‘The Walking Dead’ Season 8 Episode 1: Mercy

On Sunday night, AMC will premiere the eighth season of The Walking Dead with the show’s 100th […]

October 22, 2017, 8:30am

On Sunday night, AMC will premiere the eighth season of The Walking Dead with the show’s 100th overall episode.

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Episode 8×01 is titled, “Mercy.” The official synopsis for Mercy reads, “Rick and his group, along with the Kingdom and Hilltop, have banded together to bring the fight to Negan and the Saviors.” Heading into the new season, fans are more than ready for the beloved All Out War story from the comics to be adapted for television.

“There’s some great stuff coming up. Not a ton in the first episode because we’re setting the stage for our war where we left at the end of last year,” executive producer Greg Nicotero said. ‘The first episode has a lot of interesting nods to previous seasons. If you watch it and you know the show pretty well, you’ll recognize them — as much as me shooting shot for shot a sequence that was in an earlier episode.”

By comparison to Season 7, the new batch of episodes will see Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes retake control of the AMC series. The most recent episodes have all featured Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) ruling the series with his group of Saviors. After killing Abraham and Glenn to launch his reign, Rick and his group were humbled by the group for 16 consecutive episodes before rallying in the finale and chasing their enemies out of town.

In the Season 8 premiere, Rick Grimes will bring the war to his enemy’s doorstep.

“It is interesting having directed the 100th episode because it was my 20th that I had shot, our style, we’ve really tried to sort of change up the style. We wanted to be fresh. We used a lot of zoom lenses. There’s not a tremendous number of crane shots,” Nicotero said. “We’ve been going for really evocative frames without discovering things, without dolly set ups and things like that…these have been the hardest episodes that we’ve ever shot, this season, because of even the story telling. Traditionally, we have, this season, been completing a lot of character storylines in one or two episodes instead of letting them play out of the entire season. It’s a very different way than we tell stories…we’re constantly aware of what we’ve done in the past and trying to top ourselves.”

To watch The Walking Dead premiere online, head over to AMC’s official website when the episode ends. Following The Walking Dead Episode 8×01, AMC will air a two-hour Talking Dead special live from the Greek Theater, beginning at 10:07 pm ET, following the slightly extended premiere episode.