Beware of little girls
The episode begins with a sheriff's deputy walking through a wasteland of abandoned cars. He is holding a gas can in one hand walking toward a gas station. He slowly makes his way through the cars as the camera zooms in on corpses lying still as flies buzz over them. He finds the gas station but a sign says there is no more gas. He hears something and throws himself to the ground. As the footsteps get closer you see they are a child's feet.
The child bends over to pick up a teddy bear from the floor and continues walking. Rick stands up and calls after her offering her his help. As she turns we see that half of her face is decomposed, she is a zombie. As she runs toward him, Rick pulls out his gun and shoots her in the head. All is quiet. Cue presentation.
Two cops, a car, and some burgers
The episode then goes back to a few weeks before the incident that opened up the show. Rick and his fellow officer Shane are sitting in a patrol car eating and sharing their women problems. Shane goes off on how all the women he know turn all the lights on and seem incapable of learning that the light switch works both ways. Rick shares the latest fight he had with his wife. She accused him of not caring about his family. He is really upset that she said this in front of their son. Their conversation gets interrupted when they get a call about two armed suspects being chased by other officers. They rush to the road to set up a spike strip to stop the car. As the car approaches they get behind their patrol cars with guns drawn. The car hits the spike strip and goes flying to the field on the side of the road. Both men come out guns blazing. They are shot down but not before Rick gets shot. When Shane rushes over to Rick he sees Rick is okay since he was wearing a bullet proof vest. He begs Shane not to tell Rick's wife he's been shot. As Rick stands up a third man emerges from the vehicle and shoots Rick. This time Rick is injured because the bullet went to a part of his side not covered by the vest. We then see Shane visiting Rick in the hospital. He leaves a giant bouquet in a flowered vase by his bed.
Is this real?
Rick makes a comment about the vase to Shane. He turns to speak to him and realizes he is alone. He looks over at the vase of flowers and sees that the flowers are dead and have been for some time. He struggles to get up and falls on the floor. He calls for a nurse but nobody comes. He stumbles to the bathroom and drinks some water and looks at his face and the beard that has grown on it since he was shot. He walks out to the hall and it looks like a disaster area. No one is around. The lights and phones aren't working. He grabs a matchbook and keeps walking down the hall. He sees a dead body in a hallway that looks like it's been torn to shreds.
He quickly walks down another hallway when he sees a couple of doors that have been chained shut with a sign saying Don't Open Dead Inside. As he walks closer he can hear someone on the other side. The door is pushed open an inch or two and long dead looking fingers reach out towards Rick. He walks as quickly as he can and makes his way to the stairwell where he is met by pitch black darkness and the smell of the dead. He uses the matches he has to light his way down and finds an exit. He is blinded by the light of the sun when he opens the door.
What Rick finds outside is terrifying. Bodies laid out on a parking lot and stacked up on the back of a truck. These bodies are covered with sheets and appear to have been shot in the head.
We also see abandoned military vehicles and a helicopter. This shows the extend of the zombie pandemic on this small city. We are left to imagine the damage done to the rest of the world. Rick stumbles slowly out to the street on his way home. He sees a discarded bicycle and picks it up. As he does so he sees his first zombie (the hands don't count since you couldn't technically see that they were zombies). It is half the body of a woman that is slowly crawling her way towards Rick. He quickly rides home and starts calling for his wife and child. The house is empty. He keeps calling out Lori and Carl until he crumbles to the floor crying. After a while he walks out of the house and sits on his front steps. He sees a man walking slowly down the street. He waves to the man and as he calls out to him we see someone coming up behind him. Another man walks up to the zombie walking down the street and shoots it in the head while the person behind Rick, a young boy, hits him over the head with a shovel. The man who killed the zombie is the boy's father and he asks Rick if he was bitten but the shovel to the head has knocked him out.
Rick wakes up in bed with his hands and feet tied to the bedpost. The man now asks him again if he has been bitten. Rick responds that he has been shot. Rick shows no signs of a fever so they cut him free. As they eat dinner the man (named Morgan) explains what has been going on: the fever epidemic, the chaos when the dead started walking, and how light and sounds attracts the dead. He shares how his wife became sick as they were evacuating and the fever turned her into a zombie. He has seen his wife walking around town but hasn't been able to make himself kill her. The next day they went to the sheriff's station to load up on guns. While there they took the time to take a shower and get a moment's respite from the horror. Rick gives Morgan a police walkie talkie and tells him he will call Morgan every morning at six. Before leaving Morgan warns Rick that while one zombie might be easy to kill several are not. They say their goodbyes and each go their own way. Morgan and his son Duane return to the house they have been staying in. Morgan goes upstairs and has target practice on the zombies milling in the street. Soon his zombie wife shows up. For a moment their we think he is going to kill her, but he can't. She is still his wife and he still loves her. He breaks down in tears. They may be zombies but at one point all of them were people who had families. As Rick heads out of town he finds the half zombie woman and shoots her in the head. He tells her he is sorry that this happened to her. It's a sentiment that could be said to Rick also. We are sorry you woke up alone in a world filled with zombies.
As Rick is driving towards Atlanta he tries calling over the radio to find anyone else that might be out there. His transmission is picked up by a group of survivors who try to warn him to stay away from Atlanta but the connection is lost. We have now arrived at the scene where the episode began. Rick is out of gas for his car. He finds a horse at a house where the owners have killed themselves. He mounts his trusty steed and makes his way to Atlanta. On one side of the highway is a pile up of empty cars leaving the city. The other side is empty with the exception of Rick. He finds Atlanta empty. As he rides deeper into the city passing cars and buses with dead people inside. The sound of the horse's hooves stir those dead to wake up and begin following Rick. He doesn't seem to notice this, but he hears and then sees a helicopter overhead.
He sets the horse to a gallop in the direction of the helicopter. All of a sudden he runs into a horde of zombies. The quickly surround him and grab at the horse. He barely escapes them and hides inside a tank. Now he is trapped in the tank while the zombies eat his horse and wait for him to come out. The last thing we hear is a voice over the radio talking to Rick calling him a dumb ass. As the camera pulls away from the tank we see that the city of Atlanta has become Deadlanta. It is filled with zombies.
Final thoughts
This is the best pilot I have seen for a TV show in a long time. It does a great job of setting up the storyline and introducing us to the main character, Rick Grimes. I also love that there is very little music in this episode. The lack of music just accentuates how quiet and still everything is. It adds a new level of eeriness.
