Days Gone Bye

Police officer Rick Grimes is driving down a country road. He notices that his car is running low on gas, and stops at a station to refill. As he gets out of his car, it's revealed that many of the vehicles in the vicinity are abandoned wrecks. He fills up a gascan and heads back to his car, but stops and looks under a vehicle only to discover a child's feet. Rick stops and moves around the car, where he asks the girl if he's alright. As she turns around, it's revealed that she is undead, and is missing part of her mouth. She growls and starts walking towards Rick, who is forced to pull out his revolver and shoot her. As she falls to the ground, he stares in shock...

Several months earlier, Rick and his partner, Shane Walsh, are sitting in their patrol car eating lunch. They briefly reminisce about the past and Rick's marriage to his wife Lori. Suddenly, a dispatch comes through informing them that there are three robbers attempting to escape King County, and they are sent with other units to set-up spike strips and apprehend the robbers.

Rick, Shane and several other officers take up positions on the road and wait for the robbers, who are being pursued by another patrol car. The robbers' vehicle drives over the spike strips and flips through the air, landing at the bottom of a hill. As Rick and the other officers investigate, two of the robbers emerge from the car and begin firing wildly. They are easily taken down, and Rick turns to thank the others. Suddenly, he is shot in his side by the third and last occupant of the vehicle, who is swiftly shot down by Shane. Rick struggles to hold on while Shane runs to him and calls for an ambulance...

Rick has a momentary glimpse of Shane visiting him in the hospital telling him he brought flowers from Lori, then wakes up asking for Shane. He looks around and sees that he is in an empty hospital room with no sound around him. The flowers beside him have long-since wilted, and he can't page anyone to his room. Rick painfully climbs out of bed and uses an IV stand as a crutch while he walks out of the room.

He walks into a corridor to find many dead bodies of hospital staff and army officers around him, who have all been shot in the head. After trying and failing to use a telephone, he walks down the hall and discovers a room that has been barricaded with the words "DON'T OPEN DEAD INSIDE" scrawled in spray paint on the doors. As he looks in confusion, several fingers begin trying to claw through the slit in the door.

Recognizing the danger, terrified Rick heads away as fast as he can, and makes his way down a darkened stairway to an emergency exit. Outside, he finds dozens of dead and bodybagged civilians, as well as an abandoned Army helicopter. He continues walking down the street and finds a bicycle to use as a means of transportation. As he gets on, a presumably-dead corpse missing its lower half suddenly turns over and begins growling at him, and he rides away in shock.

Rick gets to his family's home and goes inside, only to discover that Lori and his son, Carl, are nowhere to be found. He collapses in grief and goes outside to sit in despair, only to be hit by a boy holding a shovel. As he lays on the ground, Rick sees a man walk up and shoot one of the undead in the head, and he tries to speak to them before he goes unconscious.

Rick wakes up later tied up in the home of Morgan and Duane Jones, who ask him if he's going to attack them. When he explains what happened to him and his role as a police officer, they release him and give him some food. They tell him that the world has been affected by a Zombie Apocalypse. Anyone who is dead comes back as an undead "walker", and that any bite or scratch from one will result in an infection and eventual death. Rick tells them that he thinks his family is alive, as they took all the family albums, and Morgan says they likely headed to a rumored safe zone in Atlanta. Later that night, Rick and Morgan watch as a group of walkers (including Morgan's wife, who was bit and reanimated) try futilely to get into the barricaded house.

The next morning, the three men head to the police station. They shower and Rick puts on his old police uniform, and they raid the armory for weapons. Rick takes a bagful of guns and a walkie-talkie. He gives the other to Morgan and asks him to stay in contact while he searches for his family. When Morgan and Duane leave, Rick heads back to the place he found the undead "bicycle girl" and follows a trail into the forest, where he sees her futilely pulling herself along. Rick apologizes for what happened and puts her out of her misery with a shot to the head, while Morgan goes home and tries to shoot his undead wife before breaking down in tears when he can't pull the trigger.

Rick obtains a police car and begins driving towards Atlanta, where he sends a dispatch over the police radio. In a camp outside Atlanta, a group of people (including Lori, Carl, an older man named Dale and a young woman named Amy) struggle to hear the transmission, and Amy says that she hopes the person isn't headed towards Atlanta because it's overrun. Some time later, his car runs out of gas and he stops at a farmhouse, where he finds a tame horse who has been left alone after its owners were Driven to Suicide. Rick saddles the horse and uses it to ride towards Atlanta, passing a traffic jam on the lanes leading out of the city.

Rick enters the city and rides through the streets, where he finds numerous cars that are abandoned and walkers that begin to stir after he rides past. He looks up and sees a helicopter in the distance and tries to follow it, only to run into a horde of walkers. Rick attempts to flee the horde, only to get surrounded and knocked off, losing his bag of guns in the process. Rick crawls away as the horde eats the horse. He climbs under an abandoned tank and plans to shoot himself as walkers close in around him, then sees that a hatch on the undercarriage is open and climbs in before he's bit.

Rick shuts the hatch behind him and catches his breath, only for an undead soldier to attempt to attack him. Rick shoots the soldier, which deafens him and forces him to climb out of the top of the tank to regain his hearing. He is forced to shut the hatch again when walkers climb up onto the tank.

As he thinks about what to do, a voice crackles through the radio, asking him if he's cozy...

Tropes:

• Abandoned Hospital Awakening: Rick has one of these upon coming out of his coma.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The identity of the "little girl" walker is revealed in the Walking Dead Social Game, released for online platforms, which gives her name as Summer and places her as a resident of a camp that was attacked by walkers. She panicked and fled, and was bit by a walker during her escape.
  • The backstory of the "bicycle girl", the first walker Rick encounters on the streets of Atlanta, is shown in the "Torn Apart" webisodes, which establish her name as Hannah and her activities during the first day of the outbreak, before she pulled a Heroic Sacrifice to try and get her kids to safety.
  • The reason why the hospital has a Room Full of Zombies, and the identity of the person who wrote the warning on the door, is later explained in the "Oath" webisodes.
• And I Must Scream: The "bicycle girl" walker, who is missing half of her body and is dragging herself along the ground with her head down before Rick arrives and puts her out of her misery.
• Artistic Licence – Gun Safety: Before the shootout with the criminals fleeing in the cars, one of the deputies at the roadblock starts joking about how it would be great if they were being recorded, because they could get on a show like COPS. Rick snaps at him that he needs to focus, make sure he has a round in the chamber of his gun, and that the safety is off. The deputy does so, racking back the slide to chamber a round, then we hear the click of a safety being switched off. Problem is, he is using a Glock 19. Glocks do not have a safety switch, the trigger is the safety.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The outlaws at the beginning of the episode, who come out guns blazing even after their car rolls over and they're surrounded by Rick and numerous deputies.
• Automaton Horses: Somewhat; the horse does panic upon seeing the zombies, but it's a little hard to believe that it would lie there quite so passively upon being eaten alive.
• The Cameo: As revealed in an interview several years later, an uncredited Sam Witwer (Being Human) plays the soldier who Rick is forced to shoot inside the tank. This was part of an unrealized story that would have followed Witwer's character until he got bit and passed away while hiding in the tank.
• Cliffhanger: The episode ends with Rick stuck inside the tank (which is being swarmed with walkers) while an unseen individual sarcastically asks if he's cozy.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Rick finds the remains of a couple inside a house who scrawled out a note written in blood before conducting a Suicide Pact.
  God forgive us.
• Death of a Child: Right from its very first scene. Rick shoots and kills an undead girl when he stops to get gas from an abandoned station. According to the DVD commentary, the showrunners state that this was used as the very first scene as an act of courtesy for the viewer, as the shock value would chase off anyone too squeamish to handle the series as a whole.
• Despair Event Horizon: Rick gets this upon going back to his house and seeing that Lori and Carl are gone. He breaks down sobbing on the floor and sits in stunned silence on his front step, and would have been killed by the walker were it not for Duane and Morgan intervening.
• Devoured by the Horde: A horse being Eaten Alive by hundreds of walkers. Its death allows Rick to weasel his way out from the horde and hide himself in a tank.
• Door Handle Scare: Rick is at the house with Morgan and his boy, hearing the car alarm go off outside on the street. He looks out the peep hole on the front door to see another zombie on the other side. The zombie then looks down towards the door knob, and then Rick, and the camera focuses on the door knob turning to the left and right.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • The farmers in the house Rick comes across while looking for gas.
  • Rick himself, when it looks like he's trapped by the walker horde in Atlanta, prepares to blow his brains out... until he notices the open tank hatch right above him.
• Due to the Dead:
  • Rick remarks fondly on one of the walkers (a deputy at the King County police station) just before shooting him through a fence.
  • Rick also apologizes to the "bicycle girl" walker for what has happened to her before dispatching her.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Being the pilot episode, the plot has this in spades.
  • The series begins with Rick encountering a child walker who retains enough intelligence to bend down and pick up an item (a teddy bear), then hold onto it as she attacks him. No other walker in the series displays such awareness or higher brain function.
  • Considering how long Morgan states it has been since his wife was bit and turned, she looks nearly indistinguishable from a normal human being, save for a pair of fake-looking prosthetics and a bite wound.
  • Morgan's wife trying to turn the doorknob shows some basic recall of the undead's previous lives, which is disproved many times later, as they are entirely mindless.

• Establishing Character Moment:
  • The only pre-apocalypse scene that takes place concurrently within the timeline of the series (that is not a flashback) involves Rick and Shane sitting in their cop car, talking about the former's strained marriage with Lori and how it will impact their son, Carl. The subsequent chase and shootout with the robbers establishes Rick as the natural leader of the group, while Shane is a dependable confidant who is extremely loyal to Rick.
  • Rick has one about halfway through the episode when he risks attracting the walkers so he can shoot the "bicycle girl" and put her out of her misery.
• Establishing Series Moment: The first scene in the episode is Rick looking for fuel. He finds a young girl and calls out to her, only for her to turn and reveal she has turned. Rick, understandably, put one between her eyes. The world is abandoned, nobody is safe, and this show doesn't pull any punches. This opening scene demonstrates it all perfectly.
• Expodump: As there are no real flashbacks to what happened during the breakdown of society for Rick's benefit (given that he's been in a coma the entire time), Morgan describes what's happened over the past two months, including the attributes of the undead, to get him up to speed.
• Extra-Long Episode: Being the pilot, the episode runs for 90 minutes.
• Fatal Family Photo: Subverted and discussed. Rick initially breaks down seeing that Lori and Carl are gone, only to realize that they must be alive, given that they took the family photo albums with them when they left.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Morgan warns Rick that though typically a single zombie isn't much of a threat, an entire horde of zombies is quite dangerous. 30 minutes of screentime later, guess what Rick encounters when he goes to Atlanta?
  • Morgan mentions the reason his wife got bit is because she let her sentimentality get the better of her. By the end of the episode, he does the same exact thing by not killing her when he has a perfect chance to, and two seasons later, Duane ends up getting bit as a result.

• Gorn: The horse being eaten alive and the walker torso crawling toward Rick with its intestines hanging out.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Rick finds the "bicycle girl" walker with no lower torso, sitting in the middle of a park and still very much undead. The "Torn Apart" webseries establishes the walker as a woman named Hannah who had the entire lower half of her torso and legs consumed by walkers while sacrificing herself.
• Heroic BSoD: Rick has one upon finding his house empty, collapsing into a fetal position on the floor in between sobbing and yelling for Lori and Carl. He then wanders outside in an almost catatonic state and would most likely have been eaten if not for Duane whacking him in the face with a shovel.

• It Can Think:
  • Morgan's wife seems a fair degree more intelligent than the other Walkers, as she tries to open the house by twisting the doorknob, and even looks in through the peephole. Also counts as Early-Installment Weirdness, as the Walkers never demonstrate this sort of intelligence again after the following episode (where they use rocks as battering rams and climb over fences).
  • The walker child that Rick kills also picks up her teddy bear as she wanders around the gas station.
• Jump Scare: The "bicycle girl" walker waking up and turning around, which causes Rick to fall off the bicycle he was riding.
• The Lost Lenore: Morgan's wife. Her turning into a walker haunts him.
• Mercy Kill: Rick delivers one to the "bicycle girl" walker. To that end, the music track used during the scene (and during Morgan's attempt to kill Jenny) is called "The Mercy of the Living".
• Mister Exposition: Morgan's main purpose is to explain the events leading up to the apocalypse to Rick, and by extension the viewers.
• Mundane Luxury: Rick, Morgan, and Duane enjoy a hot shower for the first time in weeks. Morgan and Duane are visibly euphoric about it and Duane literally dances and sings in joy.
• No Communities Were Harmed: While Atlanta is obviously real, Rick's hometown of King's County is fictional.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The complete absence of noise when Rick first wakes up in the hospital, as well as the total darkness when he climbs down the fire exit.
• Oh, Crap!: The horse Rick rides on has a major reaction when it comes upon a swarm of zombies.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The series establishes this in its very first scene, when Rick encounters a Creepy Child walker who displays enough intelligence to pick up a teddy bear and rush towards him, while another displays the capability to grasp a doorknob and attempt to open the door to Morgan's house.
• Room Full of Zombies: Rick encounters one of these in the hospital, conveniently labelled as such to prevent any unsuspecting person from wandering inside.
• Shell-Shock Silence: Used when Rick dispatches the soldier, and averting Steel Eardrums.
• Shoot the Dog: Used as an Establishing Character Moment. Rick is forced to shoot and kill a child walker that rushes him at the gas station while he's refueling his cruiser, and looks visibly shaken by it afterwards.
• Shovel Strike: Duane gives one of these to Rick after mistaking him for a zombie.
• Shower Scene: Of the non-fanservice variety, as Rick, Morgan and Duane get a much-needed shower and new clothes at the police station.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: Rick did, thanks to his coma.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Wang Chung's "Space Junk" plays at the end when Rick is trapped in the tank and the walkers are chowing down on the horse.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Morgan is last seen shooting down several walkers approaching the house, before breaking down over his inability to kill the zombified Jenny. His whereabouts are left unknown... until...
  • The identity of the suspicious helicopter flying over Atlanta, just as in the comics. Rick chases after it and is waylaid by a horde of walkers, but the identity of the aircraft is left unknown for quite some time.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The world went to hell while Rick was in a coma.