Hunt or be hunted with this new THE WALKING DEAD season 5 trailer

I have a bit of a on-again/off-again relationship with The Walking Dead TV series. While it started out really strong as its own beast as well as a good adaptation, changing showrunners and decompressed storylines hurt it, ending with an inconsistent show has had its very highs and very lows (the first half of Season 2, where they stretched out one comic book issue’s worth of story into 6 episodes, was positively subterranean).

But most of Season 4 was definitely on the high side, particularly the last few episodes, where Rick and the gang were finally almost all back together again, and looked to have discovered their very own sanctuary from all the craziness in Terminus. Only – as these things tend to happen – to discover they just walked into what appeared to be a cannibal trap with them being prepped as the main course. The season ended on a hell of a cliffhanger, as the whole gang was gagged, bound and locked in a dark train car, but based on this new trailer for the show’s upcoming fifth season, things are about to get real crazy once those train car doors are opened again.

If there is a single complaint I can level at this TV adaptation, its that Andrew Lincoln’s TV Rick Grimes is nowhere close to be being the brutal, unflinching badass that comic book Rick Grimes is. The TV series did this by having Jon Bernthal’s Shane around to do all the bad stuff, allowing TV Rick to keep his hands relatively clean. But since Shane’s departure, TV Rick has been forced more and more to mire himself in the moral issues that Comic Book Rick faced all the time, and has subsequently stepped up in a big way. And from what I’m seeing in the video above, that darker, more fatalistic Rick is really starting to come to the fore now, and I cannot wait to see more of him.

The Walking Dead‘s fifth season kicks off in the US on October 12, and you can expect local broadcasts to follow shortly thereafter.

Last Updated: September 9, 2014