Episode 1

I chose to analyze the show's ability to craft emotionally gripping sequences. In the first episode, we saw several intensely emotional moments regarding characters that we knew next to nothing about. For example, the family who rescues Rick was struggling to come to terms with the loss of the mother and, although we knew next to nothing about her character, her story was incredibly emotional for the bulk of viewers. This is an interesting trait that resurfaces several times without the entire series. So how exactly did the creators manage to make us feel for characters we knew nothing about? By tapping into shared emotional reactions of most humans. Although we didn't really have any insight into the relationship dynamic of the father, mother, and son, we made connections to our own families and thus felt empathetic for them. It's challenging to make the audience care about people that haven't been written into the show well but they pull it off by making you associate characters to the loved ones in your own life. Some other ways they made the subplot interesting were by the implementation of good acting and sad music. Overall I felt that the family Rick encountered in the pilot had one of the most emotionally gripping backstories of the entire first season.