Review

With the zombie apocalypse now in full swing Andrew is starting to build a cache of weapons, as the realities of the new world order start to exert their influences. Hannah is reminiscing about the goldfish thing from the first episode and wishes she could wake up with things being back to normal, just the sort of person you would want to be with as the zombie whip comes crashing down.

Meanwhile the kids are in the lounge room arguing about Max, the family dog, who Andrew shot in the second episode. Unfortunately they are not alone, their step-mother is about to make any fears they may have harboured from fairytales a reality. Its zombie step-mom, and my what big teeth she has! One of the kids can think pretty quickly on his feet and looks like a survivor, even with that Hanson haircut, MMMBop Mofos!

Got to say I had some longer relationships in College than this episode's runtime which clocked in at a paltry couple of minutes maximum. Considering we have gone three episodes setting up the situation and defining who exactly is rolled up in the carpet, the delivery of what we expected to happen was pretty piss weak. Okay I got the dog was a plot point, step mom was wrapped in carpet, and the zombie deluge was about to start, but could I also have got a decent slice of time with the delivery. There's very little meat on the bone here considering the efforts that went into defining just what was about to go down. Sadly this is the first episode of any of the webisodes that has disappointed me. What was writer John Esposito thinking when he short changed us all with this effort?

I'm still not letting anyone off the hook with our zombie situation here either. To recap the issue, Judy - Andrew's second wife - got bitten by a zombie on her way home from the shopping mall. By the time Judy makes it through the front down she has turned, we're talking dead and wanting human flesh. Andrew blasts Judy with the rifle he picked up over at Palmer's place, which puts zombie Judy down for the count. Pull the car up to the curb here folks, in The Walking Dead universe you need to shot them in the head to make them stay dead, no way in hell was Judy shot in the head, ergo she shouldn't have been taking a little afternoon nap. There's a logic bomb here that no amount of fudging is going to get past!

Damn it zombies need to be taken down with a shot to the head, don't be playing with that concept!

Danielle Burgio is having fun times getting her zombie walk on, but since her legs weren't injured during the zombie attack I wasn't buying it. Burgio comes off looking more like a marionette than a zombie to be honest, someone should have asked her to tone it down a bit and try and come across as something less than spastic. There were some good makeup effects however, two thumbs up there, zombie Judy's lips have been eaten away, which was high on the cool side and in keeping with plot developments established previously.

Out of interest we get plenty of background noise, helicopters, police sirens etc which would indicate it's still early in the apocalypse. Which sort of underlines that over the course of five episodes we are still on day one as Andrew and Hannah realise things have gone completely pear shaped. You could readily believe that somewhere in a local hospital Shane is having to leave Rick as all hell breaks loose. To be honest nowhere in The Walking Dead is it stated how the outbreak happened, why it happened, or whether or not it was a sudden escalation or steadily worsening situation. Like Romero Kirkman isn't giving any answers, besides we all carry the disease, there are no signposts to just how it all began. I'm quite pleased the television series hasn't explored their own causality, we just get to groove to the zombie apocalypse and the post outbreak world.

Not sure if this is correct or not, but I picked up on a huge node to Halloween (1978) during this episode. The kids are hiding in what I took to be the broom closet, maybe they have clock rooms in the states, and the doors have those slates that allow you to see out, just like the ones Laurie Strode peered through as Michael ran rampant. I got the same sort of a vibe here with zombie Judy doing the Mikey thing. Maybe it was just a horror trope, but sure looked like John Carpenter's scene.

Guess with one episode to go our survivors aren't going to remain behind locked doors but will attempt to make it to one of the Government emergency centres. That nearly always works out in a zombie movie, but since this web series has a nihilistic ending I guess we know where we are heading, to Rick Grimes ending it. Would actually be pretty cool if they finished with that recap from episode one of the television series, fingers crossed.

As stated I was generally disappointed in the length of this one and really didn't think the payoff merit the three episodes that were used to set it up. The zombie plotting is up there with Twilight in terms of taking liberties with the mythology, so yeah some real disappointed after this series started strongly. Fingers once again crossed they can get it right in the final episode, but I got a feeling this train has already derailed.