I watched this to see if it was as bad as the walking dead. . .it is!
I kept hoping for a wandering zombie submarine to torpedo them. It was like one of those teenage slasher movies where you want everybody dead because you just don’t care.
Apparently, they have the same top-notch writing team on both of the shows.
I’m letting this show air a few times before binge-watching a few at a time. It was too dull in season 1.
One point where the show succeeds as a horror series in this episode is in mirroring the “you’re on your own” aspect of the real world. In the show, our characters are survivors in a universal disaster. Everybody needs help, but this boat is only so big, sorry, You’re On Your Own. The show may have been a little clunky in expressing the anxiety of enforcing this when the impulse is to help those in distress, but at least it was there.
In the real world, we have thousands of children fleeing gang violence in Central America, desperate to get to the relative safety of the US. The response? Republicans and christian groups, who are fucking bible scholars when it comes to cracking down on gays or oppressing women’s reproductive rights, denounce them as invaders and call for their deportation. Or in Greece, thousands of desperate refugees are fleeing civil war, ISIS, or both. They run into fences set up by the authorities to turn them back. When they try to tear down the fence, what happens? The authorities fire tear gas, not just at the unrulies, but into their camp where all the homeless women and children are hiding. Why? Because in this world, You Are On Your Own. Your better not ever experience a lick of trouble, because if you do, you are well and truly fucked, the safe and the healthy are going to turn their backs on you, not caring if you crawl into a ditch and die.
The characters in the show at least have an excuse. The dead are coming to life to munch the living. The US military is firebombing LA, and the characters have a sense that the chaos is probably near-universal (we get that from the radio broadcasts). The safe ones are only so safe and can’t afford to take chances. In the real world, yeah, it always seems to be the apocalypse somewhere, for somebody, but the attitude of most people seems to be, that’s tough, You’re On Your Own, now run along and suffer and die. Could you do it a little more quietly? I’m trying to watch this Trump speech.
So yeah, the characters may be a little flat and hard to care about, though we do have two badasses and a junkie, plus Dad has the humanity to not punch back when his grieving son slugs him. Still, they are a relief from the ubiquitous, abject assholes who seem to be running the real world I have to slog through each and every day.
It was originally pitched as a show for Lifetime or Hallmark with the title A Family for Strand.
The two biggest riddles to me are why Strand puts up with the other castaways on his boat and why the other castaways put up with Strand.
I expected someone to shoot him when he refused to pick up survivors at sea.
Seriously? Trawling is the process of dragging nets behind a moving boat, thus entrapping targeted (and untargeted) organisms.
Trolling is dragging hooks on the end of lines, either from fishing reels on typical fishing rods, or the commercial version of motorized reels. The hooks are dressed with bait, or artificial simulations of bait, or both. The trolled lines are streamed out aft of the under-way boat, where they attract bites from predatory fish.
Abigail has zero provision for trawling. Apparently she has little provision for trolling either. The fishermen were baiting hooks with what appeared to be shrimp, then dropping them on weighted lines over the side of the boat, not the stern. Had the boat been moving, the lines would have been sucked into the propellers. If not, they would have streamed out aft, as in actual trolling, but the asymmetrically shaped bait would have spun like a prop itself, tangling the line and then ripping off from the pressure of flowing water against it. Lures and baits that are trolled have to be somewhat streamlined to prevent spinning. So these guys were “bottom fishing” from a boat that is not under way. Baits were being let down over the side, and dropped to the bottom, which is the realm of fish like the eel that was caught.
And I guess the question is “Why do I care?”, the answer being perhaps I don’t, but thinking about fishing distracts me from all the really crappy memories I have of this episode. 
Huh. I didn’t realize there was a distinction between trawling and trolling. At least it looks like the way they caught an eel made sense.
Or when he was doing the “Rule number 1: this is my boat” thing. I don’t really think that who it’s registered to is that big of a deal right now.
At this point Salazar is the only person who could be cold blooded enough to that that. Salazar of course would not do that because; a) he agrees with Strand, & b) Strand is the only one who knows how to operate the boat. Hardwick made an interesting point about how this group is already harder than Rick & co was in the early seasons (if my math is right he doesn’t wake up for another 3-4 weeks yet).
Interesting. I didn’t either. Thanks to CannyDan for fighting my own ignorance.
Yeah, I thought that was a good point!
By the way, I think that Salazar and Strand are the most interesting characters on this show. The junkie comes in third. The others, I don’t care so much about. Maybe they’ll grow on me, eventually…
I gave up on it about halfway through the season opener- I found that not only couldn’t I remember any of their names, I also didn’t *care *about them. Hell, I found the *yacht *more interesting than any of the characters.
Pretty much. I made it through to the end, but it was touch and go there.
We know the junkie’s back story, and some of Salazar’s back story, and see potential for interesting characters there. We know little of Strand’s back story, but we have hopes that it will render him entertaining. We know a lot of back story of the other characters, and find them all totally boring.
So far, the potential for interest far outweighs the actual, developed characterizations, and that after a full (though short) season and this episode. In sum, the dreck to entertainment ratio does not favor this show so far. The writers really need to step up their game.
What did the guy who was supposedly on a fishing boat in a cove say to Alicia? Something like “That’s okay, we’ll see you”. I wonder if he’s a West Coast water Neegan (sp?), though that seems a bit quick to get that kind of operation going.
Still working on Strand: he doesn’t have anybody- friends, family, fook-buddies, bodyguards- he found worth saving, yet he takes strangers with him? Does not compute.
(Regarding Abigail, I kept thinking "That looks like the pictures I’ve seen of the yacht Johnny Carson lived on in his retirement.)
Finally watched the episode, and posting without reading the thread.
When teenaged what’s-her-name strikes up a friendship over the radio my first thought was ‘She knows nothing of COMSEC.’ Not that an L.A. teenager would know about communications security; but I heard the phrase ‘Loose lips sink ships’ very early in school. (The phrase is appropriate to the episode.) Strand hasn’t had any sleep, but given that he seems aware enough of other operational tasks, one would think that he would confiscate communications devices or at least make it clear they’re not to be used. I wouldn’t expect a gullible teen to recognise the obvious pumping for information, but if it was obvious to me then it would have been waving flags and shooting up rockets to Strand – if he’d taken the appropriate precautions.
I think ‘trolling’ is correct. AIUI, trolling is a method of fishing whereby a baited hook or hooks is towed through the water, and trawling is dragging a net through the water. ISTM trolling is a more targeted method of fishing, and trawling is less so. Had the boat been moving, they would have been trolling. This is how I understand the terms. If I’m wrong, I’m sure I’ll be told. EDIT: I see CannyDan already made the point.
Speaking of the moving boat… I said in my last post that Strand should have ensured communications security. It was a mistake for him not to. It was also a mistake to keep stopping the boat. I don’t remember why they’d stopped during the fishing scene, but they certainly shouldn’t have stopped for dinner later in the episode – particularly when they were sill in sight of land, and with smoke obscuring visibility, and with debris that should have shown up on radar.
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Negan. No doubt that is what the writers WANT us to think. Whether it is or not, I guess we’ll find out. My instincts lean more towards “is”.
I have a feeling that the writers feel like they covered their bases by having Strand tell us he was tired at least two or three times. See, he’s tired, folks! That’s why this eye-rollingly stupid sh*t is happening, not because of poor writing!
Then we have a pirate who apparently expected a lot of moony, stupid teenaged girls to be monitoring radio communications, as the sensitive indie disc jockey schtick would seem to indicate. I had hoped the writers would get it together in the second season, but it looks like this will continue to be a hate watch for me.
Asked because I know nothing of nautical or radio matters: how would a person be able to pinpoint location from a radio conversation?
Which actually is a weak point of the show to me: with Rick’s group, you actually got to see their development; but with this one, it just feels like it’s been cut short so as to get to the point where the writers can just throw nasty crap for them to deal with at them faster.
What I’d hoped to see was sort of the opposite: the slow buildup to the zombie apocalypse, the gradual deterioration of society, the failure of government efforts to react, perhaps some wider perspective on the situation, and so on—all the stuff we missed due to TWD’s starting with Rick awaking from his coma.
But instead, it seems the writers just want to get to the cashing-in point TWD’s at as soon as possible, which I think is a wasted opportunity to build something independent of the original show, with a different angle, rather than just ‘TWD with different people (oh, and on a boat, how’s that for originality?)’.