The Walking Dead

James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly published a letter reportedly from Frank Darabont about his idea for the second season opener of The Walking Dead. The first half of season 2 aired just before the holidays, and the second half begins February 12th. The season so far has felt slow and decompressed to the point it was boring at times.I feel a little bit cheated because this letter describes an episode that could have been great.

"The opener allegedly flashbacks to the early days of the zombie apocalypse. The entire episode would have tracked a squad of Army Rangers dropping into Atlanta. They get trapped in a zombie outbreak. “All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from ‘the city is being secured’ to ‘holy shit, we’ve lost control, the world is ending,’” Darabont describes in a letter to AICN. So, yeah — Black Hawk Down with zombies.

Along the way, the soldiers encounter some familiar faces from the show. “Picture our squad arriving at a manned barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city on shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it’s a panicked high-intensity scene, and in this crowd of desperate people we find Andrea and Amy. The barricade gunners panic, the civilians start to get mowed down by machine-gun fire, and in this melee the girls get pulled to safety by some old guy they don’t even know. It’s Dale. He’s nobody to them, just some guy who saw the opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment.”


The end of the episode concludes with the last surviving member of the squad, now infected and dying, hiding in a tank. A very familiar tank…

After the soldier dies this squalid, lonely death … and after a quiet lapse of time … we do a shot-for-shot reprise from the first episode of the first season: Rick comes scrambling into the tank to escape the horde … blows that zombie soldier’s brains out … now Rick’s trapped … fade out … the end.

 The notion was to take the ‘throwaway’ tank zombie Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier’s story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his journey, but don’t reveal who he is until the end. The idea being that every zombie has a story…”

(Please note I have no idea about the truth behind Darabont's leaving the show. Some reports say it was due to budget cuts. Creative differences due to the cuts. Whatever the case, I'm not saying Darabont was dismissed for any particular reason. No one knows but Darabont and AMC.)