Ten years after the outbreak, the Campus Colony is an oasis of calm and industry. The Bennett sisters, Hope (Alexa Mansour) and Iris (Aaliyah Royale) are a special case in a colony full of special cases. Iris is a class president and future scientist and leader. Hope is angry, rebellious and quietly guilt stricken. Their father is a scientist who has been transferred out as part of an exchange program with the Civil Republic Military or CRM. All’s well, or as well as it can be. Until their father gets in contact, explaining that things have gone south. Aided by quiet new kid Silas (Hal Cumpston) ad eccentric genius Elton Ortiz (Nicolas Cantu), the girls set out on a thousand mile journey to rescue their father…

The World Beyond joins Star Trek’s Lower Decks as a genuinely envelope pushing spinoff. The connective tissue here is solely the CRM, glimpsed briefly retrieving Rick in the core show and far more extensively last season in Fear The Walking Dead. The time frame is different, the location is different and the cast are radically different. Each choice works.

Time frame first. By jumping ahead a decade we officially see what happens after the world ends. Intriguingly, the ones who got closest to the right answer are the Alexandrians and the Kingdom. Campus Colony is very similar to the Kingdom in approach and Alexandria in layout and there’s a gentle utopian feel to it which gives the show a remarkable lightness of touch.

That’s doubly true once the sisters are introduced. Mansour is a fantastic, mildly competent punk with excellent reasons for her bad choices. Royale is a prissy, focused leader with a profoundly terrible secret. One that in the space of the first episode we not only discover, but discover she’s wrong about. Both girls are desperate for something important and when they get it they grab it with both hands. Their reasoning? Is teenage. Their hearts? Absolutely in the right place. Likewise Cumpston’s quiet, sad Silas and Cantu’s old before his years Elton. Each is assembled with remarkable speed and gentleness and each is absolutely someone you could hang a show off, even if sometimes you’re screaming at them to do something else. They’re kids. Convincingly, untidily so and the world they’ve inherited neither wants them or trusts them. Thankfully, that last feeling is entirely mutual.

The time frame also informs the location. Campus Colony is focused and calm, a serene community of thousands because after ten years it has to be. This is a group who have their survival techniques down and are in the process of negotiating a new version of America. That in turn is where the CRM come in, revealed here to be deeply secretive, intensely gifted and violent and clearly working to an agenda. Julia Ormond as Elizabeth Kublek, a senior CRM officer with a very odd agenda is the face of the organisation here and she’s amazing. A Smiley-esque figure, clearly with a plan and possibly desperately conflicted about what that plan is, she owns the screen just long enough for the Bennett girls to push and take it back. I have no idea if she’s going to be a friend or foe. I do know she, along with Campus Colony Security officers Felix (Nico Tortorella) and Annet Mahendru as his number two, Huck are the strongest possible supporting cast a show like this could hope for. The world has ended. It ended a while ago. These folks are trying to work out how to build what comes next.

Which brings us to the cast. The obvious point to make here is they’re all genuinely young and that by itself is worth noting. While several cast members in the core group are in their twenties the range runs from 24 to 17 and they all present as genuinely young and with it, fragile, desperate and inexperienced. There’s no Daryl here, no Carol or Rick. Just a group of kids born into the world ending, trying to deal with what they did to survive and what they do next. That’s compelling and personal in a way the core show often has to relegate to B plots and instantly gives World Beyond a subtly different flavour.

Likewise this cast are physical vastly diverse. Multiple ethnicities and body shapes are the sort of thing that TV shows still struggle to take into account. Here they’re baked in from the start and not in a crass or obvious way. These are a group of kids, a post-apocalyptic Breakfast Club with none of the polish and all off the teenage clumsiness. People of colour, people of size and a gay relationship that may even be allowed to happen on screen. This really is a brave new world not to mention a world beyond.

That sense of the new is what’s going to bring me back. World Beyond is a finite story, two ten episode seasons and done, and in that time it looks set to explore the unique teenage horrors of its leads with a clear eye and a brave heart. It’s clever, and kind, subtle and interested in personal trauma and how we deal with it.

Verdict: It’s very much worth your time, a great entry point into the rapidly expanding TWDverse and one of the strongest opening episodes I’ve seen this year. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

World Beyond is available now on Amazon Prime in the UK; it airs on AMC on Sundays in the US