Those of you who watched Walking Dead on Sunday may have noticed that it suddenly bears a stunning resemblance to the comic book. That may be because Robert Kirkman himself wrote the script. While not a direct adaptation of the original source material, the episode retains the original tone of the world he created -- there is, if anything, an inverse relationship between the nobility of a given character and their chances for survival, which makes acts of decency even more meaningful.
This chapter benefits from a clever subversion of the viewer's racial assumptions about the new characters, who are not so nearly as toxic or inhuman as Merle Dixon. There is, I submit, a direct relationship between the amount of Merle Dixon we're subject to in a given episode and its overall quality. Fortunately, this week, we only got a handful.
