The Walking Dead Season 1, Episode 5: Wildfire

This week on the Walking Dead:

In the aftermath of the zombie attack on the camp, the survivors begin burying their dead. Andrea can’t seem to let her sister Amy go, and won’t let the others near her now dangerous corpse. The others discover that Jim was bitten in the attack, and he soon gets zombie fever. Shane blames Rick for the attack on the camp, and good pal that he is, comes close to picking him off while the two are along on zombie patrol. Rick convinces the others to desert the camp and head for the Center for Disease Control, hoping they’ll find a serum there to cure an ailing Jim.

We’re definitely off the comic book map now. They never went to the CDC in the comic, so I have no idea where the story’s headed now.

Poor Jim. I was just getting to like him too. He wasn’t in the comic though, so I figured he was cannon fodder. Or rather zombie food. I get why he didn't want to go on with the others, but why wouldn't he take the gun from Rick? I would think it would be better to blow your brains out right before the end than to become a shambling zombie, doomed to wander the countryside looking for fresh brains.

I loved Darryl’s face when Carol borrowed his pick axe to “take care” of her husband Ed's corpse. Pretty disturbing stuff.

I guess we won’t be seeing any more of Merle this season, as it’s unlikely he’d follow them to the CDC. This confirms my suspicion that he’ll reappear in a later season as the TV version of the Governor.

That Shane's quite a pal. Apparently he coveted Rick's wife and child for himself, so he told them Rick died in the hospital and swooped in to take his place. Then when Rick miraculously turns up alive, Shane comes very close to killing him himself this week. Things didn't end well between them in the comic, and it looks like it'll be no different in TV land.

I was on the edge of my seat when Andrea was cradling Amy’s rapidly awakening corpse. I kept wanting to yell, “Shoot it in the head, stupid, before it bites you!” Andrea’s a major player in the comic, so I didn’t think they’d kill her off, but I wasn’t sure there for a minute.

They did pay slight lip service to a "tin can perimeter" in this episode, to help explain why no one was standing guard during the fish fry last week. I've noticed they do this quite a bit; answer questions we have in the next episode.

I’m not sure about this CDC plotline. It seems like it's coming awfully early in the series. In the comic they never find out what caused the zombie outbreak, which is probably for the best. The comic characters are too busy trying to deal with the situation to worry about How and Why. I hope the TV show goes that route as well. So far they’ve striven to make the show as real as possible, and adding some kind of alien virus that fell off a comet or secret germ weapon kind of destroys that realism. Better to not worry about the cause, in my opinion. I’m hoping this CDC guy doesn’t have all the answers.

Dang, only one episode to go. That was a short season!

Update: Jim was indeed a character in the early issues of the comic. It's been 4 or 5 years since I started reading it so I forgot a lot of the details from the first few issues.