The Walking Dead Season 8 Premiere

The previous fall, the show's seventh season began with the passings of two darling characters, including Glenn Rhee, a brave person who had been on the show since its second scene. The activity a year ago focused on the man who murdered those characters with a spiked metal wrapped slugging stick Jeffrey Senior member Morgan's swaggering, overtalking supervillain Negan. It was bit of a bet, damaging a devoted group of onlookers while totally re-adjusting a standout amongst the most prominent shows on TV.

We spent long scenes last season becoming more acquainted with new characters and groups who were endeavoring to survive the zombie end of the world while fuming under the fanciful, severe control of Negan's sprawling pack, the Friends in need. Negan was working additional time to break our saint, Rick Grimes, and his supporters, a gathering of survivors who had vanquished savages and more awful. Appraisals plunged as a few fans stepped back.

In any case, on Sunday the show denotes an imperative historic point: its 100th scene and the begin of its eighth season. So it bodes well that the main scene is an arrival to shape, of sorts. Andrew Lincoln's extraordinary saint, Rick, and his band of survivors are actualizing an unpredictable arrangement to topple Negan and win back control of their groups. They aren't uninvolved casualties any longer; they're dynamic and battling back. It's the way long-lasting fans are accustomed to seeing them, and it can rest easy.

In true Walking Dead style, Sunday's episode isn't exactly told in a direct narrative. Instead, the action jumps around in time. We move from Rick and his allies preparing for their attack, to adrenaline-pumping clashes as they carry it out, to a future in which Rick has an almost Santa Claus-level white beard and a noticeable limp. Despite all the shooting, shouting and action, much of this episode feels like table setting — events mostly designed to maneuver characters and situations into certain positions to enable a greater story later.

It's tough to believe The Walking Dead has lasted this long, remaining the most-watched TV show by 18- to 49-year-old viewers for five seasons running. Originally developed as a graphic novel, the show picks up where most zombie movies end: at the point where animated, flesh-eating corpses have spread across the world and threaten to end human civilization.

Some have seen the show as an allegory for the fear of outsiders that fuels anti-immigrant or anti-refugee sentiments. But I've always felt the zombies in The Walking Dead were more like a natural disaster; a plague that sweeps away all the institutions we rely on in modern society. Faced with that challenge, what kind of person do you become? Can you survive the brutality of this new world and keep your humanity intact? And are the zombies — or "walkers," as they're called in the world of The Walking Dead — the biggest threat, or are other people? Seven years in, the show is still exploring those questions: Sunday's episode has Rick leading a group of not-so-thinly-veiled avatars for a humane post-apocalyptic civilization as they try to outfox a character who often seems like the Devil personified.

But here's one thing I haven't understood in recent seasons: What's happened to Michonne, played by Danai Gurira? She does very little in Sunday's episode, but at one point she was among the show's strongest female characters, adept at wielding a huge, Japanese sword and surviving in a world filled with flesh-eating zombies and even worse people. As she became more humanized and emotionally open — kindling a romance with our hero, Rick, and becoming something of a mentor to his son, Carl — she's been featured less and given less agency. Even as other female characters have grown more independent — especially abused wife turned warrior Carol — Michonne seems to have faded into the background, as if she couldn't be part of a loving, healthy relationship and still have her own independent story.