What would happen during the “two weeks later” fast forward, and how many seasons could you possibly get from that? Serious question, what do you think happened during two weeks? People hunkered down and waited for civilization to be restored. Sounds boring. I guess they could fill it would stupid girlfriend boyfriend stuff. Ooh, my boyfriend is sick, what do I do? I’ll tattoo myself.
My complaint is invalid unless I write a screenplay? That’s a silly position. Frankly I can think of a host of possibilities that have tension, conflict, and developed characters. But I’m not getting paid to entertain you. Presumably FTWD’s writers are being paid. But sadly the entertainment value of their product doesn’t satisfy me. YMMV.
I’m not telling you that you can’t write your own fanfic but I’m not sure what you’re going to learn from the adventures of some random people in LA. Maybe they’ll come out with Walking Dead: Pentagon.
Not sure what you’d expect from that. They aren’t going to explain that there was an alien virus sent to Earth on an asteroid by Planet X with the intention of wiping out humanity so they could colonize. It’s not a story about what caused it. It just happened. That’s the premise.
That’s what World War Z would’ve been if it’d been made into a mini-series instead of a movie. I’ve also be interested in a zombie movie that say took the White House or Downing Street perspective instead of the man in streets for a change.
Maybe they could make 24 Hours: The Walking Dead, and each episode is an hour realtime. Sounds like what people want. It would still mostly be character drama without a lot of technical info. We could follow the exploits of some power company employees trying to keep the power on. Maybe a nuclear power plant. That could be fun.
Back when they first announced a spin off, this was sort of what I wanted. An anthology that skipped around and told different stories from different places at different points in the time line.
At the end of the day I think the point of this Spin off was more about showing the west coast dealing with the Zombies. Setting it right at the beginning was just a way to differentiate it.
The producers believe that there is money to be made in watching zombies being sliced up, not in seeing the fall of society.
The writers admit they have no idea of the cause of the zombie virus, and may fear getting to close to it in writing of it’s origins.
At any rate, they believe they make money when zombie violence is shown. It worked wonderfully well with the walking dead, and they have made lots of money.
Why change?
They are not concerned with the minority of us who want to see how society fell apart (why did all the cities lose electricity at the time the plane was trying to land?) they are concerned with the majority of people who want to see zombies and the occasional human sliced and diced.
And making money.
Yeah, zombie violence and cliffhangers. The zombie splatter is almost comical though. It’s the humans who scare me.
levdrakon, maybe I’m just not being clear. I’m not asking that explanations of the basic premise (OMG ZOMBIES!) or where it came from be given. But the original series started with a big gap in the story, since it opened with Rick awakening some weeks into the apocalypse. Call it the Early Days Gap. FTWD promised to give us a glimpse of that unknown period, filling in some of that gap. So I expected to see the initial stage(s) of the event, before full blown apocalypse, which is where Rick and we the audience formerly began. And FTWD did in fact show us some of the Early Days, some of the first victims and the growing confusion and alarm.
We started with normal society, progressed into a normal society and normal people dealing with an unknown emergency, then skipped two fucking weeks and picked up with a dysfunctional society, no civilian government, the tail end of martial law degenerated into a military with no central command and run by psychopaths (if our local commander was typical), and a full blown zombie apocalypse! in other words, pretty much the situation when Rick woke up, just transplanted to the west coast.
I think carnivorousplant has it right – “They are not concerned with the minority of us who want to see how society fell apart… …And making money.” The formula worked with Walking, so they’re by golly gonna repeat it, right down to the Early Days Gap and various plot devices. And making money. Apparently you can’t make money if you require your writers to produce decent fiction.
You need to come help get the coffee out of my sinuses. Bring me a neti pot!
The West Coast zombies seem more lively than their East Coast cousins. You think it’s from more exercise and a better diet while alive?
Makes sense, plus they’re fresher than the two-year-old zombies in Walking Dead, not that that seems to make much difference.
You seem really fixated on the cause of zombyism. Nobody else is. You’re the only one who has even mentioned it.
Our complaints are wholly unrelated to not seeing the cause of the outbreak. We’re complaining about not seeing the results. That’s a clearly different thing.
You seem fixated on finding things to get testy about. Oh well.
Yeah, you have to bite the bullet on the physically and medically impossible premise that people are rising from the dead and moving around without recourse to a living creature’s systems for intaking and distributing energies, receiving and transmitting sensory perceptions required to track and attempt to move toward prey, slowing the ravages of bacteria and opportunistic parasites and scavenger species, etc, etc. On top of all these sheer impossibilities, we admit under this umbrella any number of improbabilities – that brains don’t go defunct for lack of blood and oxygen, but require only a little bit of impact before they do and thankfully skulls are weirdly permeable.
That whole premise is easier to suspend disbelief on than what supposedly comes next. Within pretty much no time at all, all institutions fail. Pfut. And we are meant to understand that there is somehow enough breathing room that a small band of plucky survivors have other living people as their biggest problem. Yes, that’s the story writers of zombie fiction want to tell, so they skip the unlikely fall of absolutely every possible bastion of civilization. Yes, it’s a bit stunning at first that apparently the entire world goes radio silent. But after a while it starts to feel like they just don’t want you to think about it, because they don’t want to think about it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! You’ve saved me from myself. Had you not succinctly made my point for me, I’d have surely struggled through yet another repetition of my failure to communicate. I can stop now.
Thank you again.
The only zombie story that at least attempts to show how the collapse of civilization came about is World War Z, and the answer was mostly “it was an strategic decision”.
To be honest it serves the creators no purpose to come up with an origin. It won’t be better than the one in people’s imaginations and just gives something for the audience to poke holes in.
I kind of like that it is mysterious. Of all the problems I have with both Walking Dead series, this isn’t one of them.
Nobody cares about the origin, we wanted to see how the world went to shit. The period between “holy shit zombies are real” and “whole world is now shit”. That’s what season 1 of this show was supposed to be like, now its just Walking Dead with different people.
I loved the “World War Z” book. Haven’t seen the movie.
The “White House or Downing Street perspective” is an excellent idea!