"Days Gone Bye" is the first episode of Season 1 of The Walking Dead.
Plot Synopsis
Being chased by hundreds of walkers, Daniel hides in an abandoned police station, being safe for only a matter of time.
The next scene flashes back to before the apocalypse, with Daniel and his best friends Cristiana, Mariana, Inês and Diana, in their highschool. Daniel tells Cristiana that Mariana was different since he changed to another class. Cristiana agrees, stating that she hasn't been with them as often. "Is that why you don't like her anymore?" she asks him. "I used to really like her" Daniel replies "but ever since i changed class, she got so distant" he concludes by saying that he thinks she's not the girl he fell in love with anymore. He also adds that he misses being with the 4 of them, "it's not that i hate my new classmates but... it's not the same" he says "the only one from our former class that is still in the same class as me is Johanne and you know that I barely speak with her".
Cristiana then asks him about a girl named Carla. "After forgeting Mariana, I started looking at Carla differently. I've never thought of her in another way, i allways thought of her as a friend. But now things are... just different".
Then we hear Mariana asking Diana how her relationship with Fábio was going. She states that they've been having some problems and that she's thinking in breaking up with him. "He's playing with me, he doesn't really like me or he wouldn't be flirting with all the other girls". Inês tells her that she's being too dramatic and that she should speak with him to clear things out.
Suddenly the bell rings and Daniel is forced to leave his friends to go to his class.
Then in the middle of Daniel's class they her gunshots and suddenly his teacher, Ana Grave, looks threw the windowd door from the classroom and sees lots of students running away from a fallen corpse while the gunshots continue. "Is that our English teacher?" asks one of Daniel's classmates. Their teacher tells them to stay inside the classroom and walked towards the corpse. As she kneels before their former teacher, the corpse reanimates and attacks Daniel's geography teacher, devouring her. They lock themselves inside the classroom but Daniel refused to stay because he wanted to make sure his friends were safe.
He gets to his friends classroom but it was already empty by the time he got there and decides to go back to his classmates. When he gets there he finds the classroom empty and thinks that he was left behind, so he makes his way out of school. He sees the military rescuing another school next to his school, the school that Daniel's brother attended. He gets an abandoned bycicle and heads into their direction but they depart before they spot him.
He heads home, but in the way he stumbles upon a walker who almost takes a bite out of him,he is saved by a pair of survivors, the younger girl stabs it with a knife. The guy who was with the girl asks Daniel if he knew what was going on and proceeds to explain that the woman his friend stabbed and tried to eat him was already dead before they killed her. "One thing we do know, don't you get bit" The girl says. "Bites kill", he explains, "and then you become one of them. The fever burns you out. But then after a while... you come back."
"How do you know all that?" Daniel asks. "Seen it happen" The girl says, "the woman who attacked you... she... she was my mom...". Daniel tells her he's sorry for her loss and she tells him he should spent the night with them, where he would be safe.
The next morning, Daniel, walks outside in a painter's mask, carrying an Axe. They are teaching him how to kill walkers. "It's gotta be the brain," he says. Daniel kills a walker easilly to wich the guy says "I think we don't need to teach you anything, you seem like you were born for this". "Yeah well... I have been accumulating lots of anger inside me for the last 9 years, you'd understand if you knew my old classmates... I was so happy for changing class."
After practice, Daniel tells them he thinks his brother and friends are still alive.
"They're in Atlanta, I bet," the girl offers. The guy explains that the government was telling people to head to a refugee center there with military protection and food, before the broadcasts stopped. The Center of Decease Control — where they're rumored to be working on a cure — is also in Atlanta.
The girl tells Daniel that they were headed to Atlanta amid absolute panic. "The streets weren't fit to be on," she recalls. He explains that they never got to Atlanta because they got "stuck" after her mother got bit, and after she died they just stayed hunkered down at that house. Afterward, the duo gives a knife and a bag with some food and water to Daniel, who prepares to set off to Atlanta. The duo says that they'll follow in a few days.
They both leave Daniel with a warning: "They may not seem like much one at a time," he says, "But in a group, all riled up and hungry? Man, you watch your ass."
Before departing to Atlanta, Daniel sends out a broadcast on the duo's CB radio. In a camp outside the city with a boy perched atop an RV with a pair of binoculars, a group of survivors receives the transmission. A young girl in pink rushes to the CB, but can't get a reply through. Cristiana, Mariana, and Bruno are among them, but they don't recognize Daniel's voice over the garbled transmission.
Johanne, one of Daniel's classmates who were with him in the classroom, voices that she's been saying that they should put signs up on the highway warning people away from the city, and volunteers to go on her own, but a blond guy argues that venturing out is too risky.
Meanwhile Daniel had arrived to Atlanta, but it's nothing like the duo described it. Hundreds of burned out cars trying to leave the city have stalled out on the other side of the freeway, while the road into the city is completely deserted.
Nonetheless, he continues to walk in to the devastated metropolis, with no other leads on his friends or family. Two ravens peck at a dead animal.
Rick hears a helicopter pass overhead, catching the reflection in a windowed skyscraper. He tries to follow it, but leads himself straight into a horde of dozens of walkers. The undead follow him. He runs into an alleyway and turns to the left where he finds an abandoned police station and decides to hide inside of it.
Suddenly a radio in the police station crackles. "Hey you, dumbass," a voice says. "You in the police station. Cozy in there?"
Deaths
- Dora
- Ana Grave
- Possibly some Students
- Unnamed girl's Mother
Trivia
- First appearence of Daniel.
- First appearence of Bruno.
- First appearence of Paquete.
- First appearence of Mariana.
- First appearence of Cristiana.
- First appearence of Johanne.
- First appearence of Illyana
- First appearence of Diana.
- First appearence of Inês.
- First appearence of Dylan.
- First appearence of Renato.
- First appearence of Carla.
- First appearence of Leonardo.
- First appearence of Hanna.
- First appearence of Natacha.
- First appearence of Nadine.
- First appearence of Johanna.
- First appearence of Marialex.
- First appearence of Andrea.
- First (and last) appearance of Dora.
- First (and last) appearance of Ana.
- First (and last) appearance of the unnamed girl.
- First (and last) appearance of the unnamed guy.
- The cover of this episode shows Atlanta.
- "The real villains in The Walking Dead are the living, and the real horror isn't the death that comes from the teeth and nails of zombies but the moral compromises made to avoid that fate. It's a survival story in the truest and bleakest sense, a story of the triumph of surviving an impossible situation, and the devastation of what that survival does to you."
- This episode marks the first time someone mentions Fábio.
- In this episode we find out that Daniel had a crush on Carla and Mariana before the apocalypse.
- The characters considered as recurring cast, Co-Stars, and season regulars who are only seen in the background and don't even talk are Daniel's old classmates, excluding Ana who get some lines in the episode.