A bit of a mis-step this time after last week’s strong opening. Sadly Darabont seemed more keen to get the plot in motion this episode rather than allow us to wallow in the atmosphere some more, providing more opportunities to draw comparisons with other zombie movies (I was reminded of Dawn of the Dead, what with the shop-based setting, and 28 Days Later with the survivors taking on the zombies while dressed in riot gear, I’m sure there are more similarities in there). Not that it was in any way ‘bad’ – it was all good gory fun, but the first episode did suggest that the show has the potential to be much more than that.

Whereas the first episode was filled with a pervading sense of dread, this week’s only really went for this in the opening scenes where Rick’s wife wandered off into the woods alone. The constant attention to the sounds made by animals, branches etc was certainly tense, so it was a shame that it turned out that she had been followed by Rick’s ex-partner Shane and the two ended up having a rather soft-core porn-like sex scene there in the middle of the woods (I’m not saying that following a zombie outbreak people wouldn’t be having sex, it just seemed a bit overdone, and it was a shame that all that tension was squandered on something so tawdry - it was kind of the pervy equivalent of the old horror cliche of the cat jumping out to create a cheap shock).

While his wife and former colleague were getting it on, Rick was still stuck in a tank in Atlanta, getting advice from a sarcastic voice coming through the tank’s radio. It turned out that the voice belonged to Glen – a member of a small group of survivors who were holed up in a shop nearby – and most of the episode was taken up with their antipathy towards Rick for alerting the zombies to their presence (to be honest as the zombies were right outside their hiding place I think they would have found the survivors even without Rick’s help), what to do with the inconveniently racist member of the gang (played by Michael Rooker in another one of his psychotic bad-ass roles – like every other role I’ve seen him in – and with an accent so impenetrable that I wished I had the option of turning on subtitles) and how to escape the horde of the walking dead outside (who, in a nice continuation of last week’s fleeting signs of intelligence, had learned to use rudimentary tools as they took to using rocks to bash in the shop windows with – although it did take them a surprisingly long time to break through a couple of panes of glass). After trying and failing to get through the sewer system underneath the building, Rick and Glenn took to the streets by attempting to ape the zombies in a manner only slightly less hare-brained than the one they used in Shaun of the Dead. Still it seemed to work – Glenn distracted the zombies by finding the fastest, noisiest and flashiest car possible and driving it past the store to lure the zombies away – although I’m surprised the lumbering corpses even managed to do that as he did go at a fair speed, and they, being the good old fashioned type of zombie, can’t – allowing Rick to get to the store and load the rest of the group into a van, minus Merle the racist who (un)fortunately remained hand-cuffed on the roof after the black guy he’d spent the episode insulting ‘accidentally’ dropped the key down an inconveniently placed pipe (not that I’m saying that the guy dropped it deliberately, but considering just how much Merle had berated the guy during the episode, it would lend itself to Freud’s theory that there’s no such thing as an accident – although to be honest I might have got that wrong, most of my knowledge of Freud comes from episodes of Frasier). Ending the episode with the gang heading out of the city, presumably back to the other group of survivors – as hinted at by one of the Atlanta lot incongruously ignoring the horde of zombies at the window to look at a mermaid necklace her sister would like – so hopefully we’ll see an end of the Rick’s wife/former partner affair next episode, or at least not so much in the way of sex scenes between the two.

I think my problem with the episode was that things felt too convenient, or rather conveniently inconvenient, in order to move the plot along. Of course one of the nicely multicultural gang would turn out to be a ridiculously overblown piece of white trash only there to antagonise everyone else (although the end of the episode suggested otherwise, I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of him as well), and that one of the group would turn out to know all about building plans and sewer access having worked on city zoning (still, nice to know that the things we learn in boring office jobs will still have their uses after the apocalypse), and of course it was going to start raining heavily as soon as Rick and Glenn walked out among the zombies, washing off the blood they’d covered themselves in in order to disguise their smell (on that subject – I’m surprised that the smell washed off quite that quickly, judging by the decomposed state of the corpses they got the blood from I would have thought that the smell would have been much more difficult to get rid of). Still there was plenty to like, mostly revolving around Glenn actually – from his prodigious vomiting when Rick smashed up the zombies’ corpses, to the resulting strange neckwear the two wore out – I don’t think ligaments and feet will really catch on as substitutes for the scarf. Although the fact that he was last seen alone, driving out of the city in a ridiculously loud car, as well as his cocky yet squeamish attitude, suggest that he’s not going to last long, I hope that we haven’t seen the last of him yet.

Apologies for being quite negative about this week’s episode – I did enjoy it (honest!), I just thought it fell quite short of the high standards set by the opening episode, and I’m hoping it was only a temporary dip in quality. What did you all think about it?