The best zombie movies are NEVER about the zombies. Zombies are boring. Sure, they can give you a sudden blast of horror, but most of the time they just shuffle around.
It is not Travis and Madison and Nick and everyone’s journey of discovery that I object to. It’s the fact that this entire season has stretched out into nearly one long burst of Twenty Minutes With Jerks.
Actually I suspect he sells insurance just fine, His line about selling insurance was put in there to lead into the bit about a man entrusting his family to a piece of paper. It was there to make whats his face feel even worse.
I love the new guy but hes smart and black and therefore zombie chow.
I laughed out loud!
I expect more of Madison and Nick geared up to go on a grocery and pharmacy scavenging raid and asking Travis if he can come along to be a zombie decoy, Travis instead tells them there is no need as any day now the government is going to come along to restore order with MREs and methadone for all.
They pat him on the head as they leave the fortified compound and say bless your heart.
Ok, now that made me LOL!
So… I finally remembered to watch it today, and…
Still not impressed. Having trouble keeping the characters straight. Don’t care about a single one of them. Not sure I’ll be keeping up with this one.
Seriously. Thanks for the cufflinks, dick, but I can just go down to Rodeo Drive and smash my Humvee through a Tiffany’s. Or pistol whip you with my M4 and take them.
Seriously. The show went from patient zero to FEMA camp atrocities pretty darn quick.
You know what films I liked that I thought captured what should have been the mood of The Walking Dead: Los Angeles? The Crazies, Shaun of the Dead, the beginning of the original Dawn of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Dead Set. Not a zombie tsunami, but a slowly rising tide. The sporadic news reports, emergency vehicles racing a bit too fast somewhere, the “too quiet” noticeably broken by distant helicopters, that traffic stop where you can’t quite make out what the heck is going on at those flood lights and muffled loudspeakers a quarter mile down the road. That imposing sense you might not want to get separated, even though there is no real reason to think that. Kind of how the first couple episodes were.
I mean where did 4 million Los Angelinos go? They must have all left town since the city wasn’t overrun with zombies. And if the city was that abandoned, why was it so hard to sweep for undead?
Because traditionally telling someone you saw a dead person eating someone else’s face or that you smashed a teachers head in with a fire extinguisher gets you branded as insane.
That doesn’t make sense. The soldiers are all bugging out. No diversion is required. Not to mention LA is a pretty big place. What good is a diversion across town?
He went there to create the dramatic tension of 2000 zombies trapped in a stadium.
Maybe he’ll start renovating the kitchen since they are all going to be spending more time at home in this strange new world.
One thing WWZ (the book) did I would have loved to have seen – a traffic jam of people trying to escape the city getting overrun and eaten. The total collapse of society was a great opportunity and they missed it. Seriously, as you said, Shaun of the Dead did this better.
One problem they do face, however, as has been pointed out on the board, is how easy the slow walkers would be for the military to kill. Get on a roof, destroy the staircases, resupply by helicopter, and just shoot shoot shoot.
I like how in World War Z they lured a bunch of zombies into a stadium with loudspeakers, then blew it up.
The problem with a slow zombie apocalypse isn’t that zombies are particularly difficult to kill for a well armed military force. The problem is that every person who gets turned into a zombie is a cop not enforcing the law, a truck driver, not delivering fuel and supplies to where it needs to go, a powerplant operator not keeping the lights on. Even people who aren’t infected start to abandon their jobs to be with family or find someplace they think is safer.
So what happens is that the systems and logistics that keep civilization running slowly grind to a halt. As those systems break down People become more vulnurable to zombie attacks and you have a vicious cycle that leads to the full-on collapse of everything.
IOW, what will happen to your squad is what typically happens. They set up a position picking off zombies. Things go well at first. Everyone is joking around, patting themselves on the back, counting kills, making a game of it. Then the helicopter is late with a reduced ammo load. Then it never comes. Then then the radio goes silent. And as ammo starts running low, it suddenly dawns on your squad that they didn’t even put a dent in the zombie hoard. The Pvt Johnson panics and tries to make a run for it and has to be restrained and gagged because his rantings are huring moral. Now food is running low.
Soon the squad will be forced leave their position to find food or help at which point somewhere between half to all of them will be killed.
Yeah. And as far as I can tell, we missed it. And meanwhile, our heroes in the Safe Zone don’t have a clue what’s going on out there.
We might yet get a panic and a collapse of the military forces… that is, the military forces that we can see.
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You only have a limited supply of ammo and your withdrawal depends on the availability of others. What might seem like a good strategy in a video game doesn’t work in something serious, like a TV show. 
Dropping anti-personal mines would be more effective. Until you run out of AP mines, pilots, and fuel. We, the viewers, know that fire bombing doesn’t work but the FTWD characters haven’t discovered that yet.
When faced with overwhelming opposition, sometimes it’s best to withdraw, regroup, and reassess the situation. The killing of trapped/left behind survivors (operation Cobalt???) doesn’t make any sense. Yet???
But it’s not just that squad. It’s entire military units involved in this activity and really, if you can get yourself in a position where you’re not at risk of getting swarmed killing zombies is just target practice. Take 3,000 troops and even giving them a low 25% hit rate, that’s over 250,000 dead zombies with the unit’s standard ammo loadout. How long is this apocalypse really going to last, especially when you’re killing zombies right from the start when numbers are low?
…well, that begs the question of where your soldiers are.
Sure, sitting on the roof, sniping, and resupplying by air is peachy… you’ll kill every zombie within range of the building. And then what? How many soldiers, how many buildings, what kind of radius? And what do you do in places without buildings? And then what do you do with the zombies inside the buildings? How many soldiers and weapons do we have… versus what kind of zombie coverage?
One of the terrifying things about the zombie apocalypse is that people die… everywhere… every DAY. When Grandpa drops dead of a heart attack at home, inside fifteen minutes, he’s going to be up again and looking for Grandma. When Grandma doesn’t decapitate him or hesitates, pretty soon we’ve got BOTH of them wandering around. It gets even more fun in houses with more people, and even MORE fun if it happens after dark. And then if they get out, well, this begets another scenario.
Once you have a mob of zombies wandering outside, then it becomes a matter of killing them or spreading the contagion. We saw this earlier in the riot, when a cop goes down with a zombie gnawing at his neck. I’m assuming that at this point, not all of them knew to shoot for the head… or in some cases, whether to shoot at all.
A thing that would have given the show some weight, IMHO, would be a staggering zombie who used to be a black guy. The cops are aware that shooting what appears to be a staggering drunk black dude could result in bad press, and so they avoid doing so… until he bites a cop or two. And of course, the cops look out for their own, so they rush their brethren to the hospital, where they die and reanimate…
I’m thinking of this new show I saw last night, Code Black, in which we are asked to believe that sometimes emergency rooms get a wee bit overwhelmed. The show did a fine job of showing the chaotic and bloody environment of emergency medicine when there’s just too much going on. How much more chaotic would it have been if the unlucky patients had started sitting up and eating the doctors? It seems to me that in any environment where spontaneous reanimation is at all possible, it would snowball pretty quickly. At one point, we saw a hospital on the show, after the pilot, in which zombies in lab coats are staggering out the front doors to tussle with cops; plainly, we can’t take poor Griselda’s broken foot in THERE!
So… whatever happened to the hospital? Was it pacified? Was it retaken? Is it still sitting there infested with wandering undead? When this happened to Rick, we got our answers: the ones we couldn’t kill were locked in the cafeteria (DON’T OPEN DEAD INSIDE), and the deaders were piled on the loading dock in body bags, as Rick discovers on the way out. There are answers there, if you watch and look. Regrettably, FTWD does not seem as detail oriented; it’s all Travis, Stay In The House.
Meanwhile, it’s a fair bet that LA is largely dead by now, but there are apparently pockets of living humans under military control… at least, until tomorrow morning. When the soldiers bug out. This is the last chance we’re going to get for any kind of answers, shorthand, implied, or otherwise… and I am not optimistic. Apparently, I’m supposed to connect all the dots in my head.
We now know this from FTWD:
The government knew about the zombies instantly, AND the mechanics. They tried to cover it up and keep it quiet, why on earth they would do such a stupid thing we still don’t know.
Once things spiraled out of control the higher ups in gov started viewing surviving civilains as a threat, as they are future zombies, and instead of enlisting them to take back society they instead crafted plans to euthanize survivors instead. This of course was lets say politically unpopular, and leads to the gov and military becoming the enemy.
This is not stated. It’s merely implied. It’s certainly BELIEVABLE, but aside from the fact that the hospital seemed to have a protocol in place, what evidence is there for that?
I’d like to think that any sane government, upon realizing it had unleashed a planetary pandemic that would likely end civilization and destroy the human race, would have some sort of better plan in mind that “just kill everyone.” But in the face of Donald Trump, who am I to hope?
Four million Angelinos didn’t just disappear! Some bugged out, but if the entire population tried, the traffic jam and ever-increasing zombie waves would have wiped them out before a fraction of them got past the suburbs. So, judging by the actions of our main characters, and by the seemingly relatively open streets outside the chain link, we can be pretty sure there was no mass exodus. Instead the implication is that the military wiped them out, incrementally, as they became zombified. I’m not crediting the idea that the military wiped out normal civilians wholesale, at least not yet. The child-soldiers are suffering from PTSD, but not the level they’d be in if they had been mowing down screaming but normal women, children, and general citizenry. They seem to have been dealing with, and holding back, the tide of zombies. That, and the knowledge that their own loved ones are likely zombified and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, is horrible enough.
But even this small military contingent seems to be holding on just fine where they are. As long as they stay inside the fences and don’t all try to check out a library book, that is. So why couldn’t The Military (in the larger sense) protect enclaves of normality, aided by fences, earthmoving equipment, and firearms? And full disclosure to the citizenry, including demonstrations of zombification. If there aren’t any people conveniently fixing to die handy to the public demonstration, well, it’s a war to save humankind. Surely somebody will volunteer. Or be helped to volunteer.
Once people know, and I mean really know, that Gramps can’t just die in his bed but needs immediate “settling” with the captive bolt (or metal spike, or bullet, or other home remedy) there should be few new zombies occurring inside the fences. Anybody psychologically unable to do this themselves could surely tie Gramps to the bed and call the soldiers. And as noted above, shooting zombies as they reach the fence seems effective.
So I am still surprised that The Military seems so impotent. Of course, there would be no FTWD if the Good Guys just took care of the problem, so I recognize the need for an actual blow-up-in-your-face crisis. But the unreality still bothers me. Seems drama could be better served by showing instances of the failure of military and other actions against the zombie hordes. Not by watching our protagonists playing board games.
Not sure I agree with your reasoning.
I can think of several cities with major military bases, and a hell of a lot of manpower and material handy. Not being an Angelino, I have no idea what they have there, and am simply assuming they’re busy elsewhere, having pacified this particular suburb with maximum prejudice.
But it’s also implied that the center isn’t holding. We get to hear as one squad gets taken apart, over the radio, which indicates that things are nowhere near as stable or as safe as the Lieutenant is saying. I’m ASSUMING that our soldiers have been made responsible for a particular piece of map, and that they are gradually losing ground, partly because of a hell of a lot of zombies, and perhaps due to the Lieutenant’s idiocy. I’m just irritated that I have to assume this.
We got a lot of visual clues about what happened in the Atlanta area. We know why there were no zombies wandering around Rick’s hospital, and we spent several episodes looking at the incredible traffic jam leading out of Atlanta. The clues were in the actual plot, or just lying there for us to see. THIS time, though, they seem to be going out of their way to leave us as clueless as the people in the show. WE knew what was in the cafeteria in the hospital, and we knew why there were body bags piled up in the loading dock. The point being, RICK was shocked and horrified and scared, while we sit there and eat popcorn and go, “Yup, you’re in it now, Rick. And we will be with you while you figure out WTH.”
As opposed to simply sitting there as the popcorn grows cold, every bit as mystified as the characters in the show.
As far as the military goes, I am led to think of the First Battle Of Yonkers in the book World War Z. It’s told as a flashback, by a survivor, a soldier who was assigned to keep the seething masses of zombies from moving out of their location… literally, millions of them.
They tried setting them on fire. Bad move. Fire will eventually kill a zombie, maybe, but not quickly enough to keep him from getting to you.
They tried massed assault weapons fire. Didn’t work. Takes a lot of firepower to render a zombie harmless if you don’t get the head, and it’s wasteful of ammo. And while you’re reloading, another million zombies is slogging forward.
They tried antipersonnel weapons, cluster bombs, grenades. Didn’t work. Even if you shred his legs, he can still crawl.
And finally, one guy snapped and began freaking out… on an open mike circuit. Panic spread through the ranks.
And the zombies won. And this is in a situation where they knew exactly where they were, where the rear lines were, with the best equipment the US Army could muster, and they even knew where to shoot a zombie to kill him…
…and this is where author Max Brooks thought it out a little better than our showrunners have. Where are four million zombies? We know they’re attracted to noise, and the army’s the noisiest thing going now. Oh, and killing civilians who are in no position to stop you? Literally, just to cut down on the number of zombies? Seems like this would be a non-starter unless you can get them all to line up for a bolt to the head, and I find that unrealistic. Next week, I’m wondering if they’re just going to call all these people out, tell them to line up, and then open fire, or what?
…not to mention the effect on American soldiers, being ordered to shoot harmless people who’ve committed no crime…
Oh I don’t know. I can see where you are coming from. But- For one, even a 6 episode season is longer than a movie- we can have more than 20 minutes if we want it. For two, The Closer may be a jerk, maybe not, but he is pretty cool for an apocalypse. If the series turns him into zombie chow before 20 minutes, I will be disappointed. Who is the actor?
And for three, the characters aren’t jerks generally. Travis somehow isn’t grokking it, but I don’t hate him for it, he is just easy to make fun of. Nick is a stupid junkie, but his heart is in the right place even if his brain is in outer space. The Salvadoran torturer dude isn’t right, but neither is the ZA. Does he really have to torture someone? I think he is going to be vindicated, but I don’t like that zero dark thirty thing. Somebody has to crack in this scenario, I wish it hadn’t gone there, but it does give the civilians the fighting chance they need. That, and 2000 zombies in the stadium.
Some of the army guys are jerks, but most of them are just plebs like everybody else. The world has gone haywire, and authority doesn’t mean what it used to. Time to man up an exert authority.
I agree, but neither TWD or FTWD has a good record with the black guy. Tyreese was developing into a vurra interesting guy, very different from the graphic novel version… and then they aced him. I spent a season and a half wondering what T-Dog was going to do… and they aced him. And it really felt like we had a One Black Guy Limit, not counting Michonne, who is not a guy.
If that’s the kind of thinking we’re up against, Not Insurance Guy ain’t long for this world.
And I didn’t mean “Twenty Minutes With Jerks” literally. I mean that it’s frustrating, is all. Out of the entire cast, I currently care about Ruben Blades.
I am curious what will happen to Nick, Not Insurance Guy, and to some extent, Madison.
About everyone else, I do not give a bucket of farts in a high wind. And it didn’t have to be this way. I tuned in to see this epic story about how a family copes with the zombie apocalypse.
Mostly what I’m getting is how some remarkably bland people make dumb decisions and cope with crushing… vagueness. And some soldiers show up. And occasionally, a zombie. And the soldiers and zombies are about the only thing holding this mess off the ground at this point…