The whole gang is back! After an inexcusable hiatus, breaking up the momentum just as the season got reasonably interesting we finally return to meet back up with Rick Grimes and company this Sunday on AMC.

Either the series rebounds to the form of the first season and the flickering promise of the final act of the mid-season finale. Or we return the plodding nonsense that was the heft of first half. In genre television, a realm where concepts and execution mean so much, you either pass or fail.

The Walking Dead is at the tipping point.

Two sides of a coin. Two paths in a wood. Is TWD ready to step up its game?

Let’s consider the possibilities.

Remember true believers, we’ve been here before. Worse even! It was late November, 2006. In order to avoid maddening rerun breaks in the schedule of their suddenly popular cult hit Lost, ABC came up with a brilliant plan. Run it with no repeats, but in two parts. One six-episode run in the fall and the bulk in the spring.

The results were awful. The six-episode arc plodded, new characters added nothing to the show and took away screen time from old favorites and at the end of six hours we got a tense yet predictable climax that delivered on none of the mind blowing awesomeness we’d come to expect from Lost.

Run Kate! Run (away from this show because it’s boring)!

But something miraculous happened when the show returned in February of 2007. The creative spark was back. We got the first of what would become a trilogy of great episodes centered around Desmond’s time defying, reality hopping prowess. Our big bad Ben Linus became both more ruthless and sympathetic through an artfully told backstory. Found out why Locke was in a wheelchair. AND.. AND… AND they cleared the new character dead weight with a flourish. And Billy D. Williams.

Meanwhile, the season finale ended with perhaps the biggest sucker punch in a series known for sucker punches. A brilliant example of why you need to consistently blow up your mythology to keep things interesting.

We have to go back Kate! We have to go back (to watch this seasons again because it ruled)!

What can TWD learn?

Dead isn’t Lost. But it is the most important show about zombies since… well… ever. The first season showed so much outside-the-box promise. The CDC and Merle Dixon explored concepts like global hope and power dynamics in a thrilling and exciting way. Although Herschel’s farm certainly gave us a careful examination of how to consider the humanity of the undead, it took it’s sweet time to do it and diluted the point like a homeopathic cold remedy.

In the second half of season three, Lost focused on telling great one episode stories. Some dealt with previous mythology but many (like Desmond’s Flashes Before Your Eyes) did not. Let’s get more of those! You have an endless possibility of character interaction in show about post-apocalyptic survivors. What strange people? Cultures?

Think about how many terrible episodes in the first half hung their entire dramatic arc on the search for a little girl they knew they weren’t going to find? The complications they found were either easily solvable or had no dramatic consequence.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the sure fire way to fowl this up is to follow the comic series closer than they have. Until we get to Woodbury and meet The Governor (whose casting rumors are quite juicy) there’s a whole lot of sloooooooooooow burn in this source material.

This is not a slow burn series, it’s a story about survival and the forces against it. Or at least it shouldn’t be if it wants to be watchable.

There is a breath of fresh air, a unique buoyancy, to viewing a television series where you trust the storyteller. Gone is the nagging sense of second guessing or internal apologizing for obvious flaws because you so want to love the project as a whole.

It’s just you and the story, riding the rhythm of plot.

That is The Walking Dead.

Of course any informed fan of the series is living in fear, not unlike Andrea trembling behind the RV door with a curious walker sniffing inches away, as to when the current sense of rapture might abruptly end after AMC’s senseless in-production banishing of series mastermind Frank Darabont.

But enough of the dread, let’s focus on the now.

The zombie apocalypse survive-a-long returned to television Sunday after a nearly yearlong absence with nothing short of the best episode the series has delivered to date. Characters reset, season plots began to emerge and a few Lost tropes were dusted off for good measure.
The End is back, read on AFTER THE JUMP to get all the details on “What Lies Ahead” including the episodes best moments, ratings triumphs and a countdown as to when we can all start panicking about the quality of the series… (more…)

Researchers from the Multisensory Perception and Action Group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany have provided evidence that if you ever become lost in the desert you are more than likely going to cross your own path. Using GPS tracking, the scientists dropped people off in the Sahara and forests in Germany and monitored their movements. As long as the subjects had visible cues as to their direction from the sun or the moon, they managed to walk a relatively straight line. However, as soon as they had no indicators, they immediately started walking in circles.

“The results from these experiments show that even though people may be convinced that they are walking in a straight line, their perception is not always reliable. Additional, more cognitive, strategies are necessary to really walk in a straight line. People need to use reliable cues for walking direction in their environment, for example a tower or mountain in the distance, or the position of the sun.”

[Max Planck Campus Tübingen via Gizmodo]

Could it be Atlantis? Lost’s mystery island in the sideways universe? Either way, there are some sunken islands at the bottom of the Caribbean Ocean.

During their six weeks in the waters north of Venezuela and west of the Antilles, the experts from the University of Greifswald analysed rock samples from depths of more than 1,000 metres.

The “Meteor” crew then used echo sounding to measure the ocean floor, an exercise which revealed significant differences in depth compared to current marine charts.

In fact, some of the underwater mountains listed on charts did not exist at all, while other areas thought to be flat showed rises of up to 1,000 metres, geologist Martin Meschede said.

The team’s biggest surprise came from the samples they dredged from the ocean floor, which showed stones that could only have come from very shallow depths.

The scientist also believe that the islands were volcanic. No word on if “volcanic” means a nuclear bomb exploded, therefore resetting the timeline.

[The Local]

A remote controlled vehicle has discovered the deepest hydrothermal underwater vent on record 3.1 miles deep in the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean. Entitled “black smokers” the vents pump a black, iron sulfide compound into the ocean. The compound is hot enough to melt lead.

Locke is strangely unaffected by the news.

[Live Science]