The Walking Dead; 1.03 "Tell It to the Frogs" (open spoilers)

As a courtesy to others lease use spoiler tags when talking about stuff in the comics that hasn’t been shown or contradicted onscreen yet. Do not use spoiler tags for anything that’s aired.

You cut your hand off instead of sawing through the tiny little pipe you’re handcuffed to? Really? What am I missing here?

Best guess among me and my friends, who were discussing that very issue?

Merle’s got less than half the brains of your average housepet. That is what got him chained up in the first place, after all.

You’d think a redneck like that would have had occasion to do a little hacksawing before in his life, but I think I’ll have to consciously suspend my disbelief on that one - I know I’d try sawing on the pipe and see how it goes before I start sawing on my arm, but I’m smarter than your average housepet. :slight_smile:

He even mentioned using the hacksaw to cut through the pipe in the last episode. And even that was stupid given the thin little handcuff chain he could through.

That ending had me completely lost.

How did he get off the roof if the door was still chained? :confused: Was that the same building with the fire escape latter going up the roof we saw last episode?
The division of labour thing was bothering me too. Especially since the scavenging mission had two women on it then went back to doing laundry when they returned. And they’re alot closer to Atlanta than I thought they were; the skyscrapers are still visible in the background! :eek:

Does Rick realize that his best friend was sleeping with his wife yet? I mean everybody has got to know; it can’t be long before it slips.

Re: the division of labour thing; I can actually see that happening awful damned quickly. The men protect the camp (and, as we saw, kill the zombies), hunt, and fix the vehicles, and the women do everything else. Just like Thanksgiving dinner. :slight_smile:

I missed the first show; is Shane really the asshole he appears to be, or was there a genuine mix-up in his thinking that Rick was dead?

My best guess: dull blade and some sense of urgency meant he had to go for the soft bits.

Question #1: if the door was still locked, how did the Walkers get on the roof to create the sense of urgency that necessitates taking a dull hacksaw to soft bits?

Question #2: if the door was still locked, where’d he go?

Serious “WTF?” moment; the payoff had better not be too contrived…

But…

…if he was in enough of a hurry that he had to go for his own hand instead of a (hardened steel) handcuff chain link, how was he in much condition to run away from…whatever…caused him to need to hurry in the first place?

I mean, I know fear is a wonderful motivator and all, but climbing down a fire escape (if that is indeed what he did) or leaping rooftop-to-rooftop with a nearby building right after amputating your hand??? Pain, shock and even minimal blood loss (I think he may have used the belt as a tourniquette) are going to put you in the “staggering at barely a walking pace” for a good while.

Hell, looks like they’re still inside I-285, at the old Bellwood Quarry.

Which is funny, because they fled the city heading east and somehow wound up to the west. :smiley:

You know, since hunting brother doesn’t seem to have many more brains than douchebag brother on the roof, I’d really, really worry about those crossbow bolts that were shot into the zombies. If whatever the walkers have is infectious enough that they have to worry about getting stuff splashed on them, I’d worry about disinfecting the bolts enough to use on meat they wanted to EAT.

Last week we got the racist stereotype character. This week it was the wife-abusing stereotype guy. Wonder what’s next?

Yeah, I was a little disappointed.

My 2¢:

Hacksaw: a cheap low quality saw with a dull blade, good enough for PVC pipe but not for metal. Or he was really in a hurry, or both. Where he went? We’ll find out I suppose.

Division of labor: Even for Georgia there seem to be a distressing number of kiss-my-ass good ole’ boys, who are not exactly known for their progressive views. Exactly what form of social arrangement wins out remains to be seen.

Shane: he probably gave RIck up for dead without knowing for sure; but come on, Rick was in a coma in a hospital bed when the world fell apart. I wouldn’t have bet a wad of spit that Rick was still alive either.

Not to belabor the point too far, but we have a cheap, shitty hacksaw here, and it still cuts metal. Like I said, I’ll have to consciously suspend my disbelief on that one. :slight_smile:

When it was 10:30 in the episode before set out for the return to Atlanta, and 10:45 when they were only at the railroad tracks, I figured it would be next week before we would see them get back to the store. I guess I have to get used to things being skipped, but I would have liked to see the challenge it took to retrieve the guns and get to the roof.

My guess is a skinny zombie slipped through the small opening in the doorway and racist guy had to hurry.

My vote is for 1) cheap-ass hacksaw, 2) Merle freaking out (which we saw in the opening bit), 3) the stress of the geeks being RIGHT THERE (and Merle not knowing that the door was bolted and chained) leads to the decision to hacksaw flesh rather than steel.

The character development of the wife and the best friend was awesome. It definitely gave a lot more depth to the story than just “wife and best friend screw randomly, or had an affair going on prior.” I can see Shane honestly thinking that Rick was dead, and at the same time perhaps honestly having a crush on Lori prior, and Lori honestly believing Shane and at the same time honestly perhaps looking outside her marriage in the “before time” when things were going bad. From the portrayals tonight, I really think that they’re both decent people trying to do the best they know how, with depths of feeling regarding their behavior.

I am a tad bit sick of the ignorant rednecks in the show - I said it in the last thread and I’ll say it again. That level of hotheaded impulsiveness would’ve killed those assholes by now.

Bone’s not really that soft, either, and the sheer thickness of the bone and flesh of his arm, relative to the thickness of the bolt he was stuck to (which, honestly looked rusty enough I’d not be entirely sure it would stand up to a good hard tug), would offset what difference there is, I would think.

Not at a joint.

The wrist is a bunch of little joints/bones all connected by soft tissue, right? That seems to be a relatively simple task - Aron Ralston managed to cut his arm off at the elbow by cutting through the soft tissue at the elbow joint, not by sawing through his armbones.

No, be broke his radius and ulna with leverage, and then cut through the breakage.

Merle was also coming off a coke binge which would affect his judgment and possibly his ability to feel pain. Four pounds of Colombia’s purist uncut coke however wouldn’t help a newly one-handed man climb down a ladder (I’m sure one handed people have managed to climb up and down ladders but I’m guessing it took some practice), so he’s either dead from a fall, on the rooftop still, or leaped to another rooftop. If this were at all real life my money would be on dead but it’s about a zombie apocalypse so who knows.

Daryl’s going to need to be zombie bait at some point as well. Of course telling him the truth about his brother was the stupidest thing they could have done imo; this has a well placed “he died a hero and took down 18 zombies before he died- and all of them were black, gay, liberal, and or Jewish zombies” written all over it in the best interest of all, perhaps with an “as he was dying he asked that you teach us to use the crossbow and any other survival skills you have and then go far far away”.

For Atlantans: are the downtown skyscrapers visible from Kennesaw Mountain? Of course even if so that’s still a heavily populated area; I’ve known traffic there to be as bad as inside the beltway. I’d stock up on gas for the RV and move south; a campground in or near Okefenokee might not be a bad place to winter since it’s sparsely populated and gators might help with any adventurous zombies.

We don’t know. In the first episode, Rick was shot in the line of duty and went into a coma before any zombies showed up; the world was still normal. When he woke up from the coma, he was alone in a hospital that had already been ravaged by the zombie apocalypse.

Agreed. This alone is why I rated this episode a “Loved It” instead of “Liked It.”