He didn’t have to go through all that math. If 98% of the world becomes a zombie, then 2 people have to kill 98 zombies. If 70%, then 30 kill 70. Easy math.
Now I don’t know about you, but I could kill, like, 1000 zombies in an 8-hour workday if they just kept presenting themselves. I don’t know why they don’t take a tank or two, blare noise from them, and “pied piper” those suckers into an ambush.
28 Days later had the Zombies all die off of starvation after four weeks. But yea, most fictional zombies seem to basically be perpetual motion machines, which is ok for “magic” zombies, but if you’re going to have “scientific zombies” like in Walking Dead, it doesn’t make much sense for them to be immortal.
See jokes about zombies on treadmills providing limitless clean energy.
I don’t know about the comics, but isn’t it established in The Walking Dead TV series that the Zombies aren’t immortal and are (veeeerrrrryyyyy sloooowwwllly) starving to (re-)death?
What are these c"sandswimmers" youi talk about – I’m not speaking of things that move through light coverings of surface sand, but burrow through extensive sand. We have slow burrowers, but not anything like Sandworem,s or Tremors Graboids, because the energy to move through extensive sand – not rock – is incredibly huger. We have nothing on earth that does it, and really big creatures doing it are extremely unlikely. To compare “swimming” through sand – really swimming through deep soil – to sdwimming through water is nothing short of ludicrous.
And the existence of ice caps says nothing aboiut water elsdewhere. It’s just handwaving on Herbert’s p[art to expolain away the problems of lack of water throughout the rest of the work. I can’t accept Herbert’s Arrakis as even rtemotely possible.
Or how many survivors are killed by other survivors because they’re the wrong religion/race/clan/etc etc etc…
Whedon’s apocalyptic change at the end of season 1 showed that he at least had thought about the implications of the tech. There was a decent amount of backstory given, considering the narrative changes of direction, and overall uncertainty of the production. There were only two 13-episode seasons, with about half the first season semi-wasted on the episodic format and studio wrangling, along with typical settling-in first-season weirdness. It got a lot better when they dropped the “John/problem of the week” episodic format, but it was always a bit flawed.
From all indications, the lack of privacy was intentional. An open plan and constant surveillance wasn’t quite enough to keep some Very Bad Things from happening during the course of the series, but it is mentioned by characters several times as being a safety precaution. It’s a way of monitoring the Actives since they seem to be aware that some memory/personality retention is possible.
Actives in an Imprinted state are nearly indistinguishable from any other individual. Keeping them blank keeps them easily controllable. Do you think you could keep the “cooks” and “massage therapists” from going “home” at the end of their shifts, or submit to the kind of around-the-clock monitoring that the Actives undergo?
Wiping takes time. Imprinting takes time. If they needed to have a bunch of scientists Imprinted, but had to wipe the cooks and massage therapists first, it would take a lot more lead-time. It’s also implied that the longer an Imprinted personality is in place, the harder it is to wipe. Wipes themselves are mentioned as being traumatic, necessitating recovery time. They test and monitor the Actives between Engagements to see how much carryover there is.
I’d argue that one of the reasons Echo becomes a problem isn’t just because of her innate resistance to the technology, but also because of the frequency of her Imprinting and lack of downtime between Engagements. In fact, despite how later she’s said to be “special”, all of the main Actives show some signs of personality, knowledge, and skill retention between wipes. The technology clearly isn’t fully mature, and the Dollhouse techs are at least somewhat aware that there might be problems.
You’re taking the “5 year contract” at face value. It’s strongly implied — if not said outright — that none of them are ever actually free of the Dollhouse when their contracts are up. Aside from the necessary Active architecture that enables the technology, who knows what kind of “extras” are included in the supposedly original personality Template? They wouldn’t have “concrete knowledge” of the Dollhouse. They have altered memories, and salaries and work histories through a shell corporation. I don’t think it’s mentioned, but I’d bet that an aversion to discussing anything related to the organization, Rossum, etc. is implanted also.
I agree that the interactions in public in the real world are absolutely highly improbable. It doesn’t get less improbable when they start showing how much the organization has infiltrated. Even without the events of the later series, following these ideas to their natural conclusions in the fiction would have ended up causing some seriously bad things to happen sooner or later.
Hey, do you remember the name of any of these stories? I’d love to read them.
Sure. where the actives are, leave it an open plan spa environment. But the imprinting room and medical room are also built that way. Doors were left open by default and the rooms were often unguarded.
The most recent I recall reading is Zombies, Inc, wherein the evil corporation by that name has pretty much taken control of what’s left of America by maintaining the idea of a zombie threat.
Thanks, ep. I just downloaded it. 
A recent best-selling ebook series had a similar premise, although about the environment in general, not zombies, and I liked it immensely. It would be kind of a spoiler to put the title here, though.
Reminds me of a French SF novel where most of the population is addicted to a drug that allows to relive memories, while the country has become a fascist state where people live in abject poverty.
Revolution’s actual apocalyptic scenario itself never worked for me, either. “Electricity not working anymore” makes no sense as it’s presented in the show. I know at least one character keeps going on about this: that the laws of physics decided to suddenly change, but a hat tip to how impossible your scenario is doesn’t make it any less impossible.
If electricity suddenly stopped working, wouldn’t everyone’s brain and muscles also stop working?
Granted, I only got about three episodes in before I lost interest. I’m sure they explained it more as the series drew on, but that show wasn’t interesting enough for me to overload my suspension of disbelief.
It was explained that self-replicating nanobots were doing it. They were keeping anything that used electricity from working. Yeah, it still seems a bit much to me, but at least they didn’t change the laws of physics.
I’m not sure Dollhouse was ever as tightly plotted as Firefly or several seasons of Buffy and Angel. In the beginning, IIRC, it was heavily implied that Topher created the imprinting tech a year or two earlier and that LA was home to the only dollhouse. Eventually, they introduced multiple dollhouses and revealed that the entire enterprise had been going on for decades.
Dollhouse was interesting, but it spiraled out of control so fast (and took so long to get going) that it was only really good for a few episodes.