Was the hospital covering things up also? as soon as that old guy started to go the dr yelled “this guy needs to be downstairs right NOW”.
I’d give up on The Walking Dead in the second or third season, I was tired of all the characters and waiting for them to be killed off, but decided I try out the new show. It did start slow, but I like the dread that hangs around. I’m fairly sure that as the episode went on, you could hear more and more sirens in the background. Not enough to be overwhelming, but enough to show that bad things were going on.
But I agree on the logic errors. The Walking Dead (and 28 Days Later) were smart to skip over society falling, because it’s difficult to do in a way that makes sense with zombies. If the one school kid was reading conspiracy stuff online, there must have been other victims and other attacks that would be on regular news. And probably other videos. And the principal specifically said something on the bus about being surprised only five kids were on it, but didn’t ask the bus driver further what the deal was, why there were so few kids. If the incident just happened the night before, I could understand why he hadn’t heard about it/seen the video, but he and others were still too casual about things, thinking that it was just the flu or something.
I thought he looked more like Skeet Ulrich, the 90’s off-brand Johnny Depp.
I didn’t think that at the time, but I wondered about that later. It could be an intentional cover-up, or that they just have a specific quarantine type area for the number of patients they have with this new mysterious disease with the strange symptoms.
I get what they were trying to do and I give them credit for having the courage to do a lot of set up. The problem was the writing and some of the performances (especially the Junkie kid) couldn’t really carry it very well. Still, it wasn’t terrible and I will keep watching.
I assume what will drive the plot of the first season will be the Dad trying to find his other son whom we saw for 30 seconds on the phone.
The junkie kid (Nick?) seemed to be overacting, which did grate on me a bit. And yeah, the idea that “the authorities” could cover up things is pretty laughable. But we’re talking Zombie Apocalypse here, so you have to be willing to suspend belief to a certain extent!
Do people in LA really drive into those storm drain thingies as much they do in movies and on TV? 
He reminded me of the guy in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
…it’s was pretty much crap and it didn’t need to be. The opening kind of worked in that if you just knew it was a Walking Dead spinoff, you could think Nick woke up post-outbreak and collapse. The twist of him escaping the church and running outside and getting hit by car and just a few feet from a busy Silverlake hipster intersection–basically works.
The rest was reaaaally rough.
Middle-aged teacher goes to a junkie hangout in the middle of night…explores it (seemingly all night since sunlight through the windows was visible in the final shots) and finds giant smears of blood–also gets his hands all over…and doesn’t immediately call the police. That’s Scooby Doo logic and doesn’t work.
The only way the outbreak working like this makes any sense is actually if the government is picking up zombies and keeping it hush hush. Otherwise…WTF? Zombies don’t hide and don’t take breaks. Junkie zombie girl in the church either hangs out in the church because she can’t find a way out or she gets out and just keeps killing people.
I assumed they meant that the old guy needed to be in the Emergency Room, or in surgery. He needed to be somewhere where the staff had the tools and experience to deal with the old man’s current problem.
I was thinking that we would see her again by the end of the episode, but it turns out that I was wrong. I wonder if she will make another appearance?
That’s what i thought when the scene first happened, but we are obviously already at the death = zombie point so the hospital has to know.
I thought it was OK, not stellar. I like the idea of going back to the beginning and showing how it all went down. I always thought it was a big mistake for the orignal series to start so long after the zombie apocalypse began and skip the breakdown of civilization (especially as the series progressed and it became obvious that the writers/producers had no clue where to go with the storyline and hence became a repetitive series of action scenes - “Look! Zombie horde! Bang! Bang! Bang! Look! Evil redneck survivors! Bang! Bang! Bang!” repeat ad naseum.) Showing the first outbreaks, the inevitable martial law and sudden decay of the old world will certainly give this show a decent narrative spine for at least a few seasons.
That said, I wasn’t too interested in any of the characters. They all seemed like the same thinly characterized, stock characters that the original show routinely shuffles through. The addict son who got a big spotlight in this episode started to grate on my nerves early on. If he’s going to be the main character the show follows, I’ll be tuning out soon. The classroom lecture about Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was pretty ham-fisted.
I’d give it a C+. It’s only the pilot episode though, and things do change. So I’ll probably tune in at least a few more times.
Good point. Maybe the hospitals were collecting a room full of zombies, like the Wolves, governor, and Hershel had?
No way. They’d have to find *hundreds *of shitty, broken-down Priuses to make it that far in one season.
Pilot episodes can be slow. Either they start with a bang to draw viewers, or they introduce characters and hope the show will be around long enough to draw a large enough viewership to stay on the air. FTWD has the benefit of being a spinoff of a very popular show. Some people would tune in for answers to questions that the WD hasn’t answered, like I did.
As far as this shows storyline is concerned, it makes sense that a druggy shooting gallery would produce many zombies based on the possibility of deadly drug overdoses plus a plethora of doped up druggies who would be unable to defend themselves.
As a minor nitpick, I found it odd that a school would offer graffiti classes. Graduation based on ones skill at vandalizing public property is an interesting use of taxpayer dollars.
And what happened to the weapon that was used to kill the drug dealer? It was last seen lying between the dead dealer and his car.
I’ll watch tonight.
I don’t know if any main characters died in the opening, but do we have a poll going as to what major character will die first? I’d like to vote in it if we get one.
I don’t think we know who the main characters are apart from the main family yet. Most of the rest of the cast from the previews wasn’t in the first episode.
In TWD, all humans are infected and become zombies at death, no matter what the cause of death. But it isn’t clear that has happened yet. There has to be some period of time when some people are infected and some aren’t. In a few months, yeah, everyone’s infected. But for now, I’m guessing not every death = new zombie.
But I agree it is already happening in some cases, which is one reason they are rushing the patient downstairs.
I agree, it was slow, but I also understand that doing the show from this point can’t just mean all-out zombie chaos from the get-go. A lot of people I talked with were not fans of the junkie kid but I actually liked him. Kim Dickens was great as Joanie Stubbs in Deadwood and while it’s too early to say her character here is likable, her acting was really natural and believable. I think it will take a few episodes to figure out how I feel about the show - I could see it going either way right now. It didn’t have the instant hook for me that Better Call Saul had as a spinoff. But they use the information set up from The Walking Dead to great effect as far as the tension’s concerned.
I think the art class was decorating for some function, and the boyfriend joked about coming back that night and putting graffiti on it.
“Slow?” You people have no patience! The slowly dawning dread was what I liked about it.
I agree that the junkie kid was the weak link, acting-wise. Very broad performance.
Yeah. This franchise has always been known for its lazy writing, and they’re clearly carrying that torch forward in this spin-off. It was replete with the Fake Conflict that is so sadly prevalent in filmed fiction; the not-very-believable sniping between family members in this show was quite annoying.
Also, the free-wheeling thefts from other franchises is very noticeable. The “first you have the flu” bit doesn’t come from The Walking Dead, where people became walkers some matter of minutes after dying; I suppose it may come from another current US television show, del Toro’s The Strain. In that show, you’re sick for a while and then you become the walking dead, though in “vampire” rather than “zombie” form.
Then there’s the choice to use “the Infected” instead of “Walkers” in this show. Why on earth would the FTWD creators want to remind viewers of the far-superior “28” franchise? (The answer, I’d say: lazy writing. They just couldn’t be bothered to come up with a term of their own.)
I had a similar reaction. That guy lucked into “looking like Johnny Depp,” but he’ll throw that career chance away if he keeps mugging like that. (The “dive into the chest of the drug-dealer-friend in the diner” choice was particularly odd.)