The Walking Dead Plumbs The Depths In This TV Spot And Featurette

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Like a rotting corpse, the second half of season 5 of The Walking Dead is shuffling towards us and will be here before we know it, like on Sunday. To mark the return, AMC has released another tense new teaser, and a behind-the-scenes featurette of the cast and crew talking about what’s in store for the zombie apocalypse survivors.

Yesterday, we heard that Andrew Lincoln, who plays group leaders Rick Grimes on the show, assure fans that the first two episodes back will be especially brutal, and that we’re in store for what he thinks is the best run in the series. This new spot seems to agree, quoting reviews that call season 5 the best season ever. And if you look at this, you know that Lincoln wasn’t joking around.

There’s nothing super horrific in this 30-second spot, but it is certainly full of grim tension, and the group definitely looks like they’ve been better days. They just appear beaten and broken. Take a look at Michonne (Danai Gurira) walking along that bridge, sword in hand, shoulders slumped and defeated. They’re obviously burdened by the weight of that last tragic death in the midseason finale, “Coda,” as well as knowing they no longer have anything waiting for them in Washington DC.

In this featurette, the cast and crew touch on just how down and out the survivors are. As Lincoln says, they’re at their lowest depths, and that’s from a dude who had to shoot a zombiedied version of his friend’s young daughter in the head and talked to his dead wife on the telephone, so he knows a thing or two about being low.

That’s what this video is all about, what happened to them and exploring where they are now. Everyone has lost significant, monumental things, and it appears that every last shred of hope, something we know is in short supply in this world, has been ripped away. Now they have to figure out how to deal with the grief and see if they can carry on.

Like never before, the group appears to be on the verge of giving up, but we’ve also seen glimpses of something else waiting out there for them. There have been hints and peeks of a walled community, and many of us suspect that they’ll wind up at the Alexandria Safe Zone from the comics, which is the first real place in the narrative that they call home, where they can lay down roots. It’s going to be interesting to see exactly how this plays out, but before they manage to get anywhere, you can rest assured they’re going to have to go through hell first.

The Walking Dead returns with a new episode, “What Happened and What’s Going On,” this Sunday, February 8.