The bag of guns was only there for a few days while the MG was there beforehand.
Im finding it hard to believe it would be considered so useless you wouldnt even try to get it.
Otara
The machine gun would be worse than useless - it’s not man-portable, eats through ammo at an obscene speed, and ammo can’t be easily found.
I think when you’re in a fortification situation like the hospital it might have its uses. Or mounted on trucks, or well, any number of situations. And it can be fired single shot.
Fine, it was a carefully considered plot piece that took into account that the audience knew it would really be useless, instead of something done for appearances sake.
Otara
It was there to show that the military protection had failed in the city, but an M2 weighs almost 100 lbs, not counting the rounds, and is really too impractical to use tactically in the streets or to hump back to camp where they would have nowhere to mount it anyway. Perhaps it could have some use in the nursing home, but I don’t think anyone there would know how to operate one or cool it.
Light infantry is really the way to go right now unless and until they have some kind of solid fortifications where mounted, crew-operated artillary would have some utility. Those things are meant to be used against vehicles, not against zombies.
Its an aircooled weapon, and easily portable by car.
Im finding it hard to believe people would really let it rust in the street than collect it. But it seems to be very important to some of you to argue this makes fictional sense so I guess I should let it go.
Otara
Oh, for pete’s sake.
Nothing that is important for a weapon in their situation - ease of use; easy portability; the ability to conserve ammo; the ability to accurately hit a specific, small target (the head); the ability to obtain ammo - actually applies to a 50 cal machine gun.
A machine gun is a great weapon if you’re part of an organized military fighting humans who have the ability to feel fear and pain, or simple self-preservation, and will be taken out of the fight by shots to parts of the body other than the head, and have a supply chain getting you more ammo.
But they’re not an organized military, and thus have no ability to get more 50 cal ammo once the one belt (which is, what 30 seconds or so worth of fire?) is finished. And resupply aside, their enemies have barely enough intelligence to follow the sound of weaponsfire to the shooter - and, clearly aren’t scared of it - can only be taken out with a headshot, and don’t feel pain. You might slow one down by shattering a limb or two, or get a few lucky headshots, but you won’t stop more than a handful with a machine gun. Use the whole belt and you’d be lucky to take out as many Walkers as one man with a good hunting rifle and a clip of more easily acquired calibres - but you’ll have made a whole lot more noise, and have a much harder time reloading.
They make plenty of dumb mistakes, there’s no need to spin one of the few unassailably correct choices they make into another one.
Neither of the groups is currently mobile and are operating from static positions. Both groups are supposedly desperate for weapons rather than finding rifles and ammo all over the place. Both have previously used cars for transport.
It can fire single shot, and can potentially injure multiple zombies at once if fired at head height.
Noisewise, thats an issue with any gun.
It offers a ton of materials for shell reloading purposes even if you dont want the gun.
There arent only zombies as potential enemies.
Theres a tank with probably a thousand more .50 rounds next to it.
It doesnt really make sense, its just for story purposes it all gets ignored, just like theres no talk about using the tank as a giant steam roller or whatever.
I guess I should conclude from this that there are people who would leave it all to rust even it if it is useful so it could make sense from that perspective, but I cant help thinking its more about winning an internet argument than what they’d really do.
Otara
The gun would actually be most useful as a long range sniper platform. It’s most likely more accurate at any distance than any other weapons they have, including the hunting rifles. But yeah, it’s not very practical in that role. I certainly wouldn’t want to lug a 70 pound piece of equipment around on the fly when you’re in the middle of a city where zombies could be around the corner.
Also, have you ever heard one of those things? It’d attract zombies in all directions for 5 miles.
Maybe if they ventured into the city again with a truck they could grab it, but certainly it wouldn’t have been that practical to grab it on the go.
Yay, now that I finally was able to watch this (no thanks to you, Dopers who did not respond with suggestions on locating it legally online), I can participate.
First off - I really did like this episode. Not LOVE it, but almost did.
Yes. I admit that perhaps I have been hanging out in survival- and zombie apocalypse-related forums for too long, but they are 1) sleeping in tents, 2) in walking distance of (checks Wikipedia) 5.9 million people in the Atlanta metro area, a significant percentage of which have been zombified, 3) with no sentries or patrols established, 4) not enough warning wire/booby trap perimeters, and 5) having a fucking fish fry. I get that they haven’t had a lot of time to relax lately, but for the love of god, there was JUST a zombie IN CAMP (eating Daryl’s deer).
I kept yelling “shoot her in the fucking head! shoot her in the fucking head! somebody in the camp shoot her in the fucking head!”
I am not normal. But I did keep expecting her to turn and bite Andrea’s nose off.
That was the point I lost patience with the stereotypes. Ya gotcher racist junkie redneck (Merle), yer smart Asian (Glen), yer hair-trigger younger brother redneck (Daryl - who wants to lay odds that at some point he’ll give the big “I never could live up to my brother’s expectations” speech), yer idiotic and helpless women who wash clothes and nothing else, yer wife-beater, and now - the Mexican gang who are under the iron fist of a loving abuela. Enough, already.
Although I LOVED the fact that Glen delivered pizzas before the fall. I totally expected him to say “computer programmer” or “video game developer” when Daryl asked what he did before - and by the look on Daryl’s face, I bet Daryl was expecting that, too. I thought that was a nice play on the expectations.
The van is open from back to front - there’s not a separate area for the cab, so he couldn’t have brought them in the van. But I also think he drove slowly enough to lure them along, and bring them close enough to the camp to use them as a weapon of terror.
He basically told Lori that in the last episode, since it’s the only radio that will work with the one he gave the black guy and his kid in the first episode.
For a split second, I wondered if they had been reading the boards and refilmed an intro to the episode to explain exactly that 
Daryl’s character has quickly become quite a bit more interesting than I anticipated. Instead of the cookie-cutter redneck little brother, he’s got a depth to him that definitely came out in this episode. When Rick said that they could search a few blocks around but they’d have to keep level heads, Merle would have told him to fuck off and tried to fight him - Daryl instead said “I can do that.”
It was really hard for me to tell, but I first thought that yes, Shane was bitten. Now, I’m not so sure. Great cliffhanger.
Jim’s character was also great - just a little bit of exposition about what the apocalypse would do to a normal, ordinary person, who was able to survive by watching his family get eaten. I was convinced that he was going to be left tied to the tree, and end up as zombie chow.
There are still far too few African-Americans in this show, either as survivors or as zombies. An entire nursing home with almost no elderly African-Americans, but mostly Hispanic-American survivors and their relatives? In Atlanta? No. It’s a small thing, but it pisses me off a little.
Overall rating - good show, leaning toward great. Lots of tension, really good unexpected twists in some of the characters, some over-reliance on stereotypes, a very nerve-wracking ending.
Where were you able to watch it online? (Crosses fingers that it will broadcast to a Canadian IP.)
2 out of 11 of the characters who have been in at least five of six episodes are black according to IMDB. Seems about right, no?
Check your PM.
No. Two out of 11 is 18%. As I stated before, as of 2009 the city of Atlanta was 51.4% African-American, and the entire metropolitan area (Atlanta + suburbs) is 31.2% African-American.
The original black man and his child (whose last name is apparently Jones) were in Rick’s hometown (and not even from there), and haven’t been seen since the first episode. Currently, I have seen one African-American male (T-dog) and one African-American female (Jacqui) in camp, and one African-American elderly person in the nursing home in the latest episode. And while admittedly the decay of a zombie often makes it difficult to identify race in the undead, I don’t think that there are enough staggering, either.
I think they take whatever they can get in terms of zombies. I mean, it probably requires a good number of extras who likely aren’t all that well compensated. Hell, they’re advertising an opportunity to appear as a zombie during every commercial break!
And I have entered every one of those contests
Yea, like I said, it’s a minor thing, but it bugs me.
One of the random bitten camp dwellers in episode 4 was also black. But yeah, the show does suffer from the common problem of being set in a place where lots of people aren’t white yet having almost everyone be white. It’s weird; I can’t imagine there’s a dearth of non-white people volunteering to be zombie extras.
Wouldn’t it be funny if, at the start of the next episode, they make some explanation about the lack of black zombies.
Thanks - it’s been buffering for a really long time, so I don’t think it’s working, but I appreciate the effort.
It’d excellent! Then we could see what other explanations we could force into the story.
On the other hand, if an ethnologically correct (in regards to the Atlanta region) number of zombies in TWD were black, viewers would probably be throwing out accusations of racism and such. “Yeah, so how come so many of the zombies are black? What are you tryin’ to say? Huh?” Just sayin’. 
Did the original graphic novel address whether cold weather gives a respite from the zombies, like in WWZ? (If it stays set in Georgia, probably not). It was 10°F this morning in Minneapolis, and I need to remind myself of the upside.