Zombies this time

An unexpected addiction came late in the year for me: The Walking Dead. I caught an eerie part the 70-minute pilot episode in Singapore, as we were running out to head for the Universal Studies, and promised to myself to catch it when I got home. It's a promise I kept--for all six episodes of the first season.

The Walking Dead is yet another tale of a zombie apocalypse. It sometimes feels like 28 Days Later and those George Romero zombie films, but with a little bit of redneck-slash-small-town drama and some flavor of Lost tossed in.

The star is Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a sheriff's deputy in King County, Georgia, who wakes up from a coma only to discover that his town is now overrun by zombies. After getting hit with this rotting reality, he gets on a horse and rides off to big city Atlanta, only to discover that there were even more zombies there.

He is saved from his folly by Glenn, a Korean-American kid who now acts as "scavenger" for a small group of survivors, which includes Rick's wife and son and his best friend and cop partner Shane Walsh.

The moment Rick and Glenn cross paths is the highlight of the season for me: Rick's horse has been overtaken by hungry zombies and he is forced to hide inside a tank. There's a zombie inside the tank, there are hordes of others outside, the situation looks hopeless--and suddenly, Glenn's oh-so-human voice on the radio!

The six episodes of the first season follow the group's survival run--from an isolated hilltop in the outskirts of Atlanta to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, where they thought they would find answers and ended up uncovering more questions. A chilling bit of news: the last CDC-type facility to hold fort was in France and they carried on with the research as long as they could--until the facility lost power.

The Walking Dead has signed with AMC to make 13 more episodes for its second season, which will begin in October 2011. Yes, that far away!

I rarely follow television series these days, given the amount of time I have left to waste on TV, but it strikes me as funny that all three series I follow feature monsters of some type: True Blood has its vampires and werewolves, among others; Dexter has its serial killers; and, now, The Walking Dead has its zombies.

My life is one big Halloween. Then again, I wasn't born in the tail end of October for nothing.

A short word on Andrew Lincoln, the lead star of The Walking Dead, is not yet a superstar, but he has probably won your heart in what I think is one of the best romantic-comedies ever: Love, Actually. Guess which character he played?

No, not everyone saw those porn star stand-ins.

No, that's Hugh Grant, silly.

Yes! He's the placard-carrying member of the Brit film's, er, “Lonely Hearts Christmas Club.” The guy who was secretly in love with his best friend's wife, who was played by Kiera Knightley.

And now he's fighting zombies! 

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