younger than you there. He was not happy. That's funny.

[00:03:00] Well, yeah, so we decided we're going to start back at the beginning. So it's The Walking Dead, season 1, episode 1, Days Gone By, which was also the title of the first collection of comics, I think. Yeah, it was indeed.

[00:03:15] And I'm just quickly, briefly, in case there is somebody new to us, the way we do our podcasts is not linear. We don't just go through and tell the story in order because you've all seen it and you know what happened.

[00:03:28] So we just kind of have a conversation about it. We come with points that we want to talk about, but it's pretty free form. And we do end up going really in depth usually and covering everything. Then we have like listener feedback.

[00:03:40] So if we miss anything, you guys can write it and let us know. That'd be great. So what did you think in general? It was like putting on a nice cozy sweater and remembering a very good piece of television.

[00:03:56] There were some bits that maybe didn't age so well and other bits that are timeless. So yeah, it was just really nice to go back into it. And I laughed a lot. There was a lot that made me laugh in it.

[00:04:06] In a nice way, not laughing at it, more given things that happen later or things that we now know or how the show is now. Some things just seemed really quite funny in retrospect, but not in a mocking way and like a kind of cozy way, I hope.

[00:04:22] And some was just funny. Like when he got on the horse and it kind of took off when he wasn't ready for it. The horse. I can watch the horse. That really upset me. I remember the first time I watched it being like, no horse!

[00:04:36] But knowing what happens. I was like, he's lying to you. He's like, it's okay. Come here. It's all right. It's going to be all right. Come with me. I want to make a proposal. And I'm like, don't listen to him. You don't know.

[00:04:49] You and all your brothers run away. I know, run away horsey. I don't think I found the horse as upsetting the first time around. This time I could barely look at the screen. I was like, the horse! The horse! It was awful. Awful. Poor guy.

[00:05:05] I mean, what you kind of wonder when you go back to watch something is, will it hold up? I thought it was as great as ever. I was particularly keyed in on how focused it was and how deliberately, confidently paced, which I love.

[00:05:22] It's a great introduction to just a few characters, Rick, Morgan and Shane mostly, and just the world of The Walking Dead. And it made me realize, I mean, I've always kind of felt this, but as The Walking Dead

[00:05:33] goes along and more and more characters come into it, I almost always appreciated the episode when they would just focus on a couple of characters. And Glenn Mazzara started doing that. He realized, you know, when you just try to serve everyone in every episode, then it feels scattered.

[00:05:50] So when you focus on just a couple of characters, then some people don't like that because their favorites aren't there. But it's better storytelling a lot of the time. Not always, but you know what I mean?

[00:06:01] Because you can really capture, I mean, in this, it's about this one man's waking up to this horrible world, the world has ended and his, it can be very slow paced because it's about his emotions.

[00:06:15] And so I was still captivated by it, you know, even though I know what happens and I know what the world's all about and everything. Something I'd forgotten and loved was that you actually open with the little girl scene. I'd forgotten that.

[00:06:31] I thought you woke up with Rick in the hospital. It's been so long. And I was like, yeah, it starts like that thinking probably 28 days later and getting confused. And you don't see that little girl scene again.

[00:06:42] You're kind of left to insert that into the narrative on your own. Like it just is what it is. And it's brutal. It's brutal. You see a little girl get shot in the head like that.

[00:06:54] As soon as I saw that, I was like, oh, now I know why Lucy liked this show from the start. I don't care for cute children. Just kidding. It was, I couldn't believe how graphic it was looking back.

[00:07:10] I was like, this was the cold open to one of the best network pilots of the last 20 years and a little girl gets shot in the head in the first two minutes. And that stunned me because I had just forgotten. I'd forgotten that that was it.

[00:07:28] And I thought that is amazing. And the way that Andrew Lincoln plays that scene and the iconography of like his hat and he's so orderly and just everything about it is so great. Like it really is just such an amazing opening.

[00:07:44] You wonder, okay, what are they doing here? Because that's a pretty shocking thing to do. And I presume it's just because Walking Dead changed TV. TV has gotten gorier because I believe of The Walking Dead.

[00:07:58] If you watch a medical drama before The Walking Dead and one after the ones after, you'll see the guts, but not the ones before so much. And so I remember reading the comic because it came out seven years before the show ever did.

[00:08:13] And I was a fan the whole time wondering how are you going to show this on TV? It's so gory. It's not a, we're not in a movie theater, you know? When Morgan shoots that one zombie in the head point blank, which was another kind of

[00:08:29] shocking scene, I was like, oh, that's how they're going to do it. They're just going to do it. Yeah. And Rick does the same to that like derpy deputy. He shoots him just straight in the head. It doesn't shy away from that at all.

[00:08:40] And it's two things I think you made me think of there. One is how…so putting it in the context of where TV was in like 2009, 2010, I think the other thing AMC had done round about that time was Mad Men.

[00:08:55] And although Mad Men and The Walking Dead don't seem to be that connected, Mad Men always really leaned into a very filmic style. Like every episode of Mad Men was like watching a very rich movie. And Breaking Bad too. And Breaking Bad as well, right? Yeah.

[00:09:10] And I think The Walking Dead took that and ran with it and it had the extra like filmic thing of being like a Western, you know, with the sheriff. Right down to hiring a film director to do it, you know, Frank Darabont.

[00:09:22] And this pilot is essentially a film. It's essentially a…and you know, Kirkman always said it was to be the zombie film that never ended. Like what happened? Not pulling away when you get to a community, not pulling away when someone turns up at the

[00:09:35] gates of somewhere safe. And that really struck me. And the other thing I would say from memory, I didn't have time to read the comic again. I think what I might say is at the end of season one, I would like to take a beat and

[00:09:48] read the comic and just make sure where I'm at. This is pretty true to the comic if I recall correctly. They don't change much in this episode from those opening issues. And that's cool. No, like the whole car chase scene was pretty close to the same.

[00:10:05] And yeah, very much. And people look like their characters as well. I think Andrew Lincoln's almost the furthest away from what he looks like in the comic. Yeah. But one thing that stood out to me that was new, because I like to see, oh wait, I'm noticing

[00:10:20] something I didn't notice back then or because of what happened later, like you were kind of saying earlier, it changes how I see it. And I always thought when Rosita and Eugene and Abraham came into the picture in season

[00:10:35] four, they were dressed just like their comic book counterparts. And the comic, even though it's a very grounded comic, it still looks kind of comic booky the characters do. And so I felt like, oh, they look like they're right out of the comic, but they don't fit

[00:10:57] in this show because they're too comic booky. And then they started dressing them differently after that. So, I mean, the way they acted was a broader, a little bit more silly than the rest of the characters to even going forward. Eugene always was right.

[00:11:12] Abraham and Rosita maybe tone that down a little bit. But I always felt like how they feel like they came out of a car. They really did come out of a comic book into the real world and in a way that takes me out of it.

[00:11:22] And the thing that I forgot is that's how Rick looked to me watching this pilot. He's got his goofy ass sheriff's hat that nobody outside of Mayberry wears as far as I know. The uniform is terrible. Those trousers are awful.

[00:11:36] The big black pockets and that hat goes on to be given to Carl and passed down to Judith. And it makes more sense for a kid to be wearing a goofy hat like that.

[00:11:46] But to me, I was like, oh, look, he looks the same as I felt like when I saw Eugene. I'd forgotten that Rick gave me that same feeling. Now, the way he acts is very, very grounded, but just his look, you know? I don't know.

[00:11:58] It is grounded, but also he is quite… Dramatic. …lawful good, isn't he? And it's like he's very like… That don't last. It doesn't last. Like that's what made me laugh is like this is like unsullied Rick. This is like… Compassionate. I'm sorry this happened to you.

[00:12:15] Yeah, he's like compassionate, like weeping, like, oh, this is terrible. Are you sure they're not alive? And then I'm always thinking about that moment in Alexandria where he's like covered in blood and Michonne's knocking him out. He's like, what? And I'm like, oh, the places you'll go.

[00:12:28] When he said what, had he just like killed somebody? I think it was. And then there was like a pause and he's like, what? And Deanna's there like, oh, and he's like, what? And I'm like, yes, it is wild. And I think…

[00:12:50] I feel like for those who are like maybe listening to us for the first time, I feel like, holy crap, sexism, Batman. Like, I'd forgotten how sexist the first season of The Walking Dead is. And the dialogue in this is…

[00:13:03] I mean, Shane comes off like a total asshole. Like he's referring to women as like pairs of boobs who are too dumb to know to turn light switches off. And then Rick makes the fatal error of saying that Laurie always remembers to turn the lights on.

[00:13:18] And that, my friends, is where Judith comes from. It was interesting because, you know, Shane is played by Jon Bernthal. Who's amazing. I love Jon Bernthal. Yes, very good. Love him. And I had only seen him… They had a show based on the movie The Witches of Eastwick.

[00:13:36] I think it only lasted one season. Was he in that? And he was Rebecca Romijn's abusive boyfriend or husband. Of course he was. And he was a total asshole. And now he's here and I know Shane in the comic is an asshole.

[00:13:48] And he shows up and he's talking about, you know, being sexist asshole. And I'm like, yeah, you're an asshole. Jon Bernthal is great. He's good at playing assholes. He's so good. I listened to…

[00:14:00] Throughout this rewatch, I want to point out things that I listened to or read along the way that made me appreciate this show more. And I believe I listened to Jon Bernthal on WTF with Mark Maron. It was years ago. It must have been seven years ago.

[00:14:13] Oh yeah, great episode. Such a good episode. I mean, I think he's so wonderful. Like, trained in Russia in the Stanislavski method. He has his own podcast now too, which I think is supposed to be really good. I got to check it out. He's an incredible performer.

[00:14:27] Yeah, he really is. And if you watch him in The Bear, he's excellent in The Bear. He is excellent in The Bear. That's like the most recent thing. But so I'm listening, you know, I'm like, God, you're such a jerk.

[00:14:37] And he's saying, you know, yep, I have to walk through and turn off all the lights. And I mean, you know, Rick had asked him what's the difference between men and women. And he said they don't know how to turn the lights off.

[00:14:48] It's always a great conversational gambit. Great, great. Always start conversations like that. I mean, it's two guys. So you know, when you're with your friends, I'm sure you're not like being politically correct all the time.

[00:14:59] Oh, I always start my questions with, hey gals, let's talk about the differences between men and women. What's the difference between men and women? I know how you are when we're off the podcast. I'm just kidding.

[00:15:09] You should see how many lights are on in this room right now. It's unbelievable. I mean, I was thinking about it like what an asshole. And then I'm like, but you know what, Jenny, she leaves all the lights on around this house

[00:15:19] and I have to go around and turn them all off. And then the only time she ever cares whether a light is on when it shouldn't be is if I'm sitting in a room with a light on, she'll come in and be like, can I turn this off?

[00:15:29] And I'm like, what the hell? So I'm team Shane. No, I'm just kidding. Team Shane. Hashtag team Shane. Hashtag pairs of boobs. It's funny because when you think about it, it's like actually kind of tame. I'm not trying to stand up for Shane here.

[00:15:43] He's being an asshole, but when he could have said something much worse than they don't know how to turn the lights off, you know, it's kind of funny. It's almost cute. But then he's like calls him a pair of boobs. Like you said, that's not great.

[00:15:55] It's very, it's almost like 1980s standup. Like you know what I've noticed about men and women? And I'm like, oh, let's just leave this dialogue behind, please. And then later Morgan and Rick are like our crazy wives taking the photo albums. And I'm like, what are women like?

[00:16:10] I'm just like, oh yes, we're terrible. You know, anyway, it made me laugh. It made me laugh because the show did better. Like I think that's the thing. If it stayed like that all the way through, I wouldn't still be watching.

[00:16:24] But it made me laugh because it got better from season one onwards, I think, in how women are depicted. I mean, yeah, for sure. For me, it's one of those things like we talked about in one of the most recent episodes

[00:16:41] of The Daryl Show where one of the guys was homophobic. And I'm like, yeah, people are assholes. Let's see that. Don't pretend they're not. And Shane talking this way, it seems like some way a guy would talk. I'm totally fine with it.

[00:16:55] You know, I don't agree with it. If this was a guy in my life, he probably wouldn't be my friend. But what I'm saying is to have this kind of a character saying this stuff makes sense. It establishes a character for sure.

[00:17:05] I mean, it would have been a different vibe if it opened in the car and they're reading Simone de Beauvoir and talking about second wave feminism. That would have been a bit mad.

[00:17:14] And even Rick kind of chuckling at it, even though he being the sensitive guy that he is, at least at this point, says, oh yeah, I'm the one who forgets the lights, you know.

[00:17:23] But he still chuckles at Shane because he knows or at least he thinks as far as he knows that Shane has a good heart and he's not going to say, you know, you shouldn't talk like that. And I know that Rick's also like, women are mean.

[00:17:33] She said mean stuff in front of her kid. I'm like, Rick, you're going to see worse stuff than that. You know, Laurie is tough to deal with. I feel bad for Rick. Also some of the stuff Rick says, James. I'm like, don't worry, Carl's going to hear worse.

[00:17:51] That's true. Yeah. Yeah. When Rick's saying like, she said that she didn't even know if I cared and I can't believe she said that in front of our son and goes to school like that.

[00:18:00] And I'm like, oh my God, the things Jenny and I say to each other are way worse than that. There's something so pure about Rick in this episode. I'm like, oh man, this is maybe I mean, they had to do that so that he had somewhere to

[00:18:12] go like if he was jaded in the first episode. But there are some moments where I'm like, oh man, things are going to turn real quick. Yeah. It's great that he started out here, I think. And yeah, I loved him as a person here.

[00:18:26] And then I started not to like him so much as a person, but he remained my favorite character throughout the series. I think the other bit that made me laugh thinking about what comes forward is when Laurie's like, I'll drive into the city and everyone's like, no!

[00:18:41] I was like, I mean, to be fair, they do really lean into the women can't drive trope when Laurie flips a car in season two on an empty road with no other drivers around. So like, I don't know what you're going to do.

[00:18:54] Laurie and Andrea, not great for the feminist cause. The car thing was bad, but I the way Shane did it was very douchey. But I agree with the sentiment. You have a son here. You can't go off by yourself into a zombie infested city. Let's think about this.

[00:19:11] I mean, he just like forbade it, which is like, who the fuck are you to tell me what to do? But I don't blame him for not wanting her to do that. There's also like tied up in this point as well.

[00:19:21] I think I had forgotten that we established Laurie, Shane and Carl in this episode. I had it in my head that it's just Morgan and Rick and Dwayne and Shane pre-apocalypse. But yeah, we actually see the camp.

[00:19:36] We see like Daryl in the distance on top of the RV. I was like, oh my goodness. I was like, oh yeah. I was trying to think. I didn't see that. I'm glad you brought that up because I was like, which characters from the pilot are

[00:19:52] in the finale? And I thought there's none. And then I like, oh yeah, Rick was in the finale. I just kind of try to put that out of my mind, but he was in the finale. And I thought, okay, he's the only one.

[00:20:02] But I guess since we saw Daryl on the RV, it's both of them. He's on top of the RV with his crossbow. And I was like, oh, you're going to go for us? Because we didn't see Carol, right? No, Carol.

[00:20:11] I feel like we might not see Carol till episodes three or four. Yeah. So Daryl and Rick are the only two that were in the pilot and the finale. And I had a look, the main cast on the credits for this episode at least are Andrew Lincoln,

[00:20:26] John Bernthal, Sarah Winkleis, Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn. I'm laughing because I wrote their initials and it says JDM and I'm like, Jeffrey Morgan? Jeffrey DeMunn, Stephen Young and Chandler Riggs. They were the only seven named as main cast.

[00:20:42] And I think Emma Bell and Lenny James get credited in this one as supporting or featuring. And then I think Norman and Melissa are like supporting cast for the rest of season one, which is wild to think about now given where the show goes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:01] I mean, if a show's done well, it will figure out what's working and play that up. You know, Lost did that very well. And Walking Dead did it when it could. Yeah. With Daryl in particular.

[00:21:15] But seeing, yeah, seeing Dale and Amy and Laurie, I mean, Andrea, I remember just being really thrilled by that because I was a fan of the comics and they all look like great at the comics too. But I also can't help but think about all their deaths.

[00:21:34] When I heard Glenn's voice, I got really upset. I was like, I don't know if I can do season seven episode one again. I just don't. Like, I feel like watching, knowing what's coming is so hard. I'm looking forward to that one.

[00:21:49] I know that sounds weird, but because I remember it being a good episode, even though it was hard. Absolutely. But yeah, his wee Steven Yeun's wee voice. I mean, it was so great because here's the thing.

[00:22:03] This show, like sitting down and like, okay, we're on a journey here. And by the way, if you want us to keep going through this whole thing, we need to have a big enough audience to make it worthwhile.

[00:22:18] So tell your friends if you have a Walking Dead Facebook group, just send them to thecastofus.com. That's the easiest way. But what I was going to say is just sitting here thinking, okay, maybe we're going to be watching whatever it is, 177 or whatever episodes of this.

[00:22:35] And it's so bleak and it's all about death and loss. And I just think for this episode in particular, it's this guy waking up with death all around and he lost his family. But there's this undercurrent of hope that, oh, maybe he will find his wife and child

[00:22:52] again and you find out they're alive. And it's like, yes. And okay, she's fooling around, but still they'll figure it out. And then the thing at the end with he's stuck in the tank, but then you hear, Hey, dummy. Hey, dumbass. Yeah, you in the tank.

[00:23:08] And then that song that you mentioned, Space Junk, right? Comes in and it's such an upbeat little ditty. And it's like, okay, this is a great ending. I think things aren't quite as bad as we thought. So that's really important.

[00:23:22] It's so bizarre as well, that ending with the music and he's in the tank and you see, I love it. I loved it. It was so nice to rewatch. It's a good place to end on a bit of an upbeat note there.

[00:23:35] Otherwise it would have been too depressing. Like The Last of Us, if you're fans of that show, they were going to end it. They had to smush episodes one and two together because the place where they were going to

[00:23:48] end it was just this super downer moment, throwing a child into a fire in the end. So they decided to smush them together just so you wouldn't have that at the end. I think this pilot should be studied in television classes about how to establish the environment,

[00:24:06] the world, what's happened. Morgan, it broke my heart seeing Morgan again, knowing where the fuck he ends up. I'm sorry. I was like, oh, let's just pretend. Morgan has the most tragic story of all because he ends up on Fear the Walking Dead. It's so sad.

[00:24:24] He also loses his wife and kid, but you know, Fear the Walking Dead. But he's such a good storytelling device, the way he fills right in on what's happened. Yeah, and us if we don't know about zombie movies. Morgan coins Walker.

[00:24:37] Morgan is the one who says Walker for the first time. He establishes the rules and the stakes. I just loved that. He and Dwayne. Dwayne, who I remembered as being a polite little boy, but it's something like, I just

[00:24:49] hit this son of a bitch in the head with a shovel. Dwayne, you angel. He was great. Yeah, I mean, it was seeing Dwayne was one of the saddest for me. Like, oh, this cute little happy little kid who loves his daddy.

[00:25:05] And you know, he's a good boy. And then I thought, you know, if Morgan had only shot his wife, his son would have lived. And I thought that would be a good first line of a short story.

[00:25:18] If John had only shot his wife, his son would have lived. What? Why? Because Dwayne must get bitten not long after this, because it's Morgan's wife that does it, isn't it? Like spoiler alert for future episodes.

[00:25:32] And I mean, oh yeah, if I wasn't clear, we're going to be talking about the whole series. So it'll be spoiler filled. And if you haven't seen it, you should go watch all of The Walking Dead and then come back and listen.

[00:25:46] If you haven't seen it and you've tuned in episode 548 of The Cast of Us. I mean, I applaud you and I'd love to know your story. So yeah, we find out in clear the season three, great season three episode where Morgan's

[00:26:00] lost his mind that he just, I mean, here we see he didn't have the strength to choose wife and then I forget the exact details, but she bites Dwayne. And he and I don't know, he and Andrew Lincoln are just such great scene partners.

[00:26:14] It always cracks me up that they're both British. Just cracks me up. I'm like off screen. I'm like London and then they go back on and they're doing these. All right, let's go. Both their accents are, they improve. They're still good, but they get better. Yeah.

[00:26:30] I'm no expert either. It doesn't, they seem fine to me. They seem fine. I don't know. But when Lenny James, he's so incredible in this and he always is incredible. But when he has a great script to work with, it's just the best, right? He's magic.

[00:26:44] He's a wasted talent on fear and in this it's like, yeah man, I wish he had more stuff like this to do. One of my ambitions is to see Lenny James in a stage play in London. I think it'd be really good. Like I just, I don't know.

[00:26:58] I have so much time for him as an actor. One time I'm going to talk a little bit about my, because one thing that's different for me since we started this 13 years ago is I've met all these actors.

[00:27:14] I've interviewed them and I've been on the show a couple of times. And Lenny James, I only got to do panels with him. He was never on the podcast. I don't know why we should have tried harder. But anyways, he's kind of a quiet guy.

[00:27:32] But I remember one time I said, yeah, Morgan just has a dark cloud around him all the time or he has a dark cloud over him. And the audience started to boo and they thought I was saying something bad about Morgan and Lenny James or something.

[00:27:46] And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, don't go there because Lenny James is the most amazing thing ever and Morgan's the greatest character. I figured out at that point in my panel moderating career how to turn things, you know, and everybody

[00:27:57] started laughing and just want to get that straight. But Lenny James, when they started booing, he kind of looked over at me like, are you saying something bad? And I just wanted to make it clear because I think he's the best. He's haunted though. He's a haunted character.

[00:28:10] Like that's the thing with Morgan is like he's like Rick. If everything had gone wrong for Rick earlier or something like their lives, there's this weird mirror where Rick gets hit. Rick's pain comes from what happens when you keep going.

[00:28:24] Whereas Morgan's pain seems to come from things that, you know, Dwayne dying and his wife dying Yeah, I was I had forgotten that Morgan was already pretty intense by this time and pained. Those are two things that his characters had all the way through The Walking Dead.

[00:28:42] And I was thinking about how we talked about this, I think during the finale, but The Walking Dead is a lot about family. And in this first episode, I mean, that's kind of the emotional what pulls us through. It's very focused. As I said, it's two things.

[00:29:01] It's this one guy, Rick, just exploring this, the new reality of this destroyed world. But also it's him. One of his main characteristics is his love of his family. And that's tied into him having problems with his wife because that's his greatest sadness right now.

[00:29:18] You know, when he's having problems with his family that upsets him. So that's kind of the flip side of the coin. But as soon as he gets out of the hospital, the first thing he does is go home and try to find we get our first call.

[00:29:33] And so he, you know, that's his goal. He wants to get back together with his family, his family's everything. And that's what pulls us through. I think this pilot is just we want to see him reunite with his family.

[00:29:44] And then Morgan is like the other side of well, he's going to be the other side of that. Like he's he's already lost his wife and you can tell it pains him, but he still got to protect his son.

[00:29:56] And then the next time we see him, as we mentioned earlier, he's lost his son too. And that wrecks him. Like I think The Walking Dead is about family. It starts off here in the first episode being about actual family, but then it becomes about found family.

[00:30:09] And on a meta scale, it's about fandom family like TWD family and Zed head family and everything. Right. And it all fits together. But Morgan is an example, at least for a while there of someone who's lost all that.

[00:30:23] And then he just becomes a guy who has to clear, which means kill. And he has no connections to anyone. He's gone bonkers because he doesn't have that family yet. Then he gets brought back into the fold and, you know, Rick helps him and then grace to

[00:30:36] on fear. So it really, I mean, the relationships are so important. I mean, I guess they are in most shows, but not always. I mean, a lot of shows are more plot centric, but the characters in the relationship are really the heart of The Walking Dead.

[00:30:55] I think so. And I looked up the actor who played Dwayne. It's a guy called Adrian Kelly Turner, and he had a few small parts and things after The Walking Dead. And he's also a youth activist and does a lot of different things now.

[00:31:10] So I was pleased to see that he had a good career coming out of this because that's pretty awesome. Like I was in the pilot of The Walking Dead actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was good too.

[00:31:22] I mean, one of the things that this is reminding me of is that it's an absolute sin that Andrew Lincoln never got nominated for an Emmy or something. Like he's so good. He's so good in this pilot. He sells so much with a script that is what 70% silence.

[00:31:38] Like he has to do so much and he carries it and it's just amazing. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I talked about the deliberate slow pacing and I think part of that is the spare music. A lot of times during the tensest parts, there's no music.

[00:31:57] We just left to feel what we're feeling from what we're seeing now. And that works pretty well. I mean, I like it later on when, Bear McCreary I found kind of underwhelming actually. But overall I would say later on they got other composers that were doing better.

[00:32:15] But anyway, this episode was great because there was spare and then when the music did come in, it was when he was at home crying, Rick was at home and then there was some sad music there that really got me in part because there was nothing before.

[00:32:28] But anyway, what I'm getting at too is the lack of dialogue. Like The Walking Dead faltered in some ways when the character started speechifying a lot and we're going to get to that as we go along in the series.

[00:32:41] But I think often over the course of the series, it's at its best when there's no dialogue and it's just a character reacting to a situation, you know, and you see long stretches of something happening without anyone talking. That's when it can be at its best. Absolutely.

[00:33:01] Letting the actor do the work without the script needing to be there. I have one nitpick about Rick going back to the house and having his little break down on the floor, which is when they go to Alexandria.

[00:33:11] I'm sure he has a conversation with Michonne where he's like, Laura, you know, I always thought about getting a nice house like this. And I'm like, oh my God, your house is really nice. The first episode I was like, it's immaculate. It's got a lovely porch.

[00:33:24] I was very impressed with the Grimes real estate. So just saying, I didn't think Alexandria was that much nicer. Maybe he'd forgotten. All right, maybe we'll let's go ahead and do our normal points format. I feel like I've talked a lot.

[00:33:39] Do you want to go into another one? Yeah, why not? Let's have a look. So we talked about the cold open. I've written burger misogyny, boobs and bitches. I feel like we covered that. Duane as well. One thing about that is Shane dipped his fries in Rick's ketchup.

[00:33:59] And I felt like that was foreshadowing with Laurie, you know, feel like I saw or heard Jon Bernthal give an interview and it might have been a Walker stalker where he talks about that being a deliberate decision or he's like, Oh yeah, I thought that would be

[00:34:15] and I'm like, Oh yeah, that's quite funny. Or he and Andrew Lincoln were talking about it. You know, it might have been me asking him that. I don't know. I've I've because I know I brought it up on the podcast with Andrew Lincoln. And he laughed.

[00:34:30] But I've also done panels with Bernthal. So I might have asked him. I don't know. I remember Walker Stalker. I can't remember if you were moderating or not. He and Sarah Wayne Cowleys were on a panel.

[00:34:40] He was talking really enthusiastically about like all their decisions about how to stage their sex scenes and Sarah Wayne Cowleys was just like, Not everybody needs to know this Jon. That was me. I was asking about it because we'll see that steamy sex scene.

[00:34:56] How do you describe it? I don't know. In the grass. Peter leaned over when they were kissing in the tent and he was like, We're watching Judith get made. But also awesome. Okay, so Zeds are really different in this episode. Not really different, but quite different.

[00:35:15] So what I noticed, I think because it's the pilot and it's got big budget, we got a lot more close up detail of the Zeds than we were getting in later seasons. And I really like that.

[00:35:25] Like they leaned into the horror of like the long fingers coming through the door and dead open inside door. Bicycle girl is just incredible. The little girl zombie is amazing. They're faster than they end up being in later seasons when we see them in Atlanta and even

[00:35:42] bicycle girl is pulling herself along pretty quickly. I don't think we would necessarily see that in later seasons. They seem to be smarter. So we see Morgan's wife trying to open the door and we see them clambering on the tank.

[00:35:55] I couldn't really decide if clambering on the tank broke rules that are established later or not. Yeah, I'm kind of opening my eyes to that one. We see the little girl pick up her bunny, which we don't really see Zeds do that later.

[00:36:11] And they seem to lean more into their more active at night, which is something that we never really come back to. Like Morgan's like the kind of…the impression you get from this episode is that they're

[00:36:25] flooding the street outside Morgan's at night and then disappearing in the daylight, which isn't how they work in later seasons. Yeah, they're just out all the time. Yeah, this isn't really a nitpick because I think with every show I've ever watched

[00:36:37] and loved, the first season is about finding your feet and what works and what doesn't. But I thought it was really interesting in the context of what we've just come off with the Daryl show, which is what happens when Zeds are manipulated or advance or change

[00:36:52] in different ways. So it was really interesting to see how they were first envisaged versus how they ended up being. And I remembered when we were watching it, the zombie, the very standout zombie at the

[00:37:06] end, the guy in the suit, he looks a bit like Tommy Wiseau who did The Room. I was like, oh yeah, that zombie. For some reason, they really feature him. He keeps showing up and I remember I think people were like theorizing about him that

[00:37:18] it meant something or something. But we never saw him again. I think his makeup was just good. Yeah. And I thought it was kind of cool actually that we just kind of kept seeing the same one. There's something artistically satisfying about that. It wasn't just like…

[00:37:33] I think so. Yeah, it was a good idea to keep showing him. And there was a scene I'd forgotten about but I really liked where Rick is sitting on his porch and he sees this guy walking in the distance and it's like blurred. Yes, I love that.

[00:37:47] And he starts kind of waving. He does the weirdest non-human wave. He's sort of like… Then you see the figure and I love this in horror films when something, the focus starts to sharpen or you realize something's not quite right because we see him start to stagger

[00:38:01] and we know what that means. But Rick's just kind of like, who's this? And then Dwayne comes up behind him and hits him with a spade. But I thought that was cool. And I didn't realize that Rick's first Zed kill is the one that's just sitting

[00:38:15] outside his house. I always was in my head like, oh, it must be the little girl. But no, it's just a random zombie. And his… I have to say the face mask hit different after COVID. Seeing him in one of those visors, I was like, oh yeah.

[00:38:28] If it had been a later season, he would not have had to swing that hard with the bat. He just barely had to tap it because they had butter heads later on. Well, that's the butter heads were on my mind as well because I was like, oh, there's

[00:38:39] a lot of shooting here. And I'm like, yeah, I guess they don't realize that ammo is finite. And I mean, Rick comments on it. He's like, you'll go through ammo more quickly than you realize. But they're still thinking this is getting fixed in three weeks.

[00:38:51] So I suppose it is natural that they would shoot rather than stab. Yeah, use knives. Yeah. But yeah, those were the things I noticed about the Zeds. Rick has four kills, man outside his house, his deputy Leon, who he didn't think much

[00:39:06] of, but he wants to put him down, bicycle girl and little girl. So those are his four kills for this episode. Yeah. The deputy is a merciful act, which I thought about with zombies a lot. Like, man, that doesn't look like too much fun.

[00:39:20] If I had the chance to put someone out of their misery, I'd do it. Unless you were Morgan, in which case you don't. I mean, that's a little harder, but that's another great thing about zombies is zombie

[00:39:33] movies is and tragic and great is it's someone you cared about that suddenly this thing. Yeah. I mean, so a few things about the zombies bicycle girl look incredible. I was thinking something new again that I didn't realize before when he saw her.

[00:39:53] I think that's the first time he would be like, oh, people have become monsters because he sees the don't dead open inside door and he sees the fingers come out. And I actually thought it was a little bit unbelievable that he would just run away from

[00:40:09] that even though they were all white and they were whispery. I still think he would at least be like, who's in there? But he's just like, I'm out of here. Like you don't know about zombies, you don't know what's going on and you're just going to run away.

[00:40:28] I didn't believe it. I never had that thought before. Jason, the message was really clear. Don't dead open inside. Don't dead open inside. So I mean, fine, he runs away. But when I think he doesn't, it takes him a while, of course, as it would anyone to

[00:40:43] realize what's happening. So he sees this half gone emaciated like rib cage showing woman just crawling along. It's like, oh wait, this is like, what is that? I don't know. But she's a monster.

[00:40:58] And I don't even know if it registers to him that the dead have risen at this point. But he knows people have changed into something bad. By the way, with Bicycle Girl, since I'm talking about her, Karen and I, when we had Andrew

[00:41:14] Lincoln on for our 100th episode, we asked him to give us this intro inspired by the scene. So I'll play it. Hey, this is Andrew Lincoln, Rick from The Walking Dead. You're listening to the 100th Walking Dead cast with Karen and Jason. I'm sorry this happened to you.

[00:41:35] Amazing! I love that. He agreed. He laughed when I asked him to do that. That is incredible. And I like one of the subtle storytelling things they do. When Rick sees the little girl in the first, in the cold open, when she turns around, he's

[00:41:53] not shocked so much as distraught. It's like he knows what has happened and he's sorry about it. Whereas with Bicycle Girl, he's like, what the fuck has happened? Whereas with the little girl, he's like, oh man, I know what I need to do. And I didn't like it.

[00:42:10] And you see him also ask Morgan, are you sure they're dead? And Morgan's like, yes, they're definitely dead. Because that's right before he's going to go kill one. He just has to double make sure, yeah, because he's still compassionate.

[00:42:22] He wouldn't give a fuck later if you're dead or alive. He would shoot at people who clearly are not zombies later. This is him still man of the law as well. Because he's like, Morgan, when Morgan takes him and he's like, you know, you just shot a guy.

[00:42:35] I'm like, what are you going to do? Arrest him? He's like tied you up in his bed. He would suggest going in and killing a hospital full of people who he doesn't know whether any some of them may be innocent. Inside each of us there are two wolves.

[00:42:47] One is worried about killing the guy in the front porch. The other one just wants to bloody kill everyone at Grady Memorial. The question is whether you listen to the police officer wolf or the serial killer wolf. Why not both? So other zombie stuff.

[00:43:04] Morgan educates Rick, as you said about zombies first to call them walkers. I thought it was interesting how that came about because he asks Rick, you know about the dead people and he says yes.

[00:43:14] And he goes, No, I don't mean the ones they put down the ones they didn't the walkers. So it's like the ones who are up walking around, it kind of naturally leads into him calling them walkers or you know, of course it's the walking dead.

[00:43:32] Also he tells them how it works. Don't you get bit? Bites kill you. The fever burns you out. But then after a while you come back and it just reinforced the point that there's no zombie movies in this world.

[00:43:46] And I think it was a good choice not to have zombie movies because it makes them feel more unknown if it would just, I mean there are a lot of zombie movies and shows where

[00:43:55] the people talk about zombie movies, but then it feels a little bit more like a comedy or something. Um, it takes away from the, the newness of it or even the horrifying tragedy of it in a way.

[00:44:09] Like, it's better to have the characters go, Oh yeah, I kind of understand this. I mean, it's better to have them not understand it than to kind of have an understanding of it, you know, I think.

[00:44:19] But in the comic they did use the word zombie once or twice. I don't know if I believe that is correct. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of Morgan saying don't get bit when Karen and I started the podcast, it was three

[00:44:33] months before the walking dead ever came out and we were just covering other news that was coming out about it or other movies that were related. And we still had the tagline don't get bit at the end.

[00:44:46] And we had listeners, a few listeners writing in saying that was grammatically incorrect and we should be saying don't get bitten. And I'm like, I know that, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it, you know? So then when this episode came out, I was thrilled.

[00:45:01] And then I played this bit for the, you know, I play a clip at the beginning of every one I played this. Look, I ask and you answer. It's common courtesy, right? Did you get bit? I was like, see, don't get bit Morgan Jones.

[00:45:22] And then I thought it was funny that he says that did you get bit? And he also says, don't you get bit? And then when Dwayne says it weren't no man, he goes, what did I hear coming out of your mouth? Yeah, it wasn't a man. It wasn't.

[00:45:38] Parents are hypocrites. Grammar police. I also love that Morgan asks Rick, what's your wound? And that's really interesting because in Rick's final episode on the main show, he hears the voices of people from his past asking, what's your wound?

[00:45:57] And I never knew why they were asking, what's your wound? I was like, that's really weird. Is it like a comment on like, I don't know, the psychology of like, is it an emotional wound? Is it a real wound? I think it's both. Yeah, right.

[00:46:11] But the other, I mean, now it's because that's what he hears Morgan saying as he's like slipping out of consciousness or waking up in his brain somewhere. That's awesome. What a cool callback. I really like that. Yeah, that is really cool. A couple of things.

[00:46:27] Morgan and Dwayne peeking out at night and seeing the zombies shamble around. I just got to bring that up because it's so cool. It reminds me of Night of the Living Dead. And I love it. And then I think you mentioned how the zombies are different.

[00:46:40] Teddy bear girl picks up her teddy bear. Morgan's wife seems to have some kind of a memory of where her home is and she can turn the knob and they're faster and all that. And I think that they are variants.

[00:46:55] I think that's, yeah, I mean, I guess so. I think when they came up with the concept of variance, uh, at the end of the walking dead, I should've went and looked this up.

[00:47:08] But one of the characters said I had some experience with that early on or something. So I think that's, I think what actually happened is they had the zombies acting this way because that's what Darabont and everybody decided on.

[00:47:25] But then over time they changed their minds about some of it. I presume they changed their minds about the zombie seeming to have a semblance of humanity as Morgan's wife does. They were very clear in season three with Milton's experiments that no, they don't.

[00:47:44] And I think the reason why they kind of flipped on that is because they don't want us to feel for the zombies because so many of them are going to be killed by our heroes, you know?

[00:47:54] It's that same thing that happens in war where the soldiers have to dehumanize their enemies so they don't feel bad about killing them. But the kind of downside of that, it's dark to talk about any of this, but is that then

[00:48:10] the zombies, they are dehumanized so they don't see, they just seem like cockroaches later on. But in this episode I went back to feeling like the tragedy, the deep tragedy of it all.

[00:48:22] And I don't know for sure if part of that was just because I'm in the mindset that this is the beginning and we're discovering it anew, but I think a part of it was that they felt like they had some humanity left still. And that is very tragic.

[00:48:35] It feels more tragic than if they're just like cockroaches, you know? And they're also fresh. Like by the time we get to the end of the main show we're seeing like 12 year old corpses walking around whereas this is people's, you know.

[00:48:47] But they just made a point to not have them, like when you see Morgan's wife with that doorknob and looking up into the eyepiece or whatever it is, the peephole, it seems like there's a little piece of her left in there, you know?

[00:49:01] And even later on, they just took that away and I think they did it purposely. But in story, I mean I went to the Walking Dead wiki, it says variants are zombies in you know, The Walking Dead that are infected with mutated strains of the virus that cause

[00:49:16] notable differences compared to their original counterparts. These differences include increased speed, agility, strength, aggression, problem solving intelligence, biological defenses and reduced resurrection times. Aside from the French variant, it's unknown what caused the physiological differences in those infected by the variant strains.

[00:49:35] So I think there may be variants among the variants. Some were definitely caused by human experimentation, but it might be that others just happen because they're just variant forms of the virus or something like that.

[00:49:48] They also said in World Beyond, they seem to say that some French scientists were in the state, so maybe they introduced it here somehow. But anyway, no, I think that's what, I think they retconned it so that we would remember,

[00:50:02] like we're going to see a zombie pick up a rock in another season one episode when they're at the mall and smash the glass with it. I think they were trying to explain that. There's probably an argument as well about how viruses mutate.

[00:50:17] So they start very complex and severe and then they mutate to be more contractible, more…I don't know, it's like the way COVID for example has mutated from being very hard hitting but then it's responding to vaccines and saying, well actually I'm going

[00:50:35] to be easier to transmit but less severe now and things like that. And that's, I don't know, one of my friends is an epidemiologist. I should really ask them about this. I think he actually has a disease podcast. I just have not listened to it yet.

[00:50:49] But yeah, I do wonder if there is an explanation in that sense as well. Maybe, but I just think, I'm pretty sure when we talked about it, when the variants were first, well, introduced as variants in season 11 or whatever it was, I think we mentioned

[00:51:04] these ones early on in The Walking Dead and thought maybe they were saying that these were also those, you know, because they climb, they pick up things, they're faster. You know, it's kind of similar to what we saw later on in The Walking Dead, more deliberately

[00:51:18] introduced as variants. And yeah, I guess that's all I had to say about the zombies. MS. Alright, I'm looking at my list. Okay, here's one. Something that really strikes me coming in from later in the apocalypse back to the start, there's still so much trust in authority.

[00:51:40] You see pristine American flags at various points throughout this, outside the sheriff's office and when Rick's walking, making his way to Atlanta. You see people having faith in the legal system at the start with, you know, the first thing we see is cops and robbers.

[00:51:57] It's Rick being a man of the law, holding up the law, sort of berating this younger officer for not taking it seriously and being sloppy. And we also see faith in things like the Center for Disease Control and that being, you know,

[00:52:12] people were told to come to Atlanta, people were told to go there. And everyone in a way is searching for this authority of somebody to tell them what to do. And I think that again hit really differently post-COVID, particularly the stuff about CDC

[00:52:25] and what do we do when there is a panic and a fear and where do we look for authority and where do we look for comfort? And I thought that was really interesting because Rick is such a symbol of authority in his outfit, his uniform with his hat.

[00:52:41] You know, he wears it, he wears it with pride. He's driving his sheriff's car. It really stood out to me given the kind of what we see over the 11 seasons is the complete breaking down of that and then the rebuilding of it in a different format.

[00:52:56] And I was thinking about how we end season 11 and the societies that they've rebuilt that are in some ways better than what we have at the start of this episode. And it just made me think, you know, so much has changed since that first episode aired

[00:53:09] in terms of like our experience as a society of going through a pandemic, things that have happened in terms of Black Lives Matter and police violence. It's harder to look at Rick and Shane in their roles as cops as just good guys.

[00:53:26] I don't think the episode tries to say that they're just good guys, but there is another level to what being a cop means now that I think there maybe wasn't before this episode aired if that makes sense.

[00:53:36] Like just what the last four or five years have kind of done for that. Personally, I think that there's clear, you know, what we've seen with Black Lives Matter and everything shows that there's a systemic problem with policing that needs to be taken care of.

[00:53:58] And hopefully there's progress being made. I don't know. Do you know? I don't know. I hope so. But it's clearly an issue that there's been a lot of more awareness around because the body cams and everything like that.

[00:54:10] But I also think that then, unfortunately, people have decided that or that there's this yeah, bad feeling about all cops. And I think that's a real shame because we need people to uphold our laws.

[00:54:24] We're a nation of laws and a key part of that is you've got to have people there to uphold the laws. And it's a dangerous job. And I just hate the idea that people would go into that with good intentions and then

[00:54:37] just get attitude directed at them that they don't deserve because of something that someone else did, you know. And here I think all we've seen from Rick and Shane, which is not much, is that they're going after some bad guys.

[00:54:51] So I would give especially Rick the benefit of the doubt and say that he's just a good cop and he would be some he would be a cop that I would want in my town. I think that's my idea of that.

[00:55:02] Yeah, I think that your point is valid. I think what I'm just saying is the context in which we watch it has changed. And I find that interesting is looking at a cop chase scene and being like, oh, this is as simple as it once was, is it?

[00:55:15] There's more to it than that. We've been through a lot. Like, I think this whole process of rewatching is going to be about how both the show has changed and how the way in which we watch it has changed.

[00:55:27] And I find that a really interesting place to start. I'm like, if the show was done now, would they dial back on this a little bit? Would it be different? Probably not. But it might. I don't know. It was interesting.

[00:55:43] Yeah, no, I mean, I'm hearing what you're saying and I'm just thinking, do I look at this differently because of what we've been through? And maybe it might make me examine it a little bit more.

[00:55:54] But then when I'm done with my examination, I think, no, those guys were probably just bad guys and they needed to be stopped. And Rick and Shane were doing their jobs. And there was a third guy! A third guy. Yeah, I forgot about that. So did Peter.

[00:56:08] I was like, there's a third guy. Peter's like, no, no, he just got shot there. And I'm like, no, no, there's a third guy. There's absolutely a third guy. There's a third guy. Yeah, I totally forgot about that.

[00:56:18] And it's funny because Rick is so concerned that someone's going to tell Laurie that he got shot and then he does actually get properly shot. I know. Don't tell Laurie that's the first thing you said.

[00:56:28] I thought that was hilarious because I presume it's because she's always saying your job is too dangerous and he doesn't want her to worry or hassle him about it. And because it's funny, I think one of the other funny things is that these guys in the

[00:56:39] car who are the bad guys or they're framed as the bad guys, you know, they shoot Rick. They're clearly on the run from something. In two seasons time, those distinctions become much less important. And that's what's interesting when they arrive at the prison is there are still prisoners

[00:56:54] there. And what does it mean to be a prisoner after the zombie outbreak? Like, what does it mean at that point that you have been imprisoned? Like, it's just quite… Yeah, things break down.

[00:57:08] Yeah, the way the moral lines are so set in this episode really, I think, set it in a really interesting path for what comes next. Because it goes from a nation of laws to anarchy. And in anarchy, you got to protect yourself and the people you care about.

[00:57:24] That's the only thing, you know? And so if someone… And then, yeah, if someone who may have done something that you would have normally considered morally bad is there and can help you, then you'll take that help, you know?

[00:57:40] So yeah, I think it's really interesting everything you're saying. And then towards the end, that's why I loved the end of The Walking Dead when a lot of people were like, well, why are we in this Commonwealth? It's so stupid.

[00:57:51] And I'm like, no, now we've had this whole period of anarchy where everything went away and now it's coming back. And we're going to see how we feel about that. And it's more complicated than we might have thought.

[00:58:05] In fact, we might not even want it at all, you know? It's really interesting to me for sure. Love it. Um, I'll talk about my favorite part of this pilot is Rick waking up and exploring.

[00:58:22] He's stumbling out of his hospital bed with the dried up flowers and papers everywhere, lights flickering, looking through that window and seeing this bloody chewed up corpse. And it… I don't know how, but the show really made me feel like I was seeing this kind of thing

[00:58:41] for the first time, you know? We've seen so much gore and death on this show, but it's like, oh my God, that's horrible. You know? You wouldn't expect… I would expect to be desensitized to it. Yeah. But maybe it's just the talent of Frank Darapont. And the smell.

[00:58:58] You got a sense of the smell. I think… Flies everywhere. That helps. Oh, awful. And the way… The smell. Just… I cannot emphasize enough how good Andrew Lincoln is in this episode, but he… Yeah. You just got the sense that, like, oh, it must smell absolutely honking.

[00:59:12] He did a great job of seeming like a guy who just came out of a coma after suffering a gunshot wound and is feeling pretty fucked up and discovered that the world ended, you know? I loved that he was talking to Shane like, I don't…

[00:59:29] There's your guff from your grandma's bird bag. And then he looks and the flowers have died. I'm like… Yeah. The way they do this time stuff is so interesting. Time stuff, like time jumps. Yeah. Yeah. The one that I pick ahead about the hospital… This is again…

[00:59:44] No one wants… Like this one, this thing's really like, well, why does nobody in Harry Potter ever go to the toilet? It's like, why would you write about somebody going to the bathroom?

[00:59:53] I do feel he would have had a catheter and he probably would have had to remove his own catheter, which would have been unpleasant. So I'm glad they didn't show that. They just showed kind of mildly pale and clammy Andrew Lincoln going about in his boxers for a

[01:00:04] while, which like, you know… Why not? It doesn't really make sense. I think we see in a later episode, Shane came in and blocked the doorway with a gurney so the zombies wouldn't go in there or something. The ultimate protection, a very movable gurney. With wheels, yeah.

[01:00:22] But I looked on chat, GPT, I asked it, hey, how could Rick have survived being in a coma in this hospital or whatever? It said, Rick's survival in a coma without any assistance is very improbable. He would need more than just an IV bag to keep him alive.

[01:00:37] He would also need a ventilator to help him breathe, a feeding tube to provide him with nutrition and antibiotics to prevent infections. He would also need someone to change his IV bag, his catheter and his bedding regularly.

[01:00:49] Otherwise he would be at risk of sepsis, dehydration, starvation or suffocation. So I think this is our first instance of the Department of Suspension of Disbelief in The Walking Dead. We just stank for that, like, boom, boom, boom.

[01:01:02] I mean, imagine if he woke up though, like, beautiful Andrew Lincoln woke up, like, I don't know, covered in his own piss. Like, looking absolutely shocking. I know, and shit, and just like start… I mean, you need water every three days or you'll die.

[01:01:17] So someone was coming in and pouring water down his throat, I guess. Maybe there was like a nurse variant zombie who remembered that they were a nurse and was like, I must change the IV bag. Yeah, we need that flashback.

[01:01:31] The gurney is a good call back in the finale because someone does the same for Judith. I think they put a gurney in front of the door, which I liked. The whole coma thing, Kirkman had said he did that, you know, in the comic, in case

[01:01:45] people don't know, I presume everyone hearing me knows this, but Robert Kirkman wrote this comic, The Walking Dead, and that's what the show is based on. He was also a writer on the show for at least the first five seasons.

[01:01:53] Yeah, he seemed to distance himself from the show a little bit. I know. I kind of wonder what that was about. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about like the writers on the show are pretty much all different

[01:02:04] by the end and actually most of the writers from season one didn't make it very far. Darabont left in the middle of season two. Kirkman had written episodes up through season five, and I think he was still consulted after

[01:02:19] that, but I feel like, yeah, I couldn't find any solid information, but there was lawsuits. Was there a lawsuit? Yeah. Yeah. But he may still have been an executive producer, even though there was, I'm not sure. Glenn Mazzara was here already and he made it through season three.

[01:02:34] Scott Gimple and Angela Kang didn't even come on until season two, so they weren't here yet. They weren't there, yeah. So it just feels weird that the show we really know, it's almost all different people here. It's funny, isn't it?

[01:02:47] But anyway, so the coma, he did it, Kirkman did that in the comic because it was easier to skip the fall and the progression and just go straight to the apocalypse. And that comic came out in October, 2003, Walking Dead number one, one of the greatest

[01:03:04] zombie-esque movies 28 days later came out June, 2003 in the States earlier in the UK. Interesting. But Kirkman said he wrote the scene before he saw the movie. So it was a coincidence. I mean, it's a great storytelling device.

[01:03:18] Yeah, but it's kind of if he had seen the movie and just said, I'm going to do the same thing. That's kind of shitty, I think. Yeah. I think. I hope he didn't. I hope he didn't. I believe him.

[01:03:32] So anyway, then in the hospital, like he after he sees the whole don't open dead inside, don't dead open inside. I never know, it'd be funny. Even though I now think he should have at least said something, it was a fantastic visual.

[01:03:47] Then he has that match and he goes into the stairwell and he keeps going out and you're like, it's dark. Play another one. Even though nothing happens, it's freaky. I think Maggie had something kind of similar to that in season 11. Yeah. She's in a dark building.

[01:04:01] With a flashlight that fell. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then she had to go to matches. Oh, it was so spooky. Yeah. Yeah, that's spooky. And then coming out to the brightness after he's been in this dark place and also a coma

[01:04:14] that was really effective and seeing all these corpses wrapped in white sheets laid neatly in rows with blood spots on their heads, meaning I'm sure somebody figured out how you kill a zombie.

[01:04:26] And then, yeah, he stumbles down the stairs and sees that whole like army camp with the building next to it that's firebombed and it just such great atmosphere and him, the main, our lead character here just discovering this world in his feeble state.

[01:04:42] I don't know why, but that's one of my favorite sequences in all of The Walking Dead, actually. On his little bike with his little gown on as well. There's something so childlike about it that I just really… It is. Vulnerable. Do you have another point?

[01:05:03] I've mainly got notes. I will say that I've got young skinny Rick as a note. Just thinking about Andrew Lincoln looking so vulnerable, because I think he was in his late 30s when they started filming this and then essentially moved from there into his late 40s.

[01:05:18] And you really see Rick kind of age over the course of the show, but it works so well because of what happens in the storyline. And it's just funny to see him looking so visibly young.

[01:05:31] I think I remember reading that Andrew Lincoln had a newborn at this point. He thinks he nailed the audition because he came in sleep deprived and just like not knowing which way was up.

[01:05:42] I remember it being a big thing in the UK because we all knew him from Love Actually or from as this character Egg from a show called This Life. So there was a little bit of like, oh, that guy, that wimpy guy from TV from Teachers

[01:05:54] is going to be on the show. And I just don't think anyone could have watched this show and thought he wasn't the right person for that role. Because I think Darabont wanted someone else. He wanted someone like Thomas Jane or somebody he'd worked with before.

[01:06:06] But this was just so the right, so the right call, so the right call. I know. And yeah, you'd never think otherwise. I mean, I think he said he thought about Gary Cooper, who's a old timey, you know, American

[01:06:21] actor who was in Westerns and had this kind of a solidness to him. And I think, you know, when he gets on his horse that helps. He feels like a cowboy in this episode.

[01:06:36] And speaking of on the horse, when he goes into the city, you know, he's there's that iconic scene where he's on the road with it's such a beautiful, beautifully composed shot. And I never can help but think, dude, if you're scrambling to get out of the city and

[01:06:59] it's so backed up that you're dying in your car, you'd probably go on the other side of the road too. It wouldn't just be empty. You know what I mean? Other cars would be coming. They just really love the rules of the road.

[01:07:12] I'd forgotten as well, the farmer and his wife. That the couple that have taken their own lives. Oh, I forgot about that too. Yeah, it's brutal. But Rick makes a horse friend, but for how long? I was watching this with Nico and Bodhi. And was Bodhi there?

[01:07:37] Yeah, Bodhi and Nico had only seen the finale because we had that big finale party. Yeah, they did. And they weren't born yet when this aired. So now they've only seen the finale and the pilot. And Nico asked if this guy, meaning Rick, was still alive.

[01:07:56] And I'm like, yeah, he'll be in a series called The Ones Who Live. And he was like, what if at the end of The Ones Who Live, Rick wakes up from his coma? Which is something we used to kind of joke about. He saw your son.

[01:08:08] I know, that's so funny. And the scene where Rick sees the dead family in the house that you just mentioned that we'd forgotten about, with the father having shot himself in the head. Bodhi, who's only six, said that guy's brain is gone.

[01:08:23] And I'm like, I'm a horrible father that you're watching this. And then Jenny came home and was like, what the fuck? She was not home. And I said, you know, this isn't real, right? It's like a costume. And that inspired me to switch over.

[01:08:39] I paused and went to the season two and then season three finale and showed them I was in it so they could see that, oh, you're in it, but you're alive. So it's not real. But then Bodhi's like, you're in this?

[01:08:53] And I'm like, yeah, talk about a flex, right? Someone's finally like, oh my God, that's amazing. Yeah, that was so good. And it did. I mean, it did the job, you know, he's like, okay, it's like a costume. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, bless.

[01:09:07] So will they watch all of it? Are you going to rewatch with them? Maybe, yeah. Oh, that's lovely. He wants to know who the voice in the tank was for sure. Oh, don't get too attached, baby. Don't get too attached.

[01:09:23] So and then the final, that final scene was pretty spectacular. I especially loved when he followed the helicopter, which may have been a CRM helicopter, right? We don't know. Interesting point, right? I was like, oh yeah. Yeah.

[01:09:36] And then he goes around the corner and there's all the like a convention of zombies there. He's like, oops, sorry. The horse is like, holy shit. And like, that was so amazing. Oh, that poor horse.

[01:09:47] Atlanta, because I remember watching like just being hungry for more city scenes because we get so much forest throughout so much of this series, the woods and the city reminded me of the Daryl

[01:10:01] show with Paris, you know, it's just so nice to be in a different setting sometimes. So I loved all that whole end scene. It was great, even though it was horrifying and sad for the horse. And under the tank was so tense. That was stressful.

[01:10:16] Yeah, he almost shot himself in the head. Yeah, it was the tank just open and he didn't realize till he looked up to shoot himself in the head and then he's like, oh, there's a door. Yes. So that's kind of funny. I'm sorry. Yeah, I know.

[01:10:28] He's like, oh, let me try this. He's like, I'm going to, oh wait. It was an interesting way of framing it because we, I guess they didn't want us to see it before he did.

[01:10:37] I'm sure there was a story or a piece of trivia that the soldier in the tank is actually a known actor and the plan was always to have a either a flashback or a filler of how that

[01:10:51] the tanker got to be there and the story of the soldiers in the tank, but it never got told. It was. Yeah, that's a fact. I'm fine not knowing that. I kind of liked it as it was.

[01:11:01] I mean, Darabont said for the season two pilot he was going to show that whole like battle between the military and the zombies and how the military fell, but AMC didn't give him the money for it. I'm okay with that. Yeah, that's fine. We've seen enough of that.

[01:11:18] The only other point I have is I was going to just talk about a little bit about my experience with the actors because if you didn't know, Walker Stalker asked Karen and I to go do Q and A for their first convention back in 2013. Their first one?

[01:11:34] Yeah, and then I ended up staying on with them and running panels. You know, I produced the panels for the whole time and I did over 200 panels. 200, that's amazing. We interviewed on the podcast Andrew Lincoln, Sarah Wayne Callies, who's Lori,

[01:11:51] Lori Holden, Andrea Jeffrey DeMunn, who's Dale, Steven Yeun, who's Glenn, and Chandler Riggs, who's Carl, and then I've done panels with all of them plus Bernthal, Lennie James, Emma Bell, who's Amy, and Addie Miller, even the teddy bear girl.

[01:12:09] And then I was on the show a couple of times. I was in the season two and three finales and I'll talk a little bit more about that when we get to those episodes.

[01:12:15] But is there any of those actors that you're curious about what they're like at all in particular? All of them. I mean, I'm genuinely really... I mean, yeah, I could talk about all of them, but I don't know if we have time. Let me see who's most interesting.

[01:12:33] I mean, if you go back and listen, we talked to Steven Yeun quite a few times and he was really fun. And if you just want to hear the podcasts with any of those people who are listening, go to podcastica.com.

[01:12:46] There's a really good search function on there and search for any of those names and the podcasts with the interviews will come up. But Steven Yeun was really fun. But what always stands out to me is when we told him that we loved his character and

[01:13:01] he reminded us of Hurley on Lost and he didn't like that because he hadn't seen Lost. But he's like, is that the comic relief? I don't want to be that. And we didn't want to spoil it for him, but we're like, no, he's really important by

[01:13:14] the end of it. I think Karen especially loves Steven Yeun. But he, in my experience over the years, he's got a real edge to him. I think he just cares a lot about, I think what it is, is he's a stand for strong Asian representation in things.

[01:13:36] And so he really, in service of that, cares about how his image comes across. And so when I do panels with him, sometimes I'd ask him something and he'd just be like, I don't want to talk about that.

[01:13:50] And it would feel a little bit prickly sometimes, but I think that's why he just wanted to be careful about. So I'm like, what color is your underwear? And he's like, I don't want to talk about that. I don't know. No, I'm just kidding.

[01:14:00] Steven, why won't you take your top off? I don't want to talk about that. Can I get someone else in here to do this interview? I read an amazing article about Steven Yeun. I think it was round about when Minari was coming out. Such a great movie.

[01:14:15] Yeah, this is it. I was quite fascinated with Steven Yeun because when his family first emigrated from Korea, they emigrated to Saskatchewan, this town called the capital of Saskatchewan called Regina, which is not a big place at all.

[01:14:31] And I think they swiftly moved on from Saskatchewan to Michigan, where he kind of got involved in a lot of improv and stuff. And I think it's a New York Times article called The Many Lives of Steven Yeun from 2021.

[01:14:47] And he talks about how difficult that experience was and how that fed into his experience of Minari. And they have this picture of him, his elementary school class. And he's the only kid of color and he just looks so out of place.

[01:15:06] And he kind of comments on that and stuff. And I feel like he really tried to really shed The Walking Dead in a lot of ways because he did want to go off and be…and he has been incredibly successful. He's an incredibly talented actor.

[01:15:21] But yeah, it's interesting that he, of all the actors, I think has kind of distanced himself the most from it. Like there is a scene in Rick's final episode where they use Sasha. Oh my goodness, what is that actress's name? That's terrible. She's a great actress as well.

[01:15:35] Sonequa Martin-Green. Sonequa Martin-Green, that's it. And it just seems like a part where it's like, surely that was written for Glenn. Surely that would have been logical to have Steven Yeun come back. But I just don't think he ever would. No, yeah.

[01:15:47] I think it was him in the comics when they did that story. Yeah, I just get the feeling that A, or maybe it's a combination of these, he doesn't want to be pigeonholed. And maybe that comes from not wanting to be stereotyped.

[01:16:05] It's kind of a similar type of thing as a part of a group of people, but just even to be typecast, it's kind of a similar impulse maybe. I just think that because I do notice that he's particular about what he wants to talk

[01:16:21] about in interviews and stuff like that, but also the roles he picks, as you said, he doesn't want to have to be associated with The Walking Dead anymore. And he just picks such different roles, comedies, Korean independent movies, and weird…

[01:16:36] The Humans is a really strange movie, but I kind of loved it. I would be curious to know what you would think of that. It's so odd. I'd like to see it. Yeah, you should watch that. Maybe we could cover it sometime.

[01:16:46] I would love to see Steven Yeun do a full-ass comedy because he's got an improv background and he's so smart. I think he's so funny, but I can also understand why he's like… I mean, he's incredible in Minari.

[01:17:00] And Beef, if you haven't watched Beef, stop listening to us. Go watch Beef. Come back and listen to the rest of the podcast. Just go do it. Do yourself a favor.

[01:17:08] I was going to say, I feel like he doesn't want to be pigeonholed, but also I think he just… He's an ambitious guy and he's smart and he knows… He wants a good career and he's been one of the most successful people to come out

[01:17:23] of The Walking Dead, I think. You know, in these critically acclaimed movies and also fun shit like Transformers and Invincible and comedies. I mean, I'm so impressed with his body of work since he left The Walking Dead and he's great in all of it. And this was first…

[01:17:40] This was his first… This was his breakout role. I think he'd had one walk-on part in the Big Bang Theory and this was his breakout role. And it's such a big… It's like Glenn walked off the pages of the comic. Like, it's so good.

[01:17:56] But so much of it is tied up with how Glenn leaves the show, how the show takes a turn. You know, it's rough. Honestly, I wish he'd stayed goofier longer because I liked early Glenn. It was so much fun.

[01:18:14] But I don't think Steven Yeun liked that because it seemed demeaning or something. That's the sense, you know, from what he said about not wanting to be comic relief. And I understand that and I don't blame him but I thought it was so fun to watch him

[01:18:25] fumble around with Maggie early on and stuff like that. Oh, he was so loved. Like, he was so loved. I keep meaning to watch… I think Karen Shee recommended it to me. There was a Pedro Pascal and Steven Yeun actors on actors for Variety. Oh, I know.

[01:18:38] I really want to watch that and hear about it. But I think since he said in this episode, Hey, dumbass in the tank, it totally warrants a 30-minute discussion that we just had on him because it's Steven Yeun.

[01:18:51] And I mean, we're going to do 30 minutes per line going forward. For him, absolutely. It's going to be like so… Absolutely. So, Steven Yeun. Yeah, let's talk about him. But I think his…

[01:19:03] I'll defend us in that his loss from the show was such a pivotal moment in how people felt about the show. I feel like in some ways it was a pivotal moment for this podcast because it's… I don't know.

[01:19:15] I feel like it was a hard thing to go through as people who… There's someone missing now, you might notice. Yeah. I don't think that's the only reason, but I don't think it helped. Well, it ties into the other character that was part of that.

[01:19:29] And I think it is… That's the thing that I'm finding the hardest is even just hearing those wee lines. I'm immediately like overjoyed that it's Glenn, but devastated because I know what's going to happen. Yeah. And I'm just kidding.

[01:19:42] I mean, I think Glenn is an important character, Steven Yeun's a great actor. I'm glad we had… It was fun to talk about him for sure. I would love to see a prequel of him delivering pizza. I would watch that. Absolutely.

[01:19:54] If the Oscars dry up, come back and do that, Steven. It'd be great. Yeah, slum it on the walking dead. Yeah, slum it, man. Do you have any more notes? I do. Morgan has a tattoo. I'd forgotten that.

[01:20:06] Don't know if it's Lenny James that has it or Morgan, but it looks a hell of a lot like his ex-wife. It's on the top of his arm when he's talking to Rick. And I'm like… Does it say CRM? No, it's of a woman.

[01:20:16] And Peter and I were like, that looks really like his zombie wife. Has Dwayne got a tattoo gun? You mean it looked like the zombie or…? It looked like his zombie wife. Like, I'm not even kidding.

[01:20:28] I'm actually going to Google right now Lenny James tattoos because if it's a real tattoo, I've got questions. If it's a fake tattoo, I've got even more questions. Like, it's so strange. Yeah, I'm going to… Hang on. Okay. Oh, it's a whole Reddit thread.

[01:20:44] Everyone, we need to talk about Morgan's tattoo. I should have done my research before this. It's… It's such a bad tattoo. Like, no offence to people with tattoos. Hang on, I'm sharing my screen. This is Morgan's tattoo. Yeah, it's not the best.

[01:21:03] I mean, you can only see your eyes in there. Yeah, I'm just confused. I'm confused. Messy hair. Yeah, I'm just confused about like, is that Lenny James's tattoo? Is that… Like, did Dwayne do it? Like, I have questions.

[01:21:18] That's all I'm going to say is I have a question. Did Dwayne do it? They got really bored and they found a tattoo gun and they're like, you know what? Let's commemorate mum in the way that she would have wanted. Let's give you a tattoo.

[01:21:27] And they're like, we lost all the pictures but you can just look out there for reference. Your stupid mum jiggled the photo albums and left them somewhere. Just look through the peephole and you'll see. Another thing that hit quite hard was seeing baby Chandler Riggs.

[01:21:42] Like, little Chandler Riggs. So young. Oh God. And also for the same reason as Glenn. Just thinking about his death. Being like, oh, that's a bummer. More and more over time when I think about AMC letting him go, I just think it's such a big mistake.

[01:22:02] That's what I think. Yeah. It was just… Why? He seems like a victim of a much bigger, stupider argument. But he got to be in the finale. You read about that where he was a hilltop guy. I like that.

[01:22:14] I would have so much respect for Chandler Riggs if during filming, just as a joke, he just like ran up to the camera and be like, I'm back guys! I'm back bitches! Judas Lake. Director's like, cut, cut, reset. Get him out of here.

[01:22:35] He's escorted off the premises like, worth it. Worth it. So we have… Well, we're maybe going to do a regular segment. It was Jonathan Buccaliello's idea. I think they did something like this on Andor called Only in Star Wars. So we're going to do the same thing.

[01:22:51] Only in Star Wars. I'm just kidding. We're going to do Only in The Walking Dead. And that's just picking out something that would only happen in The Walking Dead in this episode. Do you have something?

[01:23:01] I'm going to go for shooting a little girl in the head and not feeling sad about it. Or feeling sad but also sympathetic. Yeah, I mean that's… I have the same thing.

[01:23:10] Only in The Walking Dead is it heroic in a sad kind of way to shoot a kid. Yeah, 10 out of 10. I will stamp of approval for that. Well, my contributions, I think, to this rewatch are going to be… I did an IMDB dive for trivia.

[01:23:26] And for this episode, there were a couple of bits I thought was interesting. At the time that it aired, it had an audience of over 5 million and it was the most watched premiere on AMC in that period.

[01:23:40] In this episode, and this will link to my next bit, we cover the longest time span till what comes after, which is the episode in which Rick departs and we time jump to see Judith as a kind of…I think she's about 9 or 10. Really? Yeah.

[01:23:56] Oh wow, I didn't know that. There are four kills for Rick in this episode, which I talked about earlier. So those were the… Even in between seasons? Yeah. Because the other bit I want to do is the apocalypse timeline.

[01:24:08] So in this episode, we see we are plus 59 days into the apocalypse. So Rick has been in a coma for quite a long time. The Walking Dead wiki has a great amount of detail in what happens between day zero and day 59.

[01:24:24] But we see Rick waking up on day 59, he spends the day and night with Morgan and Duane, and that takes us into day 60 where he ends up in the tank. So at the end of this episode, we're on day 60 of the apocalypse. Cool.

[01:24:37] And yeah, he had his zombie nurse so it's fine. And then in what comes after, we cover a period of I think six years, seven years? Something like that. There's a big time skip. So according to IMDB anyway, this is the longest time skip that we have. Cool.

[01:24:56] News. I missed that music. Although I loved having Mr. Blog and Infected News. That felt very nice. Yeah, we'll resurrect that at some point. So first thing a couple of longtime Walking Dead podcasters have decided to go back and start a rewatch of the series.

[01:25:41] And I'm not sure if you've seen it, but it's a new series that's been out for a while. And it's called Walking Dead. And it's a new series that's been out for a while. And it's called Walking Dead.

[01:25:49] And it's a new series that's been out for a while. So as I mentioned before, I just wanted to bring this point home again. If you would spread the word about this to help make it a success, we'd be super grateful.

[01:26:05] We need a fairly good sized group of listeners to make sure we're able to keep going all the way to the ends. And if you send people to thecastofus.com and tell them about it, I think like I said,

[01:26:17] if you're in a Walking Dead Facebook group, they might be kind of stoked to know that there's a podcast doing a rewatch, you know. So you'll be a hero if you let them know.

[01:26:26] We should really provide you with like a pro forma of like for all the common arguments of like, but the show got really bad. Be like, well, it got good in season nine again. So get back on the horse. Yeah.

[01:26:37] And when I listened to this podcast, it made me feel euphoric. No, I don't know. Exactly. This podcast improved my life in all the ways that are possible. Now I am a super sexy, cool individual who earns a lot of money. You can quote me on that.

[01:26:55] So I'll put that link, thecastofus.com in the show notes too, in case you forget. Thanks everybody. I just want to reiterate for people who haven't been tuning in. Well, if you haven't been tuning in, that means maybe you didn't watch the Daryl show

[01:27:10] and we watched it and we loved it and we covered it and we had some nitpicks, but it was super fun and very well done. Yeah. And we all want to go to France. Yeah, absolutely. So I recommend watching that.

[01:27:23] But so on the spinoff front, The Walking Dead, the ones who live about Rick and Michonne headed up by Scott Gimple is going to be out in February and we plan to cover that. And we finished up Daryl Dixon season one and season two.

[01:27:38] I think they said comes out next year. Yeah. 2024. So that's that. I don't know about Dead City season two. Will that be out next year too? I bet you it will. Yeah, I don't think they let more than a year go by.

[01:27:53] And Ben will be back covering that. Whoever else wants to come on. Yeah, he was great. Next Fear the Walking Dead is wrapping up its eight season run. Yay. And we're not the biggest fans of that show, but listeners have asked that we cover it.

[01:28:10] So I do a Patreon exclusive Fear the Walking Dead roundtable rant about each episode. If you pledge at any level at patreon.com slash Jason Gabassi, you can hear me talk shit about that show. It's very therapeutic. Thoroughly recommend. Yeah, it's pretty fun.

[01:28:28] And last, this is the last one. It's the 10th anniversary, as I mentioned, of Walker Stalker Con. And they're going to be re-releasing all the panels from the first convention online for free. It's kind of a virtual convention and they're releasing them on the same time schedule as

[01:28:42] when they first appeared. That happens November 4th and 5th coming up here pretty soon. You'll see me and Karen doing Q&A with Steven Yeun, Danai Gurira, Giancarlo Esposito, and a ton more. And I did 12 panels at this thing.

[01:28:57] I don't know how I did that, but there's also some other great ones that James and Eric moderated. So I would recommend checking that out. There's contests and giveaways of some sort.

[01:29:08] So if you want to find out about all that, you can go to the Facebook group, facebook.com slash Walker Stalker Convention. Excellent. Yeah. All right, let's get into some Listener Moans, Groans, and Grunts.

[01:29:26] So I mentioned this last time, but I think it would be really fun for the re-watch to make a new one of those with zombie sounds from you guys who are listening right now.

[01:29:35] So if you want to be a part of that, send me your zombie sound and I might stick it in there. Who's the kid? The second to last one goes, We had zombie sound contests early on, and I think we gave out like the first collection

[01:29:51] of The Walking Dead. That's so cool. And so little kids. I wonder what they're doing now. I wonder if they know. I know, they're like, That's so funny. Because you were saying how Andrew Lincoln started off looking so trim and young, and

[01:30:06] now he's aged over the course of the series. And I'm like, who else has his all of us? Yeah, right. Okay, so Listener Moans, Groans, and Grunts. Kate Harvey says, Perfect timing for my annual re-watch. Okay, amazing. Let us know what you think.

[01:30:25] There's so many listeners who watch it a lot, you know, every year, every few years. And I haven't watched it since the beginning. And I guess that means that some of these listeners are more dedicated. They're bigger fans of The Walking Dead. We'll just hand it over.

[01:30:44] Just call in. We'll just hook you up. Yeah, I mean, that's another thing too. I wonder if people are going to want to do it as slow as we are one episode a week.

[01:30:53] They might just not be able to help themselves and they'll just binge right through, you know. And I figure we'll re-evaluate after we finish season one and see if we decide we want to do like a few at a time or something like that.

[01:31:03] Yeah, I feel season one, you got to do it one at a time because it's such a short season. And then yeah, yeah. Juan Froustos says, What an episode. This is the standard I judge all sitcom pilots by. Okay. Cool. I'd like to hear that.

[01:31:22] Let me hear you. I want to hear what you think of the Cheers pilot as judged against The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead as a sitcom would be great. I'm just imagining the Seinfeld music every time someone walks into the room. Diane Ryan says,

[01:31:38] This is good timing as I've recently started a rewatch. I'm on season two at the moment. Ah, we're not far behind you, Diane. Cool. Beth Nichols says, I think this is probably the best show premiere of all time. I've watched it over and over. Heart. Very good.

[01:31:53] I mean, after, like I said, we, Karen and I started three months before the show came out. And we're just like, man, we're putting a lot of time into this. I hope it's good.

[01:32:00] And I remember watching the pilot with Jenny and some friends of ours and just being so relieved. Oh, you must have been. Oh my God, it's good. Yes. And you got that again, The Last of Us, where it's like, oh. Absolutely. Yes. Mark McBurnie says,

[01:32:16] One of the greatest pilots I've ever seen and the effects are great. Unfortunately, they haven't added The Walking Dead to UK Netflix, so I won't be watching along, but I will be listening.

[01:32:24] P.S. You'll have to let me know about the Scotland meet up next year as I live just down the road. Amazing, Mark. Yeah, we should. So we're kind of, Karen and David and I are planning to go out and visit Lucy.

[01:32:36] And I hadn't really thought about it, but we should like pick a night and say, hey, anybody want to meet at this bar in Edinburgh? Yeah, that'd be great. And yeah, Mark, I had to crack out my Blu-rays. I have seasons one to four on Blu-ray.

[01:32:50] You know when Blu-rays and DVDs were still a thing? So yeah, we actually, it was very retro, but cool. Very cool. Very cool. They look great. Jonathan Buckel says, Here we go. Very keen to see how it all holds up.

[01:33:04] I was a little late and was able to binge season one and two, so I wasn't frustrated with the pace, but I'm on board with the week to week. Further rewatching. Can't wait to see Rick. This isn't a democracy anymore. Grimes. Wield that Python again. Erg. Nice.

[01:33:19] Glad you're on board, Jonathan. Amazing. Fred Wiesinger says, I waited eagerly for this episode to be aired back in the day and was not disappointed. Looking back, I really miss the old days when The Walking Dead was truly scary.

[01:33:31] Also, I think that scene with the hospital door saying, don't dead open inside was probably the genesis of the thousands of similar memes that followed. You're so right, Fred. I think we need to have a meme watch because The Walking Dead has spawned some great memes

[01:33:43] over the years. Meme in the wild when you see them. So watching, he said back when it was truly scary and it just reminded me that a lot of people say The Walking Dead was better in the earlier seasons and then never quite reached that

[01:33:59] again. And I've argued against it when we did our rankings. I ranked the later seasons higher, but watching it now, I'm kind of trying to have an eye on that. Were they right? Is it actually better now?

[01:34:09] And I do think this is one of the standout episodes of The Walking Dead, but I've always felt that way. And I think in part it's because of the things I mentioned. It's so focused on just these characters and these, you know, family and Simple

[01:34:21] Apocalypse. That's simple. But I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on any of that? I think this leans way more into the horror aesthetic. And I think it's seeing the characters be scared makes a difference. We're in later seasons. They're almost superheroes by the end.

[01:34:36] You know, they're not fazed by things. That's a good point. So seeing the fear on Rick's face and the unknown and the uncertainty that amps it up. And that was really effective. Yeah, yeah. The zombies are just kind of pests later on.

[01:34:50] It's just like they're basically having conversations while knifing zombies in the head. Yeah. On fear, literally. Yeah, literally. Like Game of Thrones had sex position. We have Zed position where we're like, anyway, as I'm stabbing this in the head, here's my monologue about my life.

[01:35:05] Yeah, they're just having like discussions on fear about their relationships and the zombies are just kind of standing by over to the side waiting for them to finish so they can come in and try to eat them. Or like in a wrestling ring that happened.

[01:35:22] All right. Brad Holt says, Brad Holt, maybe the greatest first episode slash pilot of any show ever. Yes, I said it. I was not familiar with the comic when I sat down to watch this the first time.

[01:35:33] Thirteen years later and I still love it. And I've read every issue of the comics and seen every episode of the original and all the spin offs thus far was hooked the moment Rick shot the zombie girl in the cold open.

[01:35:44] I was thinking about that. What Brad was saying about not having watched the comic like I wanted to we were living. It was the first flat Peter and I'd ever lived in together in

[01:35:53] Glasgow. And I remember we were saying and The Walking Dead was being advertised on like her Sky TV package. And I was like, I really want to watch that. And I feel like we binge all six

[01:36:03] episodes in one day. And I just am like, oh man, that changed my life. Like choosing to watch that show and be like, yeah, I'm going to watch that. It's just cool to think back to like 2010 and

[01:36:16] how that was. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Right. I remember just seeing Andrew Lincoln in a cowboy hat and being like, huh? That guy from this life. And then watching it and being like, oh, there was a movie

[01:36:28] called the human. What's it called? Human. It was just this human traffic. Yeah. And it was I saw it at Sundance in like the year 2000 or 2001. And that was also when I was first like getting into

[01:36:44] raving and taking ecstasy and stuff. So I was like, that's what that movie was about. It was about kids taking ecstasy and raving. And I was shocked when I went back and watched it again, fairly recently and saw that the jaded raver was Andrew Lincoln. Oh, yeah,

[01:37:01] these ravers used to be so great, but now they're no good or whatever. Yeah. It's everywhere. Yeah. Ahuva O'Hirons says, it's definitely not my first rewatch, but the pilot never gets old and it's always impactful. The sets were beautiful and Andrew Lincoln does an incredible job.

[01:37:20] But did anyone else notice Morgan's tattoo? Well, Ahuva, yes, I did. What do you guys think it is? I thought it kind of looked like his zombie wife. Ahuva, you're so right. And do we ever see it

[01:37:31] again or did it get magically removed in the apocalypse? I'm going to be keeping an eye out. I'm going to be yeah. Tattoo watch is going to be my purview and I will report back.

[01:37:40] Yeah, we're gonna have to research that a little bit to find out what the hell is going on. You're right. It does look like not his wife, but his zombie wife.

[01:37:47] Doug Fick says, I was reluctant to get on the Walking Dead bandwagon back in the day and they were in season four by then. I finally relented and when the cold opened, little girl, little

[01:37:59] girl, blam, I was hooked. I started mainlining Walking Dead from that day forward. It was a truly scary episode. In retrospect, knowing it was premiered on Halloween makes it all the cooler.

[01:38:09] It's fun to see how the Zeds were in episode one as they worked doorknobs and chilled on buses until a scent aroused them. Looking forward to the retrospective. Cool. I'm glad you're watching, Doug. Yeah, they kind of sleep, don't they? Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, Doug.

[01:38:24] Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like the comic with the roamers and the lurkers, you know. Sam Lowe says, yay. Still one of the best TV pilots I've seen. The writing, the acting, the pacing, so great. I watched the premiere at the very beginning and remember having

[01:38:37] a terrible headache that day but being mesmerized by the episode. It was unlike anything I'd ever watched and I wanted to know more. Rick as a guide for the audience was so effective. We were

[01:38:47] discovering this world with him. I remember also thinking that guy from Love Actually can actually look forward to the rewatch. Yay, Sam. I didn't. I kept hearing, yeah, Andrew Lincoln's in Love Actually, this like iconic romantic holiday movie that a lot of people hate and a lot of

[01:39:06] people love. And I finally got around to watching it and I just couldn't believe what a creepy dude he is in there. He's such a creep. Right? So gross. So gross. Like awful. I didn't want to

[01:39:21] see that. He's so mean to her. I'm like, this is like incel territory, man. And I did see him like holding up those signs, you know, like just in passing, you know, maybe a clip or something and

[01:39:35] I'm like, okay, it's kind of like the say anything guy with holding the radio above his head. It's this romantic gesture. But then in the context of the movie, it's like, no, dude. Awful. Awful.

[01:39:44] I bet that's how he's going to turn up back at Alexandria with the fucking signs. Hey, Judith, it's your dad. I'm so sorry. I was in a spa. It was really nice. Wendy says we watched last night as a group. Really loved it. Such an amazing. Yeah, some

[01:40:03] of the Zed heads are watching. They're going to try to watch it group nights. Such an amazing cold open. I really enjoyed the attention to detail, the dead flowers, the clock stopped.

[01:40:13] In many ways, they let the viewer figure things out for themselves in a better way in those early episodes. Yes. That hospital hallway scene almost done in black and white still brings a cold chill

[01:40:23] even after all these years. It's such a great scene and it's the hallmark of The Walking Dead. Yes, I believe I agree. The beginning of Morgan and that ending. Hey, you dumbass.

[01:40:32] Wyman Owens says I feel I need to comment. There is a new game coming out in November, December called The Walking Dead Destinies. Basic premise from what I could follow from the trailer is that throughout the gameplay you will run into key moments of our Walking Dead

[01:40:47] story. The catch is that you will have the opportunity to change it. For example, Carl dies on Green Farm after Oja shoots him. Laurie survives childbirth or Shane kills Rick on the

[01:40:57] farm. Good or bad, I'm going to pick it up and give it a whirl. Okay, back to your regular station. That sounds interesting Wyman. Report back. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I've seen it

[01:41:08] but I haven't looked into it and I didn't know quite what it was about but that sounds like it has a lot of potential to be good if the writing is any good at all. It could also be not so good

[01:41:20] but it's worth a look for sure. It sounds pretty cool. I'm looking to see what it's getting released on and whether I might just make Peter play it. I think it might be iOS but I'm not sure.

[01:41:29] Lanny Gilbert says, I can't wait. I meant to put that at the beginning but she can't wait so that's cool. You had to wait. We're so sorry Lanny. Yeah, sorry about that. Veronica Hood says,

[01:41:40] the only episode I ever really felt scared when he stumbled into the dark staircase of the hospital. I was terrified but I was also hooked. I wasn't a zombie fan, had never read the comics and here

[01:41:50] I am all these years later still enthralled with the world of The Walking Dead. Such a strong pilot with just the right amount of heart to balance the world of the undead against. Wild to watch this

[01:42:00] now knowing the fate of these characters, deaths and some worse than deaths being sent to fear. Excited to be revisiting it with you and Lucy. Yay Veronica, we're glad you're here. Yeah, absolutely. Now we have a call. It's, we haven't heard from in a while, Owen from Leeds.

[01:42:18] Good morning people of Podcastica, specifically you Walking Dead folks. This is Owen from Leeds here to discuss episode one, season one of The Walking Dead and if I've recorded this too late, well that's life. I thought it was a great episode. I feel huge positivity. I feel like

[01:42:41] hopefully this will get past season one. I think 11 seasons would be the perfect number but we'll see what gets announced. I like this Morgan character. I assume we're going to see plenty

[01:42:52] of him over the next two or three years and we won't have to wait at all. Positive that we'll see plenty of him. My predictions for the people to die, there was a brief little clip of some guys

[01:43:09] in a camp. I guess they're going to be kind of important. You know they spoke on a radio so you know we'll see them. I assume, I don't know, maybe Beth will die. Don't even know if

[01:43:20] we've seen her yet. Truth be told I've not watched the episode but I recall it from a dream perhaps. But anyway, I think The Walking Dead shall be a fine show and I may watch season one, episode one

[01:43:35] now actually. Yes, I reckon Jenna will be a good name for someone. They might be important. Anyway, good day. Hope you're all well and godspeed. Amazing. You should let us know what you actually thought after you watch it. Yeah, I'd be really intrigued to know how this goes.

[01:43:56] I think all his predictions are pretty solid though. It just flashed up that Destinies will be released for the Switch and I'm a lame little Switch gamer so that makes me happy.

[01:44:06] I can play Walking Dead Destinies on my Switch. Cool, yeah we have that too. That'd be good. Amazing. Oh Owen, love your calls. Yeah, good to hear from you. I hope you keep calling in for this.

[01:44:17] Ben Woods says, one of the best pilots of any show ever. I was unsure of what to expect from a zombie TV show but the tension through the hospital was incredible and at the end when

[01:44:27] the horse got eaten I knew it was going to be a great series. It's so funny people are like, when the little girl got shot I was hooked or when the horse got eaten that just did it for me.

[01:44:36] The excitement, I mean these are our people obviously, the excitement with the walkers through the city was great and Glenn's voice in the nick of time was incredible. Hey you dumbass, yeah you in the tank, you cozy in there? Thanks so much for doing a rewatch.

[01:44:50] I've wanted to do this since it ended but haven't gotten around to it likewise. Thanks for all you do, keep up the great work. Well thanks Ben. Oh thanks Ben. Alma Contreras, hi Alma, says well you know I love doing my Walking Dead rewatches but this

[01:45:03] time it will be fun to do it alongside the podcast. For starters I love how freaked out Rick is after waking up all hell broke loose. I agreed with everyone that the pilot episode is one of the

[01:45:14] scariest and I don't care how many times I watch it my anxiety skyrockets throughout the whole episode. I too was hesitant on watching the show. The first episode I tuned into was season four

[01:45:24] episode eight and I was mind blown emoji. Needless to say I ended up becoming obsessed and binge watching everything before the season break was over. Been obsessed ever since. I'm glad you are

[01:45:38] Alma. Yeah cool. I wonder how many people watched it and were just like nope not for me. There must have been some. I'm sure they're listening right now. Andrea Hatfield Olmsted says this was

[01:45:51] one of tv's most iconic opening pilot scenes in history. I've been a fan since season one. One of the best scenes in this episode was bicycle girl. Rick's emotional reaction was amazing and how he

[01:46:02] came back to her to put her down. We knew what a great lead character we were getting. I love that too. I loved how we ended up getting the backstory on it later too. You and Lucy should review those

[01:46:13] webisodes by the way that would be awesome. They all connected to the universe. Also who can resist don't dead open inside or don't open dead inside iconography on the door. In my opinion how Frank Darabont wrote these characters, how realistic the terminology and acting was made it great.

[01:46:30] Excited to re-watch. Take care. Oh Andrea. Good I'm glad you're watching. Those webisodes I remember not digging all that much so I don't know if we'll go back but we did talk about the bicycle girl one on

[01:46:43] the podcast when it came out. I liked red machete. I wanted to go back and watch that again. Yeah me too. That was a cool one. Jennifer McGinley says I was in a routine of going to bed at nine to watch a

[01:46:53] show after putting all the boys to bed tidying up etc and that was my time to chill going to sleep at 10. So having done this one night in 2011 having watched a CSI episode on channel 5 in the UK

[01:47:04] I heard the voiceover stay tuned for new zombie show before I'd zapped off the tv. Oh dilemma lose an hour of precious sleep or watch a zombie show. Zombies prevailed. I remember thinking this

[01:47:15] isn't a new show. I've definitely been here before which was due to the 28 days later similarity in a couple of scenes. Enjoyed it immensely and was excited for the next episode a whole week later

[01:47:25] because it was the olden days and you had to be blessed with the gift of deferred gratification. Oh Jennifer amazing. Yeah I wonder if she would have gone back to it if she hadn't watched it that

[01:47:36] night. That might be another life turning point. These are our destinies. These are our walking dead destinies. That's right. That's good. Laura Willie Swink says I remember…wait Lara Willie Swink says I remember watching the pilot by myself in the bedroom with the

[01:47:50] lights out after putting our youngest to bed October 31st 2010. I'd never read the comics but the show had been hyped up for months on Facebook and at our neighborhood Alamo draft house

[01:48:00] great theaters by a local horror movie fan club. As a lover of horror movies I had to tune in and I was blown away with what was shown in the first episode. Rick shot a little zombie girl in

[01:48:11] the face. I'd watched quote horror series in the past X-Files, Carnival on HBO and a short-lived network show called American Gothic but I'd never seen such great production value on TV. It was cinema worthy. I never could have realized that night that I'd get into a 13-year relationship

[01:48:28] with a show but it sure was worth it. Oh Lara. Lara's one of the first people I remember hearing like write in and call into the podcast. She and Reema they're two of the earliest names

[01:48:39] I remember hearing when I was a listener. Yeah and I remember being…I think she was…she'd like challenge things that we'd say sometimes and I'm like oh who's that? She'd do that again Lara. Challenge us. Challenge us. Bring forth the challenge. Shanna Shanna says fantastic role

[01:48:59] building straight from Kirkman's vision in the comic. My favorite parts of this iconic episode are the use of silence. As Rick navigates his new reality alone we follow most of his journey without any dialogue. There are no words needed. We don't even hear his voice until over three

[01:49:14] minutes into the episode. The sounds we do hear are the flies and the moans with a lone hoofbeat which is a reminder as we begin this journey the world belongs to the dead. The fight to reclaim

[01:49:24] the world from the dead is revisited all the way up to the final finale when Daryl declares we ain't the walking dead. Yes. Thank you Jason and Lucy for taking us back on this ride. I look forward

[01:49:35] to experiencing the rewatch each week. Can we get some guest appearances from Karen? I hope so. No probably not. Because I asked I said Karen you should watch the Daryl show. She loves France

[01:49:50] and I said it's well done and she said send me some episodes so I sent her the first couple and she wrote back I watched it and I loved it and I'm like oh good come on and talk about it

[01:49:59] with me and Lucy and she goes no I'm going down on the walking dead and I'm like but you liked it so I just think she just doesn't she's burned out on it which is too bad too bad too bad but

[01:50:12] she does come and podcast about other things sometimes so I'm sure she'll be on at some point talking about something we did beef that was the last thing we did that was yeah we did first bit

[01:50:22] of the power I think as well that was fun yeah yeah yeah yeah uh Dodie Sheffield says just did a rewatch this morning Andrew Lincoln was amazing in his post-coma reactions to a world gone mad

[01:50:33] I like your turn of phrase there proof that fantastic acting doesn't always require dialogue or even monologue I believed he was experiencing this I did notice Morgan's tattoo and thought it did resemble a zombie wife the scene of Rick riding into the city was beautiful and terrible

[01:50:50] I haven't read the comics but I'm thinking this was based on a frame in the comics I don't think it was remember I need to double check maybe it was yeah I forget I appreciate the

[01:51:00] compassion he showed in putting down the torso zombie but I kept thinking Rick get yourself a knife or something pointy gunfire is less helpful in a zombie city a long time since I had watched

[01:51:12] this episode but the little girl in the bunny slippers was burned into my brain forever so I couldn't forget that can't wait to see Glenn yeah that girl is Addie Miller and she's you know 20

[01:51:23] something now living her life living her life um Nathan Eshleman says here's an interesting fact about the pilot the zombie in the tank with Rick was real no I'm joking the zombie in the tank with Rick was played by actor Sam Whitwer who's most notably known for

[01:51:44] voicing Darth Maul in various Star Wars projects but he's also a good friend of Frank Darabont and starred in The Mist along with many other season one actors Sam has said at conventions and interviews that Frank had pitched him the idea of doing a Walking Dead prequel series

[01:51:59] showing the fall of Atlanta sort of like Black Hawk Down but with zombies that would end with Sam crawling into the tank with the grenade that Rick would later grab I'm unsure if it was pitched

[01:52:08] as one of the web series or if it would have been flash flashbacks during a Frank Darabont led season two but it was obviously scrap when Darabont was let go it makes sense to me that

[01:52:17] Darabont would cast a talented actor and friend in a minor zombie role if he had every intention of using him again yeah interesting points if I remember right he was going to do it in the

[01:52:30] season two premiere but they didn't let him because they didn't have enough money I could be remembering that wrong though no I feel like that rings a bell parted ways like halfway through

[01:52:40] season two with them for a bunch of different reasons and then was in like legal battles for 10 years after that yeah here's a call from Jason from San Diego

[01:52:52] see Jason this is Jason from San Diego I haven't called in in a long time and I don't think I've ever called in about Walking Dead amazing but I wanted to call in and just say I'm so happy

[01:53:05] that we're starting season one episode one again this is so fun so I a little story I started to you know dig through Netflix or some streaming account to find season one episode one and my

[01:53:20] 12 year old son goes dad on the DVR you have the first season recorded oh I do I don't remember doing that Halloween maybe five eight ten years ago they replayed all six of them in a marathon

[01:53:37] in black and white and I recorded them and it's incredible to watch them in black and white I did watch both a colored version and a black and white version and I really like the black and white

[01:53:48] version I kind of wish they would have done the series that way you know it evokes the comics and all that stuff in any case this is a episode one season one is such a lovely setup I mean it is a

[01:54:03] little movie on itself yes there's a little bit of exposition that you know just kind of gets you where you need to be but the characters are set up so good Rick is the hero we want Shane is the

[01:54:20] the dick we need you know you need a guy that's kind of a jerk but he's the hero's best friend I get the feeling watching it over a couple of times I guess also with the knowledge of you know

[01:54:35] 12 and a half seasons and everything going on that pretty sure that Lori and Shane had something going on maybe before this went down and this just made it you know boom instant family Rick's stuck

[01:54:50] in a hospital room so I really I remember watching this thinking god they could have went in such a different direction with Morgan and Dwayne I mean that shoot that could have been that could

[01:55:08] have been a story in itself just him getting back to Morgan and Dwayne not never mind you know trying to find Lori in the group but so in any case I yeah not too detailed of a description on this

[01:55:21] one but I just wanted to say I'm so happy this is going on and I will be trying to be a regular caller every week so good luck keep this going you two do a great job as always and thank you

[01:55:38] thanks Jason that's great that's amazing what did you call in on Jason I don't recognize your voice was it on a show I'm on let me know I'm curious I thought it was really interesting

[01:55:50] that they foregrounded the marital issues in this episode as well but that gave it some layers yeah I think yeah so the whole thing with Shane talking about women and all that idiocy was I

[01:56:05] think just because they needed to get into a conversation where it would be revealed that Rick was having problems with Lori and then you see Shane with Lori later on that he's taken

[01:56:15] up with her so it creates this drama you know and again you know he knows that she'll turn the lights off Rick shouldn't have said that he hadn't revealed that you know you know that

[01:56:27] Rick will find them and but they'll be that challenge to overcome so that sets that up like oh my god what's gonna happen as far as whether they were having an affair before I was I had

[01:56:39] that thought too and I was watching this time to see if it seemed like that and the way that Shane was talking to Rick I think not I mean I don't know though he's the one who brought it up so how

[01:56:50] you doing with Lori anyway and then when he told him he seemed supportive and he was like oh it's just a phase you guys will be fine but then that could just be him trying to uh throw him off the

[01:57:01] scent or something too I mean but I think I think not all pairs of boobs are interchangeable I've learned and uh it could be that um the reason why Rick and Lori are having problems maybe

[01:57:17] her having an affair has something to do with that you know sometimes that can happen where somebody's doing something and then they feel guilty so they cause trouble at home or something like that I don't know but do you have an actual I don't think they are

[01:57:33] but I think Shane I think Shane and Rick have this weird relationship where Shane has always kind of wanted what Rick has so Shane's clearly modeling himself as this like I don't know playboy pairs of boobs coming in putting the lights on and off like there's

[01:57:49] clearly a difference there and I think when Rick is in that coma Shane gets the chance to be the hero almost and part of that is getting the family and getting the girl and the

[01:57:59] kids and yeah I like to think it happened after it's a great I mean what you just said that could be a case for before though you know if you wanted what Rick has. I don't see Lori

[01:58:14] doing it before. Yeah I don't think so I mean it's hard to know for sure but um I think it's a great complex relationship and it's fairly common among guys where you'll feel like the guy is your

[01:58:26] friend I mean it's it's not just guys it's everyone but you feel like yes this person is my friend but then there is also that thing about wanting to not be dominated or to be the dominant one

[01:58:39] personally I feel like I've avoided that with most of my friends but I'm watching White Lotus right now and there's a relationship like that with uh you remember White Lotus season two? Yes. Cameron and Ethan. Yes that's a really interesting relationship. Yeah

[01:58:53] oh Ethan. It's kind of Rick and Shane are a little bit like that maybe. The actor who plays Ethan I just adore he's so great he's a British actor he was in Will Sharp I think he was in a

[01:59:02] really good dark comedy called Flowers love him. I need to see him in something else because my only association is Ethan who I despise. He's a dud. Absolutely need to Ethan isn't the one who's

[01:59:16] married to Aubrey Plaza right? Yeah. Yeah you need to watch Flowers it's really good. Okay cool yeah uh what else oh he said black and white um yeah and based off the comic which made me realize

[01:59:29] that because they released the first six episodes in black and white as an homage to the comic which was in black and white and Kirkman said he would never do the comic in color and

[01:59:36] then when it was all over he's now started releasing them in color and he it's called Walking Dead Deluxe and they have a back matter additional back matter where he does Q&A not comic stuff but like text where he'll answer questions about that issue or different things

[01:59:52] and I find all that stuff pretty fascinating. I haven't been keeping up with it but I want to go through and look at him sometime. I like Kirkman's style in those it's funny he's very irreverent

[02:00:00] he's like nah I don't know maybe whatever Negan rocks no he doesn't he's a dick and he'll say so and so dies next issue haha and then they do die yeah I never know what to believe. You're like oh.

[02:00:12] Okay my turn Cara Lacherle says I still remember how amped I was for this pilot and it delivered it aired on Halloween night my first semester of law school I've always loved anything apocalyptic slash post-apocalyptic so I had my popcorn ready and I was hooked the opening with

[02:00:30] the little girl walker was shocking and brilliantly shot and the bicycle girl walker will always stick with me yeah totally I still think this is in the top five pilot episodes ever along with Lost and

[02:00:41] Stranger Things. Lost is so good the characters all immediately felt lived in and the show overall just felt so gritty and realistic also that cliffhanger with Rick in the tank and hearing Glenn's voice on the radio iconic not gonna lie though the horse being surrounded and eaten by

[02:00:58] walkers is still one of the most disturbing scenes to me I'll close my eyes or fast forward during every rewatch yeah it's really gross too with all the intestines everything also The Walking Dead and eventually the original podcast with Jason and Karen became an excellent stress reliever

[02:01:13] and something for me to look forward to every week as a reward for my working my ass off can't wait to hear you all dive back into the episode that started it all well I hope you keep listening

[02:01:22] Cara because we love you. Amazing. Joel Levine says glad to have an excuse to revisit The Walking Dead from the beginning again took some notes for the first time so I'll try to keep it short

[02:01:34] loved seeing a little girl in the cold open picking up the teddy bear back when zombies were zombies the conversation between Rick and Shane in the car if only women could figure out light

[02:01:44] switches work both ways climate change could be fixed from the beginning Shane was a bit of a douche Rick is not a super smart at least he wasn't a climate change denier I guess

[02:01:54] I mean he has a way of making what I mean what he was saying wasn't great but his attitude makes it sound even worse yeah that smarmy look on his face oh yeah Rick is not a super smart cop standing

[02:02:13] out in the open to get shot for the first to get shot at for the first shot vest or no don't make it easy for them but they're all terrible why did no one clear that scene before they started talking

[02:02:22] to each other Rick has to be a little sick that Laurie and Carl abandoned him who's been delivering all that mail since Laurie and Carl hit the bricks the mailbox is full junk mail even gets sent during

[02:02:34] the ZA I bet there was something in there to extend their car's warranty um Rick Grimes first said kill was with a baseball bat wish it had barbed wire wondering why didn't Morgan take a

[02:02:46] police uniform nice clean fresh clothes not like anyone else needed it sure now Rick thinks he shit ahead with the radio too much to think ahead on a high-speed chase and get behind a car to block

[02:02:57] bullets Laurie's already seeing what a life of shame would have been like I miss Darabont these ghouls were much more interesting Morgan's wife coming up sorry these ghouls were so much more interesting Morgan's wife coming up the stairs trying the doorknob the herd in Atlanta chasing

[02:03:13] Rick eating his horse the zombie stalking Rick in Atlanta waiting for him outside the tank realism a gunshot in a tank is loud not realism the place you are cornered by zombies is directly under an

[02:03:24] open access hole to a tank hey you dumbass in the tank Glenn was great even in a one-liner oh I like your notes Joe keep doing them yeah that was good uh a couple things yes we said

[02:03:38] back when zombies were zombies and these zombies do seem more like classic Romero night of the living dead zombies I think they would pick things up and they just looked like they had a little bit

[02:03:47] more of their humanity sometimes like these ones when men were men zombies were zombies and women were just pairs of boobs that was classic good time glory days man the glory days uh and then

[02:04:02] Rick he says Rick had to be a little sick that Laurie and Carl abandoned him I think we I know we find out that Laurie thought Rick was dead Shane told them he was dead I'm pretty sure yeah

[02:04:13] we'll find I don't remember if Shane knew for sure I think Shane didn't know for sure Shane tells them because he knows they won't leave if they think he's alive yeah I think that he just

[02:04:24] leaves him there in a coma so he doesn't he probably writes him off for dead but yeah knows he left him for dead basically right I think that's what happened but either way I know

[02:04:33] Laurie thought because I think in the comic actually Laurie didn't think Rick was dead so the cheating had a different flavor there yeah I think they go harder on the disintegration of the marriage in the comic for sure I think yeah Daniel DeMent Jost says

[02:04:51] okay the very first episode this is probably going to read a bit like a live Steve so bear with me I'm just taking notes as I watch wow I forgot what babies everybody was in the beginning Rick

[02:05:00] is so skinny and young I love seeing the original credit sequence I've said I didn't it's not my favorite the opening music or the credit sequence but it was pretty effective here because I think

[02:05:14] it just really shows that wow the world's changed now you know it's just seen apocalyptic scenes how barren it is how broken down and messy and everything so at least for this first episode

[02:05:27] I liked it too they also play the theme while Rick's under the tank which surprised me yeah we don't usually hear the theme outside of the credits so yeah that was cool

[02:05:35] she goes on oh so many reasons to dislike Shane such a misogynistic jerk does anyone else hear his innocent question about how Laurie is in a different light like maybe he's fishing to see

[02:05:46] if they're breaking up because he's interested it could be yeah you're right the question of how much time passed while Rick was unattended is an interesting one he survived so it couldn't

[02:05:55] have been too long since he wouldn't have had any water the webisode showed that a nurse was still in the hospital for a while I didn't remember that but I don't think she was tending to him because

[02:06:06] she would have moved the gurney out of the way of the door she may have not known he was there or alive and may have been in the hospital when Rick woke up but their paths didn't cross Rick's facial

[02:06:18] hair implies a couple weeks maybe assuming a nurse or Laurie or someone else was shaving him up until the outbreak but that might be too long to go without dangerous dehydration but suspension of

[02:06:30] disbelief yes I mean the other explanation is that at the end of The Ones Who Live he will wake up from his coma don't dead open inside damn bicycle girl was an excellent first walker way to really

[02:06:44] set the bar high nobody does hysterical grief like Andrew Lincoln okay and Sally Field how in the world did Duane mistake Rick for a walker I mean he's scared it's like the world's that's all they've

[02:06:58] seen yeah plus he's looks like shit I almost forgot what a good actor Lenny James can be when he's given good material to work with oh yeah I always love yeah I always love the walker who gets

[02:07:10] off the bus in Atlanta first very groovy looking fella ah the first helicopter sighting poor Rick was haunted by helicopters from the start oh yeah there were quite a few helicopters in this episode

[02:07:21] in the air and on the grind maybe he'll be flying one by the The Ones Who Live top gun top grind that moment when Glenn comes on the radio just makes me smile I love revisiting the beginning

[02:07:36] of that brotherhood that's well put nitpicks Walker Leon held onto the fence after he'd been shot for way too long Morgan using a swivel chair on wheels to provide stability for his gun seems

[02:07:47] ineffective I know Rick's radio message was scrambled but I find it hard to believe Shane Laurie and Carl didn't recognize Rick's voice or at least wonder yeah I thought kind of thought that

[02:07:57] too I love this show yay we love you Danielle yeah that was great Danielle good thanks for writing in she's been such a big fan and oh yeah listening to the podcast for so long appreciate

[02:08:11] you here's one final call from Colin yes I do sing not professionally but I really enjoy it I was in two metal bands between 18 and fuck now I'm 30 yeah my girlfriend really likes my singing

[02:08:32] my kids don't I sing a lot of country and folk somewhat R&B if that's the term for it I don't fucking know yeah y'all give me a rec and and I'll uh yeah I'll sing something for you whatever

[02:08:52] podcast this ends up on let me know and I'll listen to it but yeah Fear the Walking Dead they can go fuck themselves it's fucking dog shit who brings a character back after five seasons with a bum fuck eye and a vengeance I'm gonna kill Madison

[02:09:14] yeah go fuck yourself I don't care anymore I can't wait for this show to be over in three more episodes fuck that was a response to when he called in about the Daryl finale for people who wondered

[02:09:31] that's hilarious oh wow we need a shoot what was that one there was a movie with singers from was it Scotland or Ireland back in the 90s do you know what I'm talking about

[02:09:47] oh the commitments yeah yeah it's Irish yeah yeah yeah that seems like a good for his voice they had one song that they kept Mustang Sally yeah Mustang Sally there you go Colin Mustang Sally

[02:10:03] oh that'd be great yeah let's hear it all righty that is our show episode 548 thanks so much for listening everyone how did you think that went do you think I loved it so fun yeah so psyched

[02:10:18] for this rewatch yeah next episode Walking Dead season one episode two guts where they figure out how to neutralize the zombie threat forever and ignore it just be using it for every episode after

[02:10:32] that and they just forget about it just don't do it anymore I mean I was glad they did actually go back to it you know they didn't just ignore it after that but they didn't go back to it as much

[02:10:42] as I would have no I'd just been probably caught in it for like the rest of the apocalypse I'd be every disease going on that note if you want to write in or leave us a voice message about it

[02:10:54] you can find all our contact information at podcastica.com yeah right in Colin as I said please ignore zombie sounds and while you're at podcastica.com please check out our other

[02:11:06] podcast it's off season for this show but if you're the show I'm about to mention but if you're into the Walking Dead you should check out a show called from on MGM plus it's scary it's dark

[02:11:18] it's got some lost people from lost working on it and including the actor I always forget his name Henry no Michael Perrino he Michael Perrino yeah thank you he's great Harold Perrino character

[02:11:34] was Michael on Lost we got there we got there eventually we helped each other his name was Desmond John Law Sawyer that was it Lindelof and it's we have the what is from cast and

[02:11:51] yeah I think a lot of Walking Dead fans might dig that show especially if you're a fan of Lost this episode is made possible by Patreon supporters like Jeff Sharp who pledged their

[02:12:01] support at patreon.com slash Jason cabassi thank you to Jeff he gets ad free episodes of the whole rewatch and a bunch of other cool stuff so appreciate it excellent all right that is our

[02:12:14] show thanks for listening don't get bit carol actually bit bit chewed maybe scratched anything like that