The Walking Dead - Episode 1.02 - Guts - Recap

Last weeks 90 minute premiere of TWD proved that AMC has succeeded in finding another hit original program. This week we find out how Rick gets out of that tank...On to the recap!

The episode starts off at the survivor camp with Lori and Amy picking berries. Lori goes off into the woods to pick some berries and begins to sense that she may not be alone. She starts to walk back to the camp when suddenly a stranger, who is revealed to be Shane, grabs her. Soon enough the two start having sex and are stop momentarily when Shane sees Lori’s wedding ring on her neck, which she takes off after a moment of looking at it, possibly thinking about Rick. Though she probably wasn’t thinking too much about Rick’s well being as she is already having sex with his best friend. It seems like the show has taken a different approach to the Lori-Shane relationship as opposed to the slower, less passionate relationship that they had in the early issues of the comic.

After the intro song we go back to Rick in the tank and the sarcastic stranger on the radio. We soon find out this stranger has a plan to escape and it involves coming out of the tank, gun(s) blazing. Mystery man tells him that there is only one zombie on the actual tank as the zombies are all eating Rick’s horse. Rick kills the zombie on the top, jumps off the tank, and shoots every zombie in his path until he finds the mystery man and he tells him, “Not dead, don’t shoot!” The two climb up a nearby ladder and we find out that the guy on the walkie-talkie is Glenn. After they reach the top of the building Rick asks Glenn why he saved him and Glenn says that it is because he hopes that if he were ever in a situation like Rick’s someone would do the same for him. It’s all about surviving. They reach the bottom of another staircase and find themselves unarmed and facing two hungry looking zombies. Luckily Glenn is not alone and two armed men come out of the building and beat the zombies to second death with baseball bats. Once inside we see that there are 5 other survivors, and only one of them is not an original character, Andrea. Andrea promptly sticks a gun in Rick’s face and tells him that he has killed all of them. Rick tells them that he was distracted trying to wave down a helicopter and didn’t see the hoard growing around him, but the survivors think he is just seeing things. It turns out that Rick’s shooting has attracted the giant horde of zombies to their location. It also doesn’t help that another member of their group is on the rooftop shooting at zombies below, attracting even more zombies to their location.

The new survivors and Rick race to the top to stop Dixon, the guy who is shooting, from drawing any more attention to their location. Unfortunately it turns out that Dixon is a big racist and a thug, which he proves by beating up an African American survivor named T-Dog and calling him the n-word. He even knocks Rick over by punching him in the face. With a gun pointed at them Dixon tries to stage a coup, but is quickly over taken thanks to a rifle butt to the head, courtesy of Rick. Dixon is handcuffed to a pipe on the roof and Rick officially announces his presence as the authority figure. The survivors look for a way to get out of the city and decide to look for any sewage drains that might allow them to get out under the city. When Glenn sees that there are none on the street they look to the basement entrance to the sewer, but when Glenn and another survivor search it they only find a dead end and a hungry walking dead behind bars. While they are under Rick and Andrea spend some time together and Andrea apologizes for sticking a gun in his face. It turns out that she doesn’t even know how to fire a gun and Rick wasn’t really worried because she didn’t even have the safety on. Rick teaches her how to take the safety off and Andrea tells Rick about her sister Amy back at the camp and how she would really like the mermaid necklace that she is looking at. Rick tells her to take it and she asks if that would be looting, to which he replies, “I don’t think that those rules matter anymore”

The gang heads back upstairs and Rick notes that there is a construction site nearby with cars and that the keys to all of them are kept on site. They just need a way to distract the giant horde of zombies and get to the trucks, but the zombies can smell and hear the nearest humans. It’s at this point that Rick shows off his true genius and comes up with a way to distract the zombies that is straight out of the comic books. Rick and the other survivors drag in one of the zombies that they killed earlier and start hacking him up to get his guts. Rick begins to chop with a fire axe but then stops and instead takes out his wallet to look at the kind of person he was before he became a zombie. After this moment of humanity Rick and the others get to chopping and start to smear all of the zombie’s guts onto Rick and Glenn’s raincoats. Hence the title “Guts.” Before Rick and Glenn leave to go and get the trucks Rick gives T-dog the key to Dixon’s handcuffs, not that he really deserves to be saved. Rick and Glenn start their trek while the other survivors watch from the roof and it actually works. The zombies think that Rick and Glenn are zombies because they are covered in zombie guts and smell like them. Unfortunately a storm cloud is looming on the horizon…

Back at the survivor camp the radio finally picks up T-dog’s broadcast telling them that they are trapped in the department store and surrounded by zombies. Shane very coldly tells everyone, including Andrea’s sister Amy, that they can’t go to save them and that they are essentially as good as dead. Amy doesn’t take this well, as one might assume, and storms off, followed closely by Lori. It is clear that Shane is willing to let anyone else die if they might get in the way of his “protection” of Lori and Carl. He is such a likeable character. The survivor group also sees the storm cloud looming overhead..

Glenn and Rick continue walking until it starts to rain and their zombie guts start to wash off. Rick tells Glenn to run and chops a few of the surrounding zombies dead, before hoping a fence into the construction yard and starting up a movers truck just before the zombies break down the fence and come after them. To the survivors on the roof it seems like they are abandoning them, but we learn in the car that Rick is just driving to a parking lot to make some noise and draw away the zombies, so that he can then back up onto the loading dock and pick up the survivors from the department store. Rick finds a new corvette and promptly smashes its window, causing its alarm to flare off. Rick then hot-wires the car and has Glenn follow him as he drives to the department store. Glenn radios the survivors and tells them to meet Rick in the loading dock and they all run down from the roof to meet him, except for T-dog who stays and contemplates taking off Dixon’s handcuffs. T-dog finally decides to let Dixon go but in a twist of cruel fate, trips, and drops the key into a nearby pipe. Looks like Dixon isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. T-dog apologizes and runs out, locking the door behind him with chains and tries to catch the other survivors who are waiting for Rick.

Rick’s plan works and Glenn manages to distract the hoard long enough for all of the survivors to get into the back of the truck and for Rick to drive away, out of the city. In the last shot of the episode we also see Glenn speeding down the highway in his corvette, having also escaped the zombies.