1-2: Guts, and lots of exciting people!

This episode starts with a bang!  Literally.  Shane and Lori.  She is so lucky.

This is clearly the episode in which we will meet a ton of key characters, or if you are a nerd, new fictional friends.  Those whose characters were already known to me, via the comic book, shall be denoted by (yay!) and purely TV characters shall be henceforth marked as (who?).

Trapped in a tank and surrounded by zombies, Rick learns that he has a friend on the radio.  The voice cues him to get the hell out of the tank and into safety, and hence we meet Glenn (yay!).  Glenn wears a boyish baseball cap and seems very young.  He brings Rick back to a group of folks inside a department store - enter Andrea (yay!) and T-Dog (who?) and Jacqui (who?).  They are all pissed because Rick's ruckus has attracted many Walkers, forcing them onto the roof.

Who should be on the roof shooting walkers but Merle (who?)?  Merle is a meth-esque cou rouge of the highest degree,  applying colorful verbiage to describe the color of T-Dog's skin.  Rick, ever the sheriff (or cop or whatever), steps in and cuffs belligerent Merle to a pipe.  Audience cheers!

The gang has to escape, and at this point we learn that Walkers are somewhat easily fooled by scent, sight and silence.  Stink like a Walker, shuffle all slow like a Walker, and be quiet, very much like in Shawn of the Dead.  The wacky plan hatched will be to rub themselves with a dead guy, and wear his feet like a scarf in order to trick the horde.

I actually work for the state's donor registry, and so am momentarily delighted when Rick notes "He was an organ donor," before launching into a rather gross scene of, um, taking apart the dead fellow.  Ultimately, this was not a great PR moment for the noble donation of solid organs.

D'oh!  The plan goes so well until...  yep.  It rains, and with suspicious speed obliterates the death-skunk upon Rick and Glenn.  They hightail it to a vehicle, some fun car-based scenes happen, and they return to the store to save everyone.

Everyone?  Well, not Merle.  T-Dog trips and loses the key - major whoops.  As the Dixie Chicks might say, "Goodbye, Merle!"