VIDEO: Watch the First Three Minutes of ‘The Walking Dead’ — Season Premier Tonight on AMC!
The Walking Dead’s season-six premiere is set up to make you think it is an ambitious piece of TV filmmaking. It jumps back and forth in time, putting the past in black-and-white, the present in vibrant color. The episode, titled “First Time Again,” is constructed as a daring, somewhat complex plan to corral and contain a large number of walkers, led, of course, by Rick Grimes. (Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)
Rick is the John Wayne of The Walking Dead, but he’s not the simple, heroic John Wayne of hundreds of Westerns — no, he’s a specific John Wayne: the John Wayne of The Searchers. The one who is tragically arrogant, blinded by his sense of his own personal loss to insist that his way is the only way, and anyone who disagrees with him should get out of the way or be crushed.
The season premiere tries to make itself look more complicated than it actually is, shuffling the scenes of the preparation for the battle to sequester some walkers with the execution of the sequestration. It’s ultimately just a chopped-up, hyped up version of an ordinary The Walking Dead episode with one significant change. The show seems to be moving toward showing Rick Grimes overreaching — coming ever-closer to being overtaken by hubris, an unwarranted pride in his leadership. Any time anyone says (as Rick does on Sunday night), “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”, chances are, you’re looking at a character who’s headed for a fall.
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
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Avigail is an Entertainment blogger at All About The Tea, who specializes in The Real Housewives of Atlanta and The Real Housewives of Potomac. Avigail has a background in marketing. She’s a Brooklynite living in the Bahamas, with a passion for travel, writing, reality TV watching, pop culture and spoken word.