[This post contains mild, general spoilers for seasons 3 through 5.]

The zombies might shamble along slowly, but the Season 5 Premiere of “The Walking Dead” roared along at a breakneck pace last night with an action-packed spectacle that I would rate at a perfect 10.  This was a fantastic episode, even by the show’s standards.

There isn’t a hell of a lot I can say without spoilers, except it had all of the scares, gore, horror and action that a viewer could ask for — not to mention a tour de force by possibly my favorite character.  (And I just KNEW this person would shine in this episode!)

And in its fifth season, it still manages to be an effective horror show.  My stomach dropped when one defenseless character was imperiled and another extorted.  (“Go outside!”)  Yeesh.

The inhabitants of Terminus, I think, are the scariest group of human adversaries the show has developed.  The dialogue, detail and even the set design, showing how organized and methodical they were in their wrongdoing, was incredibly creepy and unsettling.

I honestly think I would have fallen for their trap.  I don’t think I’m giving myself too much credit if I say I would never have been taken in by a charismatic opportunist like the Governor –he was an obvious politician, and in the corporate world, guys like him are a dime a dozen.  I’d also like to think that I would be too shrewd to trust a guy like Shane, and that I’d be vigilant or lucky enough to stay a step ahead of “the Claimers.”

But I don’t know about the “Termites.”  I think I might have taken the bait.  They seemed so … normal, and easygoing and … safe.  Gareth and his second in command seemed like precisely the sort of people I would trust — affable, disarming, articulate grad-student types, just maybe a little worse for wear during the apocalypse.

In fact, do you know what I suspected the twist for the end of Season 4 would be?  That the Terminus residents would be harmless, and that a paranoid Rick and company would accidentally attack and kill a group of innocent people.  (This show is just dark enough to do that.)

That’s not quite how things worked out, of course.  Wow, what a great opener, and what a nice little event for the Halloween season.  🙂

Nice job, AMC.

Final fan theory observation … is it possible that one character was bitten and is concealing the wound?  A key melee does take place offscreen, doesn’t it?  (Caveat — I am almost always wrong on predictions like these.)