How long does it take for gasoline to go bad?
I’ve wondered about this. Seems like a nice sword or long knife would be just the weapon to have. On “Revolution” the doomsday (with a twist) series on NBC, everybody has a sword. It is the weapon of choice in any future world where guns or ammo are getting scarce
My favorite line was when they were looking at the map and discussing where the various zombie herds were and they said “the Newnan herd” might merge with another and cut them off. Newnan is a small town in Georgia, my home town, and where they’ve filmed a lot of The Walking Dead, including last season’s high school scene where Shane shot the other guy.
They shot some of the prison scenes in Newnan at an abandoned factory. It’s a BIG deal when they’re in town shooting. Friends tell me stories about going to watch the production and how freaked out the zombies get when you try to take pictures of them. Apparently that’s a big no-no for the professional zombies when they’re lounging around, eating a sandwich or having a smoke.
Before anyone jumps in and says 6 months or a year, I’ll anecdotally tell you that about 4 or 5 years ago I started a car that had been sitting for 12 years.
How long did it run? 
I never understood what made Hershel’s farm so “perfect”. At least what made it any more or less perfect than any other farm in the country.
A while. I drove it around for a while and did some other stuff before I eventually went and filled up to dilute what was in there.
Cool.
Herschel’s farm was “perfect” because it was a pictoresque location with lots of room and possibilities for starting a new life that they thought was safe from zombies.
As it turns out, it’s not safe, so they’re never going back.
Being able to go to sleep without having to worry about a herd of flesh-eating creatures coming to kill your family and friends is a pretty big deal.
Yeah, I would say the fire poker would probably be the best of the melee weapons. All the rest were fairly short. And barring the magic katana, i would rather have something for stabbing than for slicing. Blood loss isn’t a huge issue for zombies.
This season (so far) sure is more fun to watch. Less high school-level soap drama, more reasonably believable action-adventure. It feels like they have hit the sweet spot for talk vs kill and show vs tell vs neither. Before, there were numerous occassions where I thought “A couple lines of dialog could have saved us from 10 hours of internet speculation and fanwanking. Or even worse, 20 minutes of wasted TV.”
Except the samurai-sword lady. It feels like fell through a wormhole from a whole different show.
One thing that jumped out at me: They are being much more careful about showing obvious head injury (bloodstains on walls, etc.) to the scenery corpses. Previously, there seemed to be plenty of ambiguously inert bodies lying around. Which makes me wonder if it was originally an oversight that they are now rectifying in order to get more vocal viewers to chill out, or if they were being deliberately coy in the first two seasons, in order to get a bit more impact when they dropped the bomb at the end of S2.
Well, it was more then just picturesque. It had a river running along one side so that side didn’t need to be watched and the other three sides were bordered by forest, but the tree line was so far off and the clearing was so big they had a lot of warning before the danger was real. As long as someone kept watch on the RV, it was pretty easy to pick off walkers as long as there wasn’t a huge rush of them at once.
Not only that, they had a live in doctor and he didn’t want to leave.
Good point.
This also fits nicely with the more “mature” group now using silenced .22’s. It would be a lot easier to find and to carry a 500 brick of .22 ammo than it would to find the equivalent in .308, 30-06 or other high caliber rounds.
Typical hunting rounds are sold in packs of 20, and I can’t imagine finding more than a couple of those at a time. Even if you found more it’s large to carry. A pack of 20 rounds is too large to just fit in your pocket, but small enough to put in cargo pants.
A .22 gets the job done.
I wouldn’t expect to see too much of it. A couple of characters mentioned they wouldn’t be using it because of disgust over the fact that it had been on zombies for so long.
True. And at the same time, gasoline begins losing it’s “freshness” pretty quickly. A modern fuel injection system, like in the SUV that they keep featuring, is going to have a hard time processing old gas. An older carburetor system (like on Darryl’s motorcycle) will keep running longer.
The main problem with fuel, if they are scavenging from wherever they can find it, is going to be water contamination.
I’m just glad they’ve upgraded to some newer vehicles instead of driving those wrecks around (or is that an old Suburban in the one scene?). It just made no sense when there are freeways full of new cars and trucks.
There’s a Greenville, GA, southwest of Atlanta. They’re not heading to S.C. as far as I can tell.
Obviously, I loved this episode, every minute of it. The first five minutes of working together as a well-oiled machine, with no words, was a clear indication that they’d gotten their shit relatively together. Rick’s terse “Fifteen, you’re on point” to Carl, and Carl’s immediate response, was great, and I hope that Carl continues to be useful and not just NOT IN THE FUCKING HOUSE (or this season’s Big House).
I’m a little suspicious that Carol and Daryl haven’t already hooked up, and if they haven’t, then what the hell is wrong with them?
We all said “too late” when they cut off Herschel’s leg - the blood circulates too rapidly to prevent the virus from spreading after that much time. If they were going to try to prevent Herschel from zombification, they needed to cut that leg off in the hall right after the bite.
Not only all the things you already mentioned, but they also had several fresh water wells, fresh meat on the hoof, and nearby neighbors with plant farms.
Find some old-style plows and harnesses, and some seed stock, and you’ve got grains, and other fresh veggies too.
The real problem, IMO, wasn’t terrain, or even lack of fortifications (although a log palisade would be a pain-in-the-ass to build, it would’ve been worth it), but the group’s simple lack of numbers. Lookouts, a “reaction force” to do battle, workers to do farm chores; they just didn’t have the bodies.
Back on the subject of melee weapons, I thought something like a Boar Spear, or even just an old fashioned infantry spear, would be just about right.
Take a shovel from a hardware store, bang it roughly flat with a good sized hammer, take a basic grinder to rough-shape it, files to finish-shape it, and then a whetstone to sharpen it. Maybe reinforce the joint between shaft and metal with rivets, nails, or a good, tight, wire-wrap.
I was going to say that they’d need to find an abandon Ren Faire to get the old non-electric machines to do that to a shovel (where else are you going to find a foot powered grinding wheel or rivets that are made to be hammered for example). But if they happened to stumble upon an old Ren Faire, they might be able to come up with quite a few useful weapons that don’t need much more then some sharpening to get rid of their fake/safe edges.
Well, I was thinking that hardware stores would be more ubiquitous than Ren Faire grounds, where most of the inventory is privately owned by independant vendors, and not stored on-site between fairs.
And most Ren Faire sword-and-knife vendors I’ve ever met would instantly recognize the relative worth of their inventory in a world gone-to-hell.
And that scavengers looking for fuel, food, and ammo might just overlook the weapon potential of mundane gardening implements. A good-sized set of sharp hedge clippers could do a real good job on a walker.
I wonder if this was a one off good episode, or a change in direction for the show.
The primary thing the writers of this show really should understand is that in a world like this, your characters don’t have to be retarded to create drama.
This show is far better when they treat characters like competant, reasonably intelligent people tackling their new surroundings in a rational way. This episode showed that. Sure, you can make the case that the way they cleared the prison was sub-optimal. But compare it to something like last season when Lorrie went off by herself driving probably while drunk and blindfolded and sitting on her head in order to find Rick (not knowing exactly where he was) after someone HAD ALREADY TOLD RICK ANYWAY what she wanted to tell him. It was just inexplicably stupid and excuse to put her in a dangerous situation.
In comparison, the dangers they faced in this episode and their responses were quite reasonable. There wasn’t a lot of soap opera interpersonal drama. If the show was always like this, it would be hugely better.
The problem is - this show feels like it has 1 good writer, 4 bad ones - and you’ll get one good scene or episode followed by 4 where everyone acts like an idiot and the drama focuses on stupid little soap opera problems. So I worry that this episode was the good one, and we’ll quickly revert to stupidity.
There was a point this episode where 2 of the characters talk about how Rick had gotten them this far and how Shane wouldn’t have, and I gotta call bullshit on that. They’re just trying to retroactively solve their writing problem where essentially Shane was right about everything but they had to make him the bad guy - so this was a way of going back and trying to patch over that.
And actually, it’s only because Rick stopped being like S1/S2 Rick and more like Shane that he could plausibly keep them alive. So it seems silly to praise Rick and slam Shane in this context, because the only reason Rick suddenly got his shit together is because he acts like he realized Shane was right.