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Hello and welcome to Slate's Walking Dead podcast. I'm Mike Volo, senior producer here in Washington, D.C. joining me from New York City is Slate video producer Chris Wade. Hey, Chris.

Hello, Mike. How are you, buddy? I am well. It's been, what,

two months? Yeah, it's been quite a little interregnum here for season five of The Walking Dead.

They split it up into two parts, and we're now on episode nine, what's happened and what's going on, is the title of it. But first, just a quick announcement. We will be making this podcast available

to Slate Plus listeners only for the first 24 hours, and then it will revert to the wide listening

public. This is good news for the DVR crowd who's watching it on Monday night anyway. Yeah, that would

probably be me if we weren't

getting the screeners, but we are. And so you and I are watching these episodes on our 13-inch screens,

not quite the experience, really, they're going for, I would imagine. Hey, I'm a video producer, so I

went all in on the 15-inch screen. Oh, okay. So this episode nine, the cold open, which I loved, begins with a close-up of a mound of dirt being shoveled.

One assumes, I assumed, that they were burying Beth, who died in the last episode.

Gabriel is presiding over the burial.

He's reading from 2 Corinthians.

We look not at what can be seen, but we look at what cannot be seen.

Did you recognize that passage offhand?

I recognized it as a biblical passage.

I wasn't sure exactly where it was from, but I looked it up.

Using context clues, I discerned it was from the Bible.

Yes. So there are violins playing in the background throughout the cold open. There are kind of fancy jump cuts with the camera. There's interesting lighting effects as scenes. The whole thing is very ambient and impressionistic. Very moody and stylized. And we see what I thought at first were flashbacks, but it turns out that they're actually flash forwards.

The whole thing lasts a couple of minutes, but I found it very well done.

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