Review:
The Walking Dead: Episode Five

105 – Wildfire

We’re almost at the climax of this short first season of The Walking Dead and it’s now time to shake things up a bit. This episode finally sees the survivors leave the comfort of their cosy camp on a hillside on the outskirts of Atlanta.

In the wake of a devastating undead attack on the camp, the survivors now have many bodies to bury – including some of their own. When the time for grief is over, it’s time for them to decide together what they should do. If the walkers are beginning to leave the cities, should they move on? Or are they safer where they are, hidden from sight? The group votes for the former and so our heroes begin the search for a true sanctuary in hell.

What’s great about this particular episode is the number of emotions the cast are forced to go through. The opening quarter of the show deals almost exclusively with grief and the horror of true loss. The wide range of ways of expressing those feelings come from almost every member of the cast, from Daryl simply wanting to chuck all the bodies in a massive funeral pyre and be done with it, to the normally-quiet Glen’s angry insistence that ‘we don’t burn our dead.’ The majority of the screen time in this section, however, is given to Andrea as she grieves over the lifeless body of her sister. The simple stress of her loss, coupled by her perfectly believable and understandable reactions when the others tentatively try to suggest ending Amy’s suffering before it begins and some wonderful acting all add up to a drama that actually does what it says on the tin.

As with the previous episode, it’s Dale’s quiet scenes of powerful emotion that gently sweep the viewer away. This time the old man gives a soft-spoken, yet utterly convincing speech about how much he cares for Amy and Andrea, and it’s so believable that the show deserves its own spin-off that focuses on Dale before the outbreak, where he reads the morning paper aloud and goes for long walks.