4x01 Advance Review Von Entertainment Weekly (SPOILERS) 

Ruben Blades, Mercedes Mason, Cliff Curtis

is a grim TV show. Typical episode summary: Beloved Character Loses Beloved Organs. So if you have a bleak sense of humor, it’s been fun to see the AMC series built on gory nihilism become a family-fun phenomenon, a megafranchise crossing all known media.

, which thrilled a nation across five months of commercial breaks with the tantalizing promise that something was wrong—really wrong—onboard this crazy plane. (Better title:

launched in 2015. It began with the very beginning of the apocalypse, and shifted the action to the West Coast. The first season was a compelling dramatization of just how existentially difficult it is to travel from East Los Angeles to the beach. Since then,

has stumbled through new locations, killing people indiscriminately, not dead, not quite alive, like some kind of clumsy vampire. The fourth season features a new setting, new showrunners, new characters. It’s a near-reboot that’s fun and deflating: Inevitably,

‘s Lennie James Will Cross Over to

The premiere (April 15 at 10 p.m. ET on AMC) focuses on Morgan (Lennie James), an OG

I won’t spoil how his franchise transition occurs, but at one point he literally runs away from

, like some viewers ran from Negan. He meets chatty John (wonderful Garrett Dillahunt) who carries a cool revolver and speaks with a cowboy twang. He’s so completely the Platonic Ideal of a gunslinger that someone actually calls him a “gunslinger.” (That same someone asks Morgan, “You some kind of Karate Man?”, a sentence that belongs on a T-shirt I’d buy four of.) Fellow

newbie Maggie Grace plays a journalist named Althea, who drives around in a SWAT van full of automatic weapons, the kind of souped-up killer car you have to play six hours of 

“But wait,” you ask, “What about characters who have actually appeared on

before?” The survivors of last season’s dam explosion have reconstituted themselves behind a wall in a new community in Texas. The first time we see Kim Dickens’ Madison, she’s wearing a denim shirt, bandana around her neck, gunbelt slung diagonal across her waist at the same tilted angle Sinatra wore hats.

‘s reboot is really a return to the very beginning: Recall Andrew Lincoln in the original

pilot, with a big lawman hat and a big lawman revolver, a lonely man on a lonely horse. That stuff’s chicken soup for this Western lover’s soul, and it’s not the worst idea for this franchise to reboot back to basics.

The problem is that everything about this reset winds up blunting the

Nick (Frank Dillane) is working through PTSD by farming, just like Andrew Lincoln’s Rick in another fourth season. Colman Domingo’s morally wayward Strand is now a ride-or-die Madison acolyte. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: There’s a mysterious group of baddies who leave eerie calling cards all around the landscape, and what ever happened to all those Wolves? There’s a new character (Jenna Elfman) who has trouble trusting people, but she’s more fun than Enid if you pretend she is 

‘s Western rebranding has some funky charms: A repeated Merle Haggard tune, a conversation about Robert Johnson’s Satanic bargain, an old-fashioned standoff lets Dickens show off her John Wayne swagger. But the main feeling you get from

, like a snake eating its own tail, or a zombie biting its own foot. B-