“We’re facing a long, hard journey…Maybe even harder than I could imagine. I don’t even know what our chances are. Slim, I guess, but it’s all about slim chances now,” Rick Grimes, played by the wonderful Andrew Lincoln, says during the season two premiere of AMC’s “The Walking Dead.”

The hit AMC drama, based off the graphic novel by creator Robert Kirkman, returned for its second season on Oct. 16, after making an eager crowd wait more than 10 months from their highly regarded first season, which wrapped up in December 2010.

A quick summary to those unaware — a random epidemic (which we find out in the second episode of the current season) has turned the majority of the world into zombies, leaving few civilizations and groups of individuals to fend for themselves against the undead.

Throughout the first season, we see numerous attempts to control the undead population in the overrun town of Atlanta, Georgia, including taking shelter at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hoping to find a cure.

In the season premiere, the group of survivors has since abandoned the city of Atlanta once and for all, and runs into a number of problems, including a broken RV on a highway with a large “herd” of zombies approaching, a missing group member feared eaten, a gunshot wound with an immediate need for treatment and an overrun high school that has the necessary medical supplies inside.

It’s only the second episode and I’ve already become hooked yet again.

AMC, in its true fashion, builds up the 45-minute episode with a lot of character and plot development, packing all the action into the final 10 minutes (a wonderfully jaw-dropping 10 minutes, I might add, for any AMC show).

The plot and cinematography are so wonderful that if a viewer ever sees the camera is staying on one character for too long, we start to fear that their doom is inevitable. It isn’t, but it’s still wonderful television.

Each episode is left on somewhat of a cliffhanger, making anticipated audience members count down the days until next Sunday, when the latest episode premieres.

As of press time, it’s five days and six hours. And that time can’t pass fast enough.