‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’ Episode 1 Review: The Boring Version Of A Zombie Apocalypse

I was going to call The Walking Dead: World Beyond “cheesy” but cheese comes from Wisconsin. Nebraska is better known for its corn. And since that’s where our story begins in the latest Walking Dead spinoff, we’ll go with corny.

Corny and boring. World Beyond, at least in its series premiere, is a snoozefest filled with (mostly) uninteresting characters who will likely appeal more to a younger audience than yours truly.

I’ll judge the series premiere of The Walking Dead: World Beyond based on two criteria:

• First, how it stands up as its own show, existing on its own two feet rather than propped up by The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead.
• Second, how it compares to the series premieres of its two predecessor shows.

By either criteria, World Beyond is a letdown. The flagship series appealed to viewers of all ages. Teenagers, young adults, older folk—everyone that got hooked did so because of the realistic, gritty portrayal of what a zombie apocalypse might look like and the strength of its characters, many of whom are now dead with fans still mourning their departure.

World Beyond feels like a show that wants to succeed with a much more specific demographic: Teenagers and young adults—and specifically those teenagers and young adults who appreciate good wholesome stuff over edgy or grimdark. World Beyond is sappy in ways that The Walking Dead, even at its worst, could never match. Fear The Walking Dead only flirted with sappy in its last two abysmal seasons. Warts and all, that show’s first three seasons were dark and wild. By the end of season 5 Alicia is painting trees and houses and two of the characters are getting married in one of the sappiest, hokiest scenes I’ve ever seen.

But I digress.

Let’s talk about the series premieres of both The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead to kick things off, and by comparison see why World Beyond is such a disappointment—so much so that it’s kind of incredible this was even greenlit by AMC. What were they thinking? Will the rest of the show make up for this misfire?

The Walking Dead opens with a small town southern sheriff getting into a gunfight with armed criminals on the run. He gets shot and then wakes up weeks later in an abandoned hospital in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The hospital is creepy as hell, and so is the town he emerges into.

There’s a zombie barely able to crawl across an abandoned park. Later, there’s a zombie girl holding a doll—zombies, in the earliest days of the show, had more humanity in them than they do now. More sentience.

It’s an incredible episode that ends with said sheriff, Rick Grimes, trapped in a tank in the middle of Atlanta surrounded by a horde of zombies with a strange voice on the other end of a walkie-talkie that might just be his only chance at survival.

So to recap: The series premiere of The Walking Dead opens on a gunfight, then moves to a creepy abandoned hospital, then has Rick Grimes meeting Morgan for the first time, and ends with Rick trapped in a tank surrounded by zombies in Atlanta. All in one episode! It’s a tremendous way to start a TV show (and makes me more than a little sad at what’s happened between then and now).

Fear The Walking Dead opens to a heroin addict waking up in a drug den to find that the girl he was with had turned into a zombie and is trying to eat his face. This is right at the very beginning of the apocalypse before anyone knew what was going on. And while the show itself never quite lived up to its promise of showing us the start of the apocalypse in great detail (instead jumping ahead for some reason) that opening moment is still more compelling than the entirety of the series premiere for World Beyond.

It didn’t hurt that Frank Dillane was excellent as Nick, and that we immediately feel a connection to the characters as they try to make their escape through an increasingly deadly Los Angeles. Fear had lots of issues in its first couple of seasons, but it was still an entertaining show with a lot of great characters.

World Beyond

Instead of opening to a gunfight or a creepy abandoned hospital or a zombified drug den or anything particularly scary or exciting, World Beyond opens to a community that’s well-established and relatively calm.

The community is in Omaha, Nebraska—somewhere in middle America—and is part of an alliance with another community in Portland and the mysterious CRM, or Civil Republic Military, a shadowy organization run by Lt Col. Elizabeth Kublek.

Kublek is played by Julia Ormond, and is definitely the most interesting (and best acted) character in World Beyond. If this were a show about Kublek and the CRM I might be more optimistic, but she’s set to be the antagonist of the series. She’s also probably responsible for taking Rick Grimes away in that helicopter back in Season 9 of The Walking Dead.

In any case, World Beyond opens on what is, by all accounts, a rather tame version of the zombie end-times. The placid suburbia that one might hope for in a real-world zombie apocalypse, but which makes for rather humdrum fare when it comes to television.

The main characters are sisters Iris (Aliyah Royale) and Hope (Alexa Mansour), later joined on their flight from Omaha by fellow youngsters Silas (Hal Cumpston) and Elton (Nicolas Cantu).

Pursuing them are two security officers, Felix (Nico Tortorella) and Huck (Annet Mahendru).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The flight from the safety of the community comes after a series of revelations. We learn that:

• The girls refer to the end of the world as “the night the sky fell” because it appears a plane crashed as they were fleeing from the zombies.
• That same night, Iris and their father were separated from Hope and their mother. The latter pair came across a pregnant woman and asked for her help. She’s taking a truck and they want a ride. The pregnant woman—let’s call her Karen—says she can’t wait, but Hope runs toward her to beg. Her mother, terrified for her daughter since Karen is pointing a gun at them, screams and rushes to stop her. Karen shoots and kills her, then drops the gun in shock. Hope doesn’t waste a moment. She picks up the gun and shoots the woman dead.
• I like Hope. She’s probably my favorite character other than Kublek. She makes her own alcohol to share with her teenage friends, though it’s confiscated by security and shared with Kublek. She’s also adopted, apparently, which accounts for her much lighter skin. I was confused by this at first and thought maybe they had different fathers.
• Speaking of fathers, Dr. Bennett is a brilliant scientist but he’s gone over to wherever the CRM is located (they don’t tell their alliance partners) to help them with some science stuff but he now seems to be imprisoned there. He’s sent them messages telling his daughters that he’s no longer safe. This serves as the impetus for both their dislike of Kublek and the CRM, and their ultimate decision to go find their dad.

That’s all the backstory we get this episode. “The night the sky fell” is a pretty cheesy—ahem, corny—way for someone to refer to the event in question, but whatever. There’s all sorts of stuff like that in the premiere.

For instance, the episodes is bookended by narration. It’s Iris’s speech she’s prepared to give on “Monument Day” which is a day memorializing the end of the world and honoring those who didn’t make it.

That’s why the CRM is here, at least outwardly, and that’s why Iris is giving a speech. She stops short of giving the one she wrote, however, and flatout tells Kublek that she doesn’t trust her or the CRM. In front of everyone. It’s a ballsy move, though maybe not the smartest thing to say. “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” is apparently not something the bright high school student has learned just yet.

Meanwhile, Felix and Huck are an interesting enough pair of security specialists. Felix is the Oliver Queen or Jack Shephard of the show—handsome, with just the right amount of new beard to make him look rugged but not hide the jawline. Huck is the comic relief. She’s tough but funny, kind of a quirky character and hopefully one that gets plenty of screen-time.

Then there’s Kublek and her CRM troops. One imagines they won’t sit still, either. She knows the girls dislike her and continue to do so despite her best efforts to connect with them. She also probably knows they’re out to find their dad, though she can’t be too worried about that.

So admittedly some of this stuff is interesting. I suppose mostly I’m just not terribly fond of how it’s all told. It doesn’t feel like a Walking Dead show for the most part. It’s too cloying and too teenagey (but without the stuff that makes good teenage stuff interesting—this is not funny like The Breakfast Club or Fast Times At Ridgemont High or sexy or gripping like the early seasons of The 100).

It’s just kind of flat, at least in the opening episode. Maybe once they’re on the road, things will get more interesting. We have four teens—two sisters and two nerdy boys they bring along with them—attempting to head out on their own and track down a mysterious, heavily armed organization that could be literally anywhere. That doesn’t sound all that smart, or likely to succeed, but it could make for some interesting adventures. And it’s only 20 episodes so what have we got to lose?

So the question is, does this show hold up on its own?

The answer: No. If this weren’t a Walking Dead show I’d have almost zero interest in continuing with it. At the moment, I’m more curious about how it will shine light on the main show and Rick’s fate than anything to do with these characters. Maybe that will change, but so far I’m not optimistic.

Production values, casting, the zombie effects and all that are fine and well done, but the premiere is awfully slow and boring compared to what we’ve come to expect from this series, especially when it comes to premieres. A slow start isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a show—see, for example, seasons 4 and 5 of Fear The Walking Dead for what the “worst thing to happen to a show” really looks like—but it doesn’t inspire, either.

What did you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook and thanks for reading!

You can read my recap and review of the Season 10 finale of The Walking Dead right here.