True enough. But in the very next episode, he gets his fix and seems intent on coasting along same as always, despite the fact that EVERYONE is starting to wake up to the fact that things are changing.
Still trying to figure out if this is Nick being a junkie, or just the writers sliding the scale back and forth on his native smarts…
Agreed completely. They even lampshaded that fact this episode, with crazy commander guy telling the grunts to quit their bellyaching, skin bags don’t shoot back.
Armed military squads should be able to mow these things down with impunity. They have no range attack, they have no stealth capability, they have no survival instinct. They’re just barely one small step above shooting range targets in terms of their threat to trained soldiers.
EDIT: I can imagine scenarios the zombies “win”, like say the soldiers are clearing a building and 50 zombies are in the apartment above them and the floor collapses, dropping a swarm of walker directly onto the soldiers. But every plausible scenario that results in soldier casualties is about as exotic as that.
Or as The Far Side’s Gary Larson says -
World War Z (book, not movie) did a decent job of showing how the military could suffer defeats initially: overwhelmed by sheer numbers, an enemy that never tires, over-reliance on conventional fighting tactics that don’t work with zombies, and the non-Hollywood reality of running out of ammunition. There are ways FTWD could have made the skin bags seem like more of a threat; it’s unfortunate they haven’t bothered (yet).
TroutMan beat me to it; the book is quite explicit on exactly how several million zombies marching in a horde can break an infantry platoon.
So naturally, the movie did not show this pivotal scene from the book. And neither has anyone else.
That struck me as a particularly ineffective bribe, in a world full of abandoned jewelry stores.
It dawned on me just now: I don’t have a working TV, and I always watch the next day online. Never ONCE have I forgotten to watch TWD on Monday morning. This is the 3rd time I totally forgot to watch FTWD. I think that kinda says something…
True, but the world’s only been ended for two weeks. Some of 'em are quicker on the uptake than others.
That being said, you’d think the military would be in a position to know, particularly how we’ve found that they’re keeping a LOT from our survivors…
Ditto, and this week I actually said, “Would you GROW A PAIR ALREADY?” to TV Travis.
He’s the best thing about the show. My live FB comment (there’s a group) was, “Daniel Salazar is a badass is a sea of bourgeois namby-pambies. Then again, he survived El Salvador in the 80s.” *
His character’s background also reminds us that, nope, you *really *don’t want to get on the truck when the military shows up and tells you to do that at gunpoint. Not that, at gunpoint, you have much choice, but at that point you have to be wary and think fast.
I think we should let Daniel Salazar and Nick the Junkie handle it. With a side of Satanic Black Guy Who Won’t Sell Insurance.
I wouldn’t bet someone else’s farm on Travis. I don’t think he’ll realize that things are well and truly screwed until a millisecond before a soldier’s bullet “humanely” pierces his brain.
Maddie, though…she’s coming around pretty quickly. She’ll be a survivor, I think.
This does make me wonder how small we can go. How about a nail gun, with a good-sized nail inside? And why wouldn’t the military vet people, figure out who can and will shoot once they know what’s up, and get them working?
I was also yelling, “PULL THE TRIGGER!” at Travis. I’d love to try a 50-cal.
Soldier guy’s brain hasn’t processed this yet. He’s on the mission, and probably hasn’t figured out (or doesn’t know?) that the rest of the world is the same as LA.
*I’m assuming the time was the 1980s, since Daniel has mentioned the forced disappearances.
The military would run into the same problem. Though it’s possible they’ve secure d military dependents on the bases; that’s be an even more effective way of discouraging desertion than summary execution, but if everyone already has the dormant pathogen in them even the most well guarded fortress can fall from within. By the current setting of TWD Mt Weather is likely a giant hermetically sealed tomb filled with zombies.
Civilian volunteer or not Liza’s stuck at the detention center know; they’re too short staffed to allow her to leave willingly (on the plus she might qualify for a seat on the evac choppr).
Agreed, they’re skipping over as much of the being of the zombie apocalypse as they can so we can cut to TWD 2.01. The only reason this is a prequel at all is avoid having to start out with seasoned survivor’s with their own backstory. The Lieutenant is a Hollywood cliché left over from the Vietnam war era. On the other hand I liked the reveal that Mr. Salazar was part of the death squads during the Salvadoran Civil War instead of just a refugee. 
Poor planning and/or they’re waiting for air support to show up and bomb the stadium.
Cue Prince Charles finally becoming King only for his mother rise up from her deathbed and bite him. 
I sure hope Maddie doesn’t die right away. We only 2-3 weeks into the apocalypse and she’s already total cool with a US soldier being tortured (possibly to death) in her basement if helps her find her son. :eek: If she lives long enough for the timeline to catch up w/ TWD she’s going to make Carol look like the upper middle class soccer mom she’s pretending to be in Alexandria.
The problem with this show is the budget. The collapse of civilization is expensive. Showing a realistic threat to trained soldiers is expensive. Instead we get “stay in the car Carl…err Travis” and “nine days later…”. If they were going to half ass it they shouldn’t have bothered.
I think the entire reason for the kids trash a house to because the only reason daughter is even on the show is to be the young hottie and they needed a reason for her to play dress up.
As usual I find myself asking Why to I watch this crap? the writers of this show seem to have the concept of random reinforcement down, every so often they come up with an episode worth watching and you kinda get your hopes up again.
Well, they only had six episodes to work with. You’d think they could give us six half decent episodes without having to drag it out.
I am inclined to agree with DigitalC. But this is the kind of thinking that durn near sank TWD back in the second season, when AMC was shoveling all the money at “Mad Men…”
Also, i don’t think Ruben Blades went to check if the soldiers story was true. They are going to get slaughtered in the morning, there is no time for a side trip. He went there to free the zombies to either create a diversion for the soldiers or wipe them outright.
I think it was both to check to see if it was true so he could use them as a distraction. Or we are both wrong and he has season tickets.
I dispute this often offered excuse, action scenes involving zombie hordes assaulting the military are expensive. But a bunch of extras rioting and looting a grocery are cheap, and showing neighbors talking to each other about disease paranoia, or EMTs or ER personnel dealing with newly risen dead are no more expensive than showing us family game night.
We’re not supposed to be in the time period where zombie make up is award winning, these are supposed to be people who superficially look alive.
The budget excuse is horse doody. I wanted to see the early paranoia and fear and creeping realization that this isn’t going to pass and life and society is changed forever.
Does it occur to anyone else the real tragedy at least in this universe is that there was no reason for society to collapse if people just culturally adopted a new funeral rite?
Your loved one passes you do the thing.
Good point. As a bonus, capitalism would take over, and there would be people you could pay to do the thing. And religions would figure out how to work it in to a ceremony.
They aren’t thinking hard enough!
Me, too.
Everyone keeps talking about Blades going to the stadium, but I don’t think that happened yet. That was in the preview for the next episode, and we all know how the previews can be deceiving. For example, it shows him going to the stadium after he says to the soldier that he went there to check it out, so either the preview re-ordered the scenes or it is shown as a flashback after he talks to the soldier.
If it’s a flashback, you’re probably correct because they will show him releasing the zombies for later in the episode and only show part of the stadium scene before that. Something like it will have him tell the soldier that he confirmed the soldier’s story, then flashback to him confirming it, then at or near the end of the episode continue the flashback to show that he actually released the doors.
I thought it was the last scene of the episode and also on the preview.