And both girls are reeling, in their own ways, from a pair of familial traumas: the death of their mother on the night the zombie apocalypse broke out, and the absence of their father, Leo, who agreed to go work for the CRM on a secret base as part of the alliance pact.Įven in a fictional universe as thoroughly explored as The Walking Dead has been, this is a lot of new information, and the first half of the premiere is mostly just characters explaining everything we need to know via inelegant info-dumps. Iris’s sister Hope (Alexa Mansour) is a self-styled outsider, who uses her natural scientific talents to make her own booze and rebels against an alliance with a militaristic group called the Civic Republic Military, or the CRM.
But there are already some troubling cracks in Iris’s type-A façade, including recurring nightmares in which she sees herself as a zombie.
Iris Bennett (Aliyah Royale), the student-council president, is a driven, high-performing student - think Tracy Flick in the post-apocalypse, and you’ll be in the ballpark. Our protagonists are two of those teenagers. (This time, they’re called “empties,” because it wouldn’t be Walking Dead if they didn’t twist themselves into pretzels to avoid the word “zombie.”) And - mostly importantly - there’s a whole new generation of teenagers attending a reasonably stable approximation of what a normal American high school would have looked like before society collapsed. There are plenty of defenses against the zombies outside their gates. By the looks of things, the Campus Colony is about as idyllic as the post-apocalypse is going to get: just under 10,000 survivors living in relative harmony. In a cute nod to the premiere date of the main series, it’s been ten years since the zombie apocalypse first broke out. This time, we’re in Omaha, where Nebraska State University has been transformed into the Campus Colony. With a refreshing pair of young new protagonists, along with a new setting and premise, World Beyond might just manage to breathe some new life into this franchise.īefore we formally meet any of our new heroes and villains, World Beyond takes the time to acclimate us to a new setting. Why not aim for a fresh start? Why not roll the dice on what’s essentially a YA Walking Dead?īut as cynical as that calculation might sound on paper, the premiere episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond makes a decent case that this spinoff might actually be the shakeup the Walking Dead franchise has needed. For the past decade, the franchise’s core fanbase has remained both passionate and loyal - but they’re not getting any younger, and it’s not like next year’s season-11 premiere is likely to draw many new eyeballs to the series. It’s been ten years since The Walking Dead premiered. It is easy to imagine the pitch meeting that led to The Walking Dead: World Beyond.
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