WALKING DEAD: Ep. 5, "Wildfire" UPDATED, 2

So the theme of this episode seems to be how the living deal with their losses--those freshly suffered, but also those to come.  It's about saying goodbye or good riddance, and letting go or not.  Lots of nice character moments, I thought--Carol seeing her husband off, so to speak, and Daryl's reaction as he stands right next to her and watches; Andrea's last moments with Amy; Jim convincing everyone to leave him.

The Rick/Shane/Lori triangle ratcheted up a few notches.  The Rick and Shane scene in the woods was handled well.  I'm glad they didn't bring it to a head here as abruptly as Kirkman did in the comic.  How long will they play it out, and how will they resolve it?  At this point, I have no idea.

No sign of Merle this time, not even indirectly.  I have a feeling he's on the backburner now until next season.  I also have a feeling he'll find that note on the car before Morgan does.  If he ends up standing in for the Governor, will CDC stand in for the prison?

That brings us to the biggest swerve from the comic yet, as the survivors go to the CDC.  It looks like the cause and possible cure of the outbreak will get major treatment on the show loooooong before they ever even came up in the comic.  The extended preview snippet on the AMC website is basically an "info"-dump in which the CDC guy explains to the survivors about Test Subject 19, and how the zombie plague is like meningitis.  I guess they don't trust tv viewers to wait for an answer to that question . . . ?

All righty, then--next week's the season finale.  We'll see how that goes, and what kind of setup it leaves in place for season 2.

UPDATE: Here's Sean T. Collins on the episode.  He says: "And I was particularly struck by Amy’s resurrection, which was, of all things, sensual and beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen zombie fiction treat coming back in that way."  Not sure why I didn't mention that, myself, since that was my reaction, too.

I think he's a little too quick, though, to write the show off as, "oh well, it’s only The Walking Dead."  Zombie tv is uncharted territory, and I think the show is struggling as fast as it can to find balances that feel right between character work and zombie action, fidelity to the comic vs. departures and original angles, etc.  Six episodes is not a lot of time in which to do that.  I hold out hope that in the second season the show (and Rick) will grow the beard.  If this season's finale really does explain the cause of the outbreak, that will seem like a betrayal of the spirit of the comic, which pointedly leaves the question unresolved, but disposing of that question as preliminary business may be just what the creators need to give themselves to feel secure enough to be more daring next go-round.

UPDATE 2: More from Leonard Pierce (who also considers this a particularly strong episode) on why the first season might not be indicative of the show's longer-term quality:

I've decided that I really won't be able to critically assess Season 1 of The Walking Dead until after I've seen Season 2 of The Walking Dead. This isn't a completely unheard-of phenomenon for television; lots of shows don't really hit their strides until the second season, and that's not necessarily because they don't know what they're doing. It's also because they don't know if they're going to get a second season, and so questions of what characters should be introduced and how quickly, how much the creators are going to expand the boundaries of their show, and how far to take the story are going to be handled with a great deal of uncertainty.

That goes double for a show like The Walking Dead.  Although it's turned into a runaway success, that was by no means certain when the show started production for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it costs a whole lot of money. Interviews with the producers also revealed that they didn't have their cast fully locked down and weren't even sure if they'd get their second-season order until 2011. None of this is to excuses the moments where the show has gone awry; bad writing is bad writing, and no amount of behind-the-scenes uncertainty can excuse it, but it may account for the up-and-down quality where a great episode is followed by a shaky one, as well as the sometimes hectic pacing. I stand by my ratings, as much as I do any ratings, but an overall assessment of the season will become clearer once The Walking Dead has good footing beneath it. The show has a lot it wants to accomplish—it's about nothing less than the end of the world, after all—so judging its success at doing so only six episodes in seems premature.