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'€˜Walking Dead'€™ opens season five in spectacularly bloody fashion

Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes and Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in the season 5 premiere of The Walking Dead

Hans David Tampubolon (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, October 11, 2014

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'€˜Walking Dead'€™  opens season five in spectacularly bloody fashion Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes and Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in the season 5 premiere of The Walking Dead. (Courtesy of AMC) (Courtesy of AMC)

Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes and Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in the season 5 premiere of The Walking Dead. (Courtesy of AMC)

The Walking Dead kicks off its fifth season with a fast-paced premiere filled with relentlessly violent scenes, suggesting the series could be one of the bloodiest in television history.

At the end of the fourth season, deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who leads a band of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world plagued by zombies, finds himself and his comrades trapped in a place called Terminus, supposedly a safe haven for those trying to escape the man-eating undead.

The fifth season continues directly from where the fourth ended. Rick and the survivors are now trying to figure out a way to escape from their confinement in Terminus. But before they can, the guards of Terminus neutralize Rick and a number of his sidekicks using toxic gas.

As Rick begins regaining his senses, viewers see events unfold from his perspective. Blurred but slowly clearing images of a human body being dismembered by a chainsaw and splattered blood on the wall quickly build fears of the ugly fate that might await Rick and his friends.

Rick and his comrades are then forced to kneel in front of a steel bathtub with their hands and ankles tightly roped. The guards, dressed in butcher attire, slowly cut the throats of Rick'€™s men one by one in a gory scene that might have been in homage to The Raid 2, the ultra violent movie that features a similar yet even more brutal depiction of the medieval style execution.

Before the executioners can get to Rick, however, a major explosion takes place. The explosion destroys one of the main gates of Terminus and allows hundreds of zombies to enter the place and begin eating people alive.

Rick uses this opportunity to untie himself and injure the guards. Completely disgusted with what has happened in Terminus, Rick decides not to kill the guards and to leave them to face a fate worse than death itself '€” be eaten alive by zombies or join the ranks of the undead by their bites.

As Rick and his men try to free the other survivors confined in Terminus and escape, fans of the series will have their adrenaline pumped up in endless scenes of zombies being shot in the head, impaled and shot from point blank range. The violence is brutal but each violent scene comes with a clear purpose, not just for the sake of gratuitous gore.

The premiere offers some questions that might linger inside the minds of the franchise'€™s fans: what is the history behind Terminus? Are Rick and his men now facing not only man-eating zombies, but humans who have become cannibals as well?

However, there are few answers in the first episode. An old woman, who is a Terminus dweller, reveals that the place was indeed, a long time ago, a safe haven for everyone, yet something happened that forced the original inhabitants of the place to make a choice '€” to become the butchers or the cattle.

More surprises might come in the following episodes, especially about the cannibalism allegedly indulged in by the people of Terminus, according to Robert Kirkman, the show'€™s executive producer and the writer of the comic that becomes the basis of the series.

'€œI'€™ll answer that [cannibalism allegation] with two statements: one, wouldn'€™t it be crazy if they [Terminus people] didn'€™t turn out to be cannibals, since everything seems to be going that way? And two, all I'€™ll say is this season is following the comic book storyline pretty closely, possibly closer than we ever have before, and there'€™s a very popular, familiar storyline in the comic books that happened immediately following the exodus of the prison and it is entirely possible that we will be touching in some way on that very popular storyline,'€ Kirkman said as quoted by Entertainment Weekly.

Whatever the answers might be, the premiere episode of The Walking Dead season five is very promising. All fans need to do now is ponder how good the upcoming episodes will be after the excellently delivered premiere.

For fans in Indonesia, The Walking Dead season is available on the FOX channel. This is a return of the series to the FOX channel after spending a couple of seasons broadcast on FOX Movie Premium, a premium channel for cable subscribers.

The Walking Dead season five premiere in Indonesia will show on Oct. 13 at 8 p.m. western Indonesian time, exactly 12 hours after the premiere in the US.

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