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SURVIVORS ARRIVE AT THEIR DESTINATION ONLY TO FIND AN EXPLOSIVE AND DEADLY SURPRISE

"When the power runs out, facility-wide decontamination will occur."

The search for answers leads the survivors to the CDC but the stark truths resulting from the apocalyptic research reveals the darkest secret of THE WALKING DEAD.

Flashing back to the day the world went away, Shane is at the hospital where Rick remains in a coma as soldiers storm the hallways in protective suits. They shove doctors, nurses and patients down the hallway, then execute them in a hail of automatic gunfire, capping any last survivors with headshots. Shane looks on in horror as walkers, mostly dressed like medical staff or patients themselves, burst through the entry doors to overwhelm the soldiers. As the last gunfight ensues, Shane attempts to revive Grimes while the sounds of military aircraft and explosions rage around the hospital. One close detonation knocks out the power, shutting off Rick's monitors and med equipment. Shane listens for a heartbeat then breaks into momentary tears. Shane retreats down the hallway, blocking Rick's door with a large gurney, and runs out of the hospital as walkers slowly trail him.

Per Jenner's video log timetable, this scene confirms that once the 'Wildfire' code was given to the walker outbreak, the fall of civilization came shockingly fast. The soldiers' desperate act of executing hospital staff members and patients implies the complete overrun of military containment protocols as they foolishly try to eliminate further infections at the apparent source where the sick and injured would be taken for treatment. Yet this purge by gunfire shows the military no longer bothered blood testing of victims or innocent civilians, but instead eradicated hot zones and all those in them in an attempt to cauterize whole neighborhoods and regions too dangerous to clear on foot. Viewers can easily surmise that modern civilization had already been stopped in its tracks, while the military's eradication efforts probably hastened humanity's collapse faster than the walker outbreak itself. Imagine if jets and tanks leveled every major city's hospitals and clinics in the middle of an epidemic: overnight there would be no trained personnel left to find any solution to the infection. It's impossible to guess how many millions of innocent lives were sacrificed by such desperate and ineffective strategies, which only increased the walkers' ability to overtake humanity as the dominant species on Earth. Now that's some heavy hitting horror!

Picking up at the end of episode five, Rick, Shane and the survivors stare at the glaring light beaming through the crash doors at the CDC building, finally darting inside to safety. The lobby is empty save for Dr. Jenner who greets them with a military assault rifle, asking if any of them are infected. Jenner demands they all take a blood test as the price for entry, then has the group retrieve any last items from outside before he locks down the building exits. Entering the main control core of the CDC, Jenner demonstrates he's the only one left in the building, running nearly all services through a voice-recognition computer system called Vi. Now they're all alone together, though the prospects of Grimes finding answers grow slimmer with only one man at the helm of the CDC.

Jenner finishes the final blood sampling from Andrea, who insists none of them show signs of infection. Jenner admits to breaking all procedures by letting them in, so they must indulge his request for blood tests to justify the risk of taking them in. Andrea rises a bit too fast and gets light-headed after days of not eating, and it takes a moment for Jenner to make the connection back to what the world is like outside is self-imposed solitude. A sumptuous feast (by survival standards) follows as flowing wine dissolves the groups' tensions, eliciting genuine laughter from them not heard in a long time. Alas Shane spoils the mood by asking how the world fell apart so quickly and where all the other doctors are and why aren't they still looking for a solution. Jenner briefly relates how most of the staff left when the military protection failed, and many of those who stayed committed suicide rather than go back out into a world overrun by walkers. Jenner stayed to work in the off chance that he might discover some potential answer. Per the genre rules, what represented hope for salvation is now revealed as an empty promise as the survivors' journey to Oz reveals a lonely, ineffectual man behind the CDC curtain.

After being lead to their rooms, the group takes full advantage of a rare pleasure: hot water showers help wash away the stench of the fallen world and their anxieties, all except for Andrea who sits huddled in her shower, numb to the experience. Dale passes by her room to hear her vomiting, unable to keep her celebratory dinner down knowing her world has collapsed for good with Amy gone.  In a parallel moment, slightly drunk Rick thanks Jenner for letting them in, admitting for the first time to anyone that he'd secretly given up hope for saving his family, that it was only a matter of time before the walkers outnumbered and killed them all. Jenner recognizes something familiar in Rick's admission and dryly tells him it will be all right with the least reassuring assurance in basic cable history.

The human equation goes from bad to worse when Shane corners Lori in the lounge, insisting that he didn't lie to her about Rick being dead — and assuming the opening flashback is accurate and not his interpretation of events, he's told the truth then and is now. Once again, truth and answers are half-valid at best in this messy world of blurred lines and reality which the characters cannot rise above to see things clearly once again. What's more shocking is Shane's pseudo-rape of Lori in his drunken state, insisting that he loves her and that he saved their lives while Rick was out of the picture. She fights him off, terrified, scratching his neck until he retreats leaving her shaken to the core. Rick finds her crying in bed but she doesn't tell him about Shane's assault.

The next morning is ugly for hungover Rick and Glenn, and breakfast is short lived as Dale and Andrea want answers on exactly how the world fell apart. In the CDC command center, Jenner shows them a computer file on Test Subject 19, detailing the exact infection, death and resurrection process of the walker plague via MRI scans of TS-19's brain dying and reanimating at the brain stem level, devoid of all higher intelligent functions. Jenner says that reanimation came as fast as three minutes or as long as eight hours, though this doesn't quite seem to fit Amy's pattern since she was attacked and died at dinner but didn't reanimate until the next morning. Let's call it creative license and move on. The screen presentation ends with a scan shot of TS-19's brain being killed again with a gunshot through the skull and worse, the revelation that after all that study neither the CDC nor Jenner figured out what started the infection plague, how it's transmitted or how to stop it.

Influences of Michael Crichton's THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN resurface as Jenner reveals a countdown clock ticks off the seconds until the last remaining CDC power generator runs out of fuel, thus initiating a complete decontamination protocol of the entire complex just like his tissue sample lab before. In order to prevent the CDC's entire collection of harmful if not lethal infective samples from all viruses, bugs and diseases, the whole system is rigged for self-destruction in a massive, germ-eradicating fireball. Worse, with lockdown in effect, the survivors are now trapped with Jenner as one hour of containment remains. Since Grimes and most of the others still have fight left in them, they scramble for a solution and finding none, beg for Jenner to release them. Having already surrendered to inevitable destruction and his own failure, Jenner locks in the survivors, fulfilling his last duty to ensure that all the CDC's germs burn with him. He admits that the French held out the longest and rumors spread they were close to a cure, but their power grid failed just like the CDC's will, and that was the last known hope.

Jenner drops the bomb that it was his wife who was searching for the cure, she was the CDC genius and not him, and she was TS-19 after being bitten.  It's a fantastic twist which really feeds into the mounting hopelessness of this crisis. Jenner, having lost everything, has given in to the nihilism inherent in the zombie apocalypse scenario: having survived attacks from the undead, when do the living chose to die because they can no longer live without hope?  As he sees it, with the CDC failing, Jenner has nothing to live for now except to find release from this nightmare in death, but an end of his own choosing and not the horrible suffering end at the clawing hands of the walkers. He can't understand why the survivors want to escape such a quick and painless death with him and face almost certain odds of being killed by the undead on the surface. They argue that they still deserve the choice to fight on, just as he chose to stay and perhaps complete his wife's research. One of the last remaining human traits we all possess is free will to determine our own lives, and perhaps that above all separates the living from the undead in this brave, horrible world.

Jenner relents and agrees to let them out though he cannot unlock the exits on the surface now , just as he told them when they entered. Grimes thanks him for allowing them one more chance, though Jenner assures Rick he'll soon wish he'd never taken it. As they shake hands, Jenner leans close to Grimes and whispers something in his ear. Grimes' face registers horrific disbelief masked by a blank stare of shock at this secret revelation. The group makes a run for the exit, except for Jacqui and Andrea who want to stay and end it now rather than face the walker nightmare again. Dale tries to argue Andrea out of it but she's not having any, so he relents and sits down with her, refusing to face the horrors out there alone. Andrea begs him to leave her behind.

In the lobby, Grimes, Shane and T-Dog batter the window panels with furniture and even fire weapons at it, but of course the CDC complex is build to withstand any reasonable force breaking in or out of its confines. As the countdown continues, Carol digs into her bag and gives Rick a small hand grenade which had been clipped to his belt when she washed his clothes upon arrival at the camp.  Urging everyone to take cover, Grimes pulls the pin and drops the grenade near the ground floor window, barely escaping the blast as it detonates out into the street. The group dash out the windows, firing at a few gathered walkers (bonus points for a nice axe beheading) as they spring toward their vehicles to escape. In the last seconds, Dale and Andrea exit out from the shattered window, dropping behind the sandbag bunker near the street as the CDC erupts in a massive fireball, exploding in a towering blast of fire, concrete and steel.

Dale and Andrea get in the RV as Grimes and the survivors turn around in the street, heading off down the road of uncertainty and danger, but with hope and a will to live guiding them forward. The strains of Bob Dylan's Tomorrow Is a Long Time fittingly concludes the first season of AMC's THE WALKING DEAD with a somber note of promise in an unknown future, if only because tomorrow offers one more chance that hopes may be realized. As another famous Atlantan once put it: tomorrow is another day.

The fight to survive THE WALKING DEAD continues, and thankfully so will another season of this excellent horror series when Season Two begins sometime in October 2011. Our zombie appetites so whetted by this show, ten months seems like a very long wait, but at least Season One is now available for pre-order on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon, shipping March 8th of next year.

Meanwhile some nagging questions remain, including what terrible news did Jenner reveal to Grimes before they all escaped the CDC? Judging by Rick's expression, Jenner apparently had good reason to chose a quick death by immolation rather than face the zombie apocalypse again, yet Grimes chose to leave anyway. Is this another extension of his "keep moving and busy" to avoid dealing with their small odds of survival? Also, what happened to one-handed Merle Dixon after his escape from the Atlanta store?  His return (perhaps as a walker) was primed for a season finale hook, but none of the scenarios hinted at — he was never seen by Guillermo's vatos at the senior center, and if Merle stole their van in Atlanta he never drove it back to camp to take his revenge upon the group — paid off as expected. I give Frank Darabont and the creative team credit for not handing viewers an easy answer on Merle's fate, but am surprised that he disappeared completely thereafter. Likewise we wouldn't put it past Darabont and crew to possibly have no idea what Jenner whispers to Grimes in the finale if the second season stories had not yet been plotted during Season One production. Such long leads for a television series can be a blessing in such cases, allowing show writers to bait a hook for viewers without tying the line to any particular reel in advance: fans can speculate on forum boards as rampantly as they like without having to deliver an in-show answer for months or longer.  As long as writers can eventually deliver the goods in satisfying fashion, the plot can work wonderfully. Time will tell . . . and who knows, maybe the show creators can make a fan-based internet contest out of "What Jenner told Grimes" while we wait. For now, we're guessing that Jenner didn't reveal he's Grimes' father.  Been there, done that.

FilmEdge will update news and reports from AMC as THE WALKING DEAD Season Two goes into production and we'll review the Blu-ray release next spring, keeping the specter of the undead shambling along through next year until we meet up in front of our TVs next autumn for a second helping.

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