I think this was the camel-back breaking episode for me.
I can handle stupid (and things that aren’t necessarily stupid, she said in the show that she didn’t know if megadosing on the Morning After Pill would do anything, but it isn’t like she has a lot of methods available to her).
But the zombies are just handled so stupidly. Last episode a guy lives because the zombie is apparnetly so eager to eat that it just bites onto the closest part, which luckily is encased in a thick boot. This episode the girl lives because the zombie is appaerently so set on eating just the best parts of her that it completely ignores the hand it is holding, instead trying to get to the meaty middle bits.
A few episodes back a mass of zombies are fast enough that two guys can barely stay ahead of them. This episode the mass of zombies are so slow that they can use being surrounded by them as a teaching opportunity.
Past episodes show the zombies having serious trouble with doors, this episode the surprise zombie is in a closed building that has apparently been visited many times before. Also, they can ride loud clopping horses slowly through the pastoral countryside and town and apparently none of the zombies notice until the people are in the least likely place to find a zombie.
The local high school is crawling with a dense crowd of zombies but the nearby housing development is so devoid of them that they can drive around without ever seeing one but 30 seconds later they’re in the middle of a swarm.
The zombies aren’t scary, and worse they don’t make any (internal to the show) sense. That just leaves me watching a bad soap opera. So I think my patience is run out.
It reminds me of how vampires were handled on “Buffy” - vampires were so strong and powerful that a regular huiman would have no chance against them in a fight; only a “slayer” has the stramina & speed necessary to keep up with one in a fight, and only a slayer would have the strength to drive a stake through one - unless of course the slayer isn’t there and normal strength sidekicks like Xander & Cordelia are surrounded, in which case anyone can dust a vamp with a simple stick.
Actually, the way they handle walkers I can fanwank easily enough - the speed and intuitive reasoning that individual walkers exhibit is directly related to the amount of time they’ve been dead. I.e., the longer the walking dead bodies rot, the slower they become, and more confused their “thinking” becomes. This was actually hinted at in the first episode - the father & son whom Rick meets just after re-awakening. The guys’ wife was a zombie (and must have been newly turned because she didn’t look too decayed) and would often come right up to the door of their home, because she still had some residual memory that that particular house meant something to her. Meaning that there is still a certain level of brain activity going on for some time after a person becomes a walker.
That might also explain why Shane & Andrea could drive into the suburb, not see one walker, then be surrounded by them. The walkers there still instinctively registered which houses were their homes, and were lurking inside or in their backyards (as suburbanites tend to do) until they heard the sound of a car driving down their street.
That’s fine fanwanking but it then renders the behavior of the living people even more stupid than it already is (and suggests that they really just need to bunker down somewhere for a year and then the crisis will kind of pass on its own as the zombies slowly become not much more dangerous than angry rats.
And as presented so far in the show (at least beyond the first few episodes) it is really hard to see how any reasonably well armed military post, let alone ALL well armed military posts fell to the zombie hordes. End result is that this season seems to have completely nerfed the zombie threat.
Yeah. There’s no threat left in this world. In the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead there was a palpable sense of dread that sets in with a siege. Without these walls, we’re dead. But our fortress may become our tomb. The Walking Dead doesn’t have any of that. We’ll just hang out on front the porch at night.
Oh, please… let’s not hijack this into a debate over sex ed. You really went and researched it for a zombie thread? Someone snarked about dumb Georgians, I gave it a rolleyes and a sarcastic retort. We can leave it at that. No need to digress into links about battling sex ed initiatives.
(Spoke, I don’t think them yankees can stand it when you call 'em on their dang foolishness! Gotta start spitting out a linkety link here and a linkety link there!)
I can see your point - I didn’t take it that way - how else are the writers going to introduce or even deal with this type of struggle and the conflict.
He explicitly said he’d never make her have a baby she didn’t want.
But he wants her to want the baby, because he needs there to be hope for the future. And the reasons she doesn’t want the baby have nothing to do with the baby but because it is a complete rejection on her part that there is any hope in their future. The argument given for why she should end the pregnancy are the same arguments for why they should all just stop trying to survive and put bullets in their heads.
The “pregnancy as a signal of hope” and the debate around that is a pretty standard trope for apocalypse fiction.
I did like that she finally tells him about sleeping with Shane and his response was a more dramatic reading of “well, duh.”
Potential spoilers here, don’t read if you don’t want to be spoiled:
It’s pretty spot-on for #6, so I’m guessing it’ll be fairly accurate for #7.
If so, It’s going to annoy me quite a bit because:
If Sophia is really in the barn, then someone had to put her there. Since Herschel is eager to get rid of Rick and company, you’d think he’d just say, “Um, yeah, you’re looking for a little girl? Brown hair? Blue shirt with rainbow on it? She’s been afflicted with the disease and turned.”
If pressed for proof, he could show them the barn and demand they leave and let him keep his ‘diseased’ kith and kin in his barn and become his problem down the road. After all, they aren’t killing every walker they see; only the ones that become a threat.
He should have done this as soon as Carl become mobile, especially since then, he’s let his people go out with the group looking for Sophia, which just puts his people in danger for no reason.
This episode seems to have generated a lot less chatter than normal, especially since the whole episode revolved around several deep dark shocking secrets being revealed.
