The Walking Dead’s midseason premiere gets rare sexual content rating

The Walking Dead midseason premiere, “Squeeze,” bears the content descriptor “SVL,” which means that the episode will contain violence, bad language, and scenes of a sexual nature, according to ComicBook.com. This contrasts with the show’s more typical content rating, “V,” which just means to brace for violence. Sometimes it gets slapped with a “VL” rating, which means there’s also bad language; Negan probably has a lot of lines in those episodes.

But an “SLV” rating is rare for this show. The Walking Dead has plenty of violence but comparatively few sexual scenes, especially when compared to other major cable shows like Game of Thrones and Vikings. But with the AMC drama recently going through a transitional period — including Angela Kang becoming the new showrunner starting in season 9 — some things have been shifting round.

The previous episode left us on a cliffhanger, with our favorite characters led into a cave and trapped by the Whisperers. People in peril include Daryl, Carol, Arron, Magna, Jerry, Connie and Kelly. They’re surrounded by a horde of walkers and there seems to be no way out. Forbes, which has an early review of the first two new episodes, compares their journey to the 2009 thriller The Descent, in which a group of friends are lost in a cave and hunted by predators. That’s a solid movie, so we’re taking it as a good sign.

Forbes also teases further developments in the relationship between Alpha and Negan, which I’m excited to watch because of a certain plot twist that happens in Robert Kirkman’s comics. However, apparently that twist doesn’t happen in the opening episodes, if at all, so we might just have to wait.

I’m hoping that later on in the season we will get our first glimpse of the Commonwealth, the biggest community we’ll see in The Walking Dead so far!

The Walking Dead returns February 23 on AMC. Until then, please enjoy this calming ASMR video featuring zombies sounds posted to the official Walking Dead YouTube page:

Crunchy.

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