‘Tales Of The Walking Dead’ Episode 2 Is The Weirdest TWD Has Ever Been, By Far

When AMC said they were going to be experimenting with different ideas in Tales of the Walking Dead, I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. I figured we could get a World War Z style anthology series about how the zombie apocalypse has affected different locations around the world.

And while that’s sort of what this is, what I was not expecting was an experiment in genre as well. The first two episodes have leaned into comedy in a way we simply have never seen before in any past Walking Dead series. Not that there have never been funny moments in any of the shows, but these are full-on comedic scripts. Episode 1 was about the odd couple dynamic of Joe and Evie, and now here, with the Blair and Gina episode, things have gone into a truly strange place.

It’s not just that the Blair and Gina tale here (starring Parker Posey and Jillian Bell) is a comedy, it’s that it’s a full-on, time-loop-based take on the Groundhog Day concept, where an oppressive boss and a beleaguered employee are stuck in a “death loop” attempting to escape a city (I think Atlanta?) that’s about to fall to the zombies, but they keep dying before they can escape in a variety of ways, but usually being blown up by a gas tanker.

They retain their memories from their past “lives” and wake up at the start of the day again, doomed to repeat this cycle until well, I won’t spoil the ending, I suppose, but you can understand how weird this all sounds if you’ve seen any of the normal Walking Dead series before this.

For me, this is not working. Granted, The Walking Dead would not be the first shared universe to experiment with different genres. I mean, She-Hulk has arrived in the MCU as a fourth-wall breaking comedy, a far cry from most past series and movies, but The Walking Dead is not Marvel, no matter how much it wants to be, and this episode being this weird, standalone experiment just feels bizarre. If it was like, really, really funny or something I might overlook it, but it’s not. It’s just goofy and feels more at home in the world of say, Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland. Not The Walking Dead, which at its best, is a brutal, dark depiction of a ruined world. This does not feel like the same universe where Rick bit some dude’s neck off a few years ago.

I guess maybe that’s what AMC wanted here, a chance to experiment to see how these episodes were received to then go “okay maybe we should do a real Walking Dead comedy series!” but if that’s the idea, then I’m going to go ahead and say no, please don’t do that, based on what I’ve seen so far. The non-comedy episodes I’ve seen, the next two, are much better than theses first two, so I’m not writing off the entire anthology concept. But yeah, episode 2 is one example of an experiment failing, if you ask me.

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