With safety breeds complacency and unfortunately when we meet the survivors in “The Walking Dead” season four, not only have they built a world in the prison, but they’ve become complacent. Worse yet, Rick Grimes has now become complacent. Or so he’s told himself time and time again that the world outside has been somewhat dominated, thanks to their defeat of the Governor. They may have won the battle with the Governor, but the war has yet to end, and the group has yet to figure out what will happen if Phillip Blake returns in full force, prepared to slaughter the prison village.
Set many months subsequent the defeat of the Governor, Rick Grimes and his new group of followers have taken the remains of the prison and turned it in to a veritable community, with a farm, working water and the like. Rick has sworn off being the survivor for a long time, now committed to farming. If the farming goes through, the group will no longer have to ask the others to go on runs in to the city to find food for the community, so his world revolves around growing food, while Daryl has taken up the lead as scavenger. Now with a council in place, the world of Rick Grimes has grown to where he can feel comfortable, and suddenly his comfort is undercut by new threats that they never expected.
Unlike season two and three where the group were at their wit’s end worrying living day by day and hoping to find some shelter from the storm of the walking dead, season four begins on a lighter, but still disturbing sense of horror. Rick is committed to his own activities and has found ways to drown out the walking dead that wait at the fences. The group, despite their numbers, find themselves confused and outnumbered, as the dead have managed to not only find the prison and rush the fences, but seem to be focused on one direction of the prison, despite the fact that the assigned zombie exterminators have tried to lure them to a new part of the fence, in vain. Much of the premiere’s pay off is subtle and very intricately delivered, as the premiere hints at dire events, and a slowly rising new menace.
Rick watches the pig the community owns suddenly fade away in to death from an odd illness, and then is forced in to the wilderness when confronted with a woman begging for help. The moment that will likely cause a conflict among the group is a disastrous and beautifully directed sequence in a supermarket, where new member Bob gives in to temptation involving alcohol for a moment and sets off a chain reaction that ends in grue, gore, and lost lives. The make up effects are as great as ever, and “30 Days Without an Accident” lays down the groundwork for a massive development in the season that might not only weaken the group’s dynamic, but allow the Governor a chance to enter and destroy what they’ve built.