I keep thinking of Jeff Goldblum’s snarky line in Jurassic Park: “Eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour, right?”
A surprisingly and lone good effort on a writer’s part.
Agree so much with this. I was looking forward to a story that showed how the virus took hold, the bewilderment of authorities, the panic, people trying to wrap their minds around what is happening, how the medical community tried to cope, etc. In other words, all the stuff we never saw in TWD.
We *already *have a show that follows a small, isolated group of people in the zombie apocalypse, with almost no knowledge of what’s going on elsewhere. It’s called The Walking Dead.
At this point it seems that most of what I was looking forward to has already happened and we’re firmly in zombie land already. So whatever these folks in FTWD do from here forward will just be a repeat of TWD – a small band of characters trying to survive in a world full of zombies.
Probably the best way to do that is an anthology like WWZ (the book). AMC only gave them 6 episodes for a spinoff to see if it would work, and had them shoot in LA. They clearly weren’t willing to commit to the kind of budget that kind of scope would require. Getting a big crowd to fill a single block on location is expensive. The one riot we saw was probably all they could muster while still having enough left over for something like a massive zombie attack in the last episode.
It’s surprising that after the huge success of TWD they would have to do this one on the cheap. And even if they did, they still could have explored those issues without just skipping right to zombie saturation. Even having people watch it unfold on TV news would be better, and that’s got to be dirt cheap. I’d settle for people talking about what’s going on, what they’ve heard, what they saw online… Instead, it’s just what these few characters have personally seen and experienced, and then they still don’t talk hardly at all about what it might be, how bizarre it is, what might be happening elsewhere.
And it is a working formula that makes money. :dubious:
From the first time they announced a Spin-off I had wanted an Anthology but Anthology series don’t sell. It has been so long that there has been a successful one that I remember when I read a thread (not here I don’t think) on Black Mirror, the very concept of an anthology series was disconcerting and confusing to some of the younger viewers.
It’s my hope that the dad’s ex-wife who was faking being a nurse will bring the audience into the inside of the military operation. The real medic seemed to be really pressing her to come along. It appears to me she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place if they’re euthanizing the weak, injured and effed-up. She might be trying to recruit her for outside help to reveal what’s really going down on that side.
Then again, I’ve learned to become cynical with the writers on these shows. So fat chance for that.
Still I rather liked this episode.
I saw a review that was annoyed by Alicia because it claimed she was cutting. Wasn’t she just tattooing what her boyfriend drew because it was fading away?
Also, the government response makes me think they know the cause, etc. Possibly related to the CDC a la TWD S1. Possibly an experiment targeting junkies gone wrong.
Yes, she was.
mimicked the scene in TWD 1:1 with Rick in the tank.
I watched the first couple and didn’t much care for it.
If this show catches on, they are going to beat it to death like CSI did.
I’m sure we’re supposed to think the military guys are bad but they sure haven’t done anything bad yet. They’re doing exactly what they should be doing in a situation that they’re in. Oh, they have bad people skills, and don’t explain everything, but that’s a disease people in shows like this tend to have regardless of occupation.
Martial law? Yeah, absolutely needed in a zombie uprising if you hope to maintain any sort of civilization.
Taking out the sick and severely injured? Yeah, unless you want them kicking the bucket in the night and eating half the neighborhood before anyone knows what’s going on.
Taking out the mentally unstable? Yeah, so that guy doesn’t do something that messes up the whole set up.
Should they better be explaining this stuff and not just letting spouses worry and stuff? Sure. But boo freakin hoo, they got real work to do, keeping everyone from winding up zombiechow.
Oh, supermom saw someone in the street that looked like they shot without being turned. How does someone that’s not rotting yet and freshly turned look different from an unturned person? Who is supermom to know the difference, and even if she did, she came to such a conclusion after staring at a corpse for a while vs soldiers who had to make a split second decision of life or death. Supermom, more like stupidmom.
I’m not even sure WHEN she came to the conclusion, because her scene out there didn’t really support her rant after coming back. Go back to swiping dinner knives from kids, lady.
OH, they shot up wherever the light was coming from? Yeah, and? We don’t know what was going on there, maybe the place got overrun between when they saw lights and when they finally cleared the place. If the military was so bad, why wouldn’t they have just wiped out the neighborhood in the first place instead of setting up the safezone?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure by the end of the season they’ll have the military be a bunch of murderous rapey evil basterds, this is a show after all, but just going by this ep, the military is doing a pretty swell job all things considered. Not a damn zombie in sight. The people should be thankful, not suspicious.
Soccer Mom, not Super Mom.
Who was mentally unstable and how did they determine that? By taking his temperature and blood pressure?
Zombies don’t carry guns. The dead guy had a gun.
When she saw that he had a gun.
The neighbor dude was tweaking pretty hard; Lt. Army Dude had Travis go in and talk to him, when Neighbor Dude forted up in the bathroom rather than get his blood pressure taken.
Later, neighbor Dude was (at least, according to Lt. Army) found in his vintage car, by the fence, bawling his eyes out.
You don’t need a Doctor’s degree to know the guy has issues.
There’s no context to how he died; for all any of us know, he was holed up in his house, hiding from walkers, until he saw Army People coming down his street, and then ran out of his house, blazing away at them with his handgun, screaming, “You’ll never take me, you United-Nations-Illuminati sunzabitches!”
It’s the mystery of the dead cat; show me a dead cat, ask me how it died, and all I can tell you is that is is a cat, and it is dead.
Tell me where you found it, as in, “middle of the road,” and I can hazard a guess that it was ran over.
Show me bite marks on it, and I can hazard a guess that a dog, maybe a coyote, got to it.
All we know about dead-person-in-the-street-with-a-handgun is just that; whether he died defending himself from evil Army People, or regular Army People defended themselves from Homicidal-Lunatic-With-a-Gun, is beyond our (and Soccer Mom’s) ability to discern given the lack of evidence necessary to put the death into any meaningful context.
We saw the light signals at the end of the episode. As in, whoever was doing it was actively doing it right then. The signals stopped when we saw the muzzle flashes.
I would have liked to have seen more about these 9 days too. Maybe flashbacks or something will work them in later, who knows.
But I don’t think it is completely unrealistic to get to the situation of E4 after nine days. The hospital was already on fire and under military quarantine before the count even started. Seems a likely place for a ZA to really take hold btw- lots of dying people to begin with, and where lots of the bite victims are taken. In short order you have zombies surprising the staff, and the whole place goes up in flames.
But the authorities keep a close watch on hospitals. Enough people would witness and document the same kinds of zombie activity to at least describe it and communicate it nation-wide. The gravity of the situation would have been obvious to high-rankers early. If this doesn’t call for martial law/military quarantine, what does?
But yeah, just what happened in those nine days is a mystery. Maybe it was just too hard to connect all the dots and they had to move the plot, so they left it to you. TV’ll do that.
(post shortened)
Schrodinger’s neighbor? 
I also hope that the ex-wife’s story line will fill in a lot of the blanks. An insiders view of how the hospital/medical staff have been dealing with the dead, dying, crippled, and crazy.