The Walking Dead: Season 2 Episode “Nebraska” Turns 10

“I hear Nebraska’s nice,” says Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) before pulling the trigger on his first human kills on The Walking Dead. In “Nebraska,” the midseason return of the AMC zombie drama’s farm-set second season, the survivors wrestle with the aftermath of finding a reanimated Sophia (Madison Lintz) locked inside the Greene family’s walker-filled barn. When Rick and Glenn (Steven Yeun) set out into town to track down Hershel (Scott Wilson), they find hostiles Dave (Michael Raymond James) and Tony (Aaron Munoz). The gun-toting gang members report rumors of somewhere safe in Nebraska but are gunned down by Rick when they threaten to find the farm and take it by force. Cue Clutch song “The Regulator.”

(Nearly a decade later, the rumored location in Nebraska would be revealed as the Omaha Campus Colony in spin-off The Walking Dead: World Beyond.) Written by Evan T. Reilly and directed by Clark Johnson, “Nebraska” aired on February 12, 2012, kicking off a six-episode half-season that would bring threats from the living (Michael Zegen’s Randall) and the dead (a farm-destroying walker horde). 

“Now there is no safe place and everything is a lot more heated. So it’s a matter of making the farm itself threatening, making threats to the farm,” then-showrunner Glen Mazzara said in a 2012 interview with Uproxx. “People weren’t scared when they were on the farm and, ultimately, the show is a horror show… It’s the natural progression of storytelling over 13 episodes.” 

In a separate interview with Entertainment Weekly, Walking Dead creator and executive producer Robert Kirkman said Dave and Tony “represent new threats, and they are really just the tip of the iceberg. It’s really good to come back and be off of the farm and see that there are more dangerous things out there than the zombies. Things just keep getting worse from here.”

Ten years later, The Walking Dead is heading into the second part of its Final Season. The Walking Dead: The Final Season Part 2 premieres with “No Other Way” Sunday, February 20 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC. 

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