For a show about zombies, there wasn’t much undead based fun going on in this week’s episode. In fact there were a grand total of two scenes featuring the walking dead in this episode – one of which was a continuation of the finale of last week’s (at a stretch you could say there were three zombie related bits, as at the camp a couple of kids in the background were playing zombies until their mother stopped them, but that was more cute than terrifying). For much of the running time, it was more survivalist soap opera than blood and guts horror.

Rick finally made it back to his wife and son, and although they were both shocked and happy to see him alive, there was a wonderful undercurrent of guilt and disbelief from Lori – in particular at the moment when they first embraced and she glanced at Rick’s partner Shane over his shoulder with a look of almost horror on her face. Still a bit of talking about what happened to Rick, how she and Carl had escaped and whether he’d want his wedding ring back and everything was pretty much back to normal between them (with the numerous trappings in their tent that she and Shane had taken from their old house, like floral bedspreads, photo albums and diamond earrings, it was almost like watching a regular middle class family drama, just set out in the middle of nowhere). Not so much between her and Shane though.

Apparently in the last days of civilisation, the marches forward we’ve made over the past 30-50 years will be reversed almost completely, once again men are the ones who leave the home to gather food and ward off danger, while the women are left behind to do the more domestic tasks. Unfortunately it also seems that in the last days approximately two thirds of all men will be absolute jerks. As if Merle wasn’t bad enough (and the sight of his sawed off hand by the still attached handcuffs when Rick and co got back into Atlanta was not a welcome one – hopefully he’ll bleed to death before they manage to find him), we now have to deal with his only marginally more bearable brother Daryl (whose cavalier attitude to dealing with getting his arrows back from zombie corpses will hopefully prove to be his undoing, I think he’d be much more interesting as a walking corpse) as well as Ed, the arrogant family man who thought nothing of putting the group’s lives in danger as he wanted a slightly bigger campfire and who turned out to be a particularly vicious wife beater. Luckily Shane was around to take out some of his new-found frustrations (now that Lori had gone back to Rick and had effectively banned him from taking any more interest in her son) on the guy to get him to lay off his wife.

Glenn was his usual amusing self, on driving the sports car from the end of the last episode into the camp, still with the alarm blaring, his only defence at potentially luring the dead into the camp was pointing out ‘I got a cool car’. Although camp elder Dale may have reassured the camp by claiming that the sound from the car alarm was echoing all around the hills, so it would be unlikely for them to be found, there’s a good chance that the subsequent arrival of the first zombie at the camp the next day was no mere coincidence. Fortunately Glenn was provided with a chance to make up for this by being volunteered by Rick to join the trip back into Atlanta, despite Glenn being a self-confessed coward, so that Daryl could find his brother and he and T-Dog could relieve their guilt for leaving him there (and, as Rick argued, it also made sense to go back so he could pick up the guns he had left in the city, and the walkie-talkie that he’d told Morgan to contact him on back in episode one). It might be an incredibly stupid move to go back as they only just managed to escape but I’m glad they decided to do so – for one I preferred Rick as grizzled action man rather than loving husband and father – it’s hard to believe that Andrew Lincoln, a man whose screen presence in the past has either been wet (This Life, Love Actually) or sleazy (Teachers), could make a convincing, even kind of sexy action star, but he’s pulled it off so far. Still, it’s a shame that they came across absolutely no zombies on the way back to the roof where they had left Merle.

There was an unexpected bonus with the lack of zombie scenes in that I didn’t spend a significant proportion of the episode mentally comparing the show to movies. Although that being said, I did notice that the music at the end did get a bit 28 Days Later, I think Bear McReary (who it must be said is doing an excellent job here) may have been listening to John Murphy’s score for that film/a bit of Godspeed You! Black Emperor before working on the series (I think I promised that I wouldn’t keep going on about 28 Days Later in my review of the first episode, what with it being a bit of a controversial entry into the zombie cannon, and somehow I’ve managed to mention it every week now, so sorry about that).

So, so far the series seems to be coasting along nicely, but not quite living up to its potential. How are you all finding it now that we’re halfway through the (surprisingly short) first season?