OK, so how come Earl’s Triumph parallel twin chopper sounds like a Harley V-twin engine? 
First two, you mean. The others aren’t nearly as bad.
A general question about the show – how much of the original population is still alive? Less than 10%?
From the TV show, it’s hard to tell. We’ve seen only one small area of Georgia, from small towns to Atlanta to open country. There certainly aren’t many survivors around. It’s possible some larger populations exist somewhere, in areas where brains aren’t only zombie food, but from the overall evidence it looks like the human population is somewhere in single-digit percentages of the starting total.
We’d know more if any of the characters could ever, say, operate any kind of long-range radio - ham, military, public safety. In every disaster story I’ve ever read, there was someone in each group who figured out that staying in touch with ham gear was both possible and productive.
That and someone could have taken over one of the broadcast stations and be sending “Voice of the Resistance” type broadcasts to a large area. Most of the US, if there is a sufficiently talented engineer who can turn a 50kw station into a “Mexican burner.”
But we keep talking as if there is a collective IQ above room temp among the survivors.
I’d say less than 10%; at least in the Southeast US. We’ve seen random other survivors (guy in cabin, that Hispanic family), but otherwise the countryside seems pretty empty. And we really don’t know if the rest of the world is doing any better. Jenner implied it wasn’t back in 1.06; the French were the last to communicate with the CDC. We don’t know what happened to the government, or the Navy, or how things are going in Australia or New Zealand or Iceland.
Okay, less than 10% it is, then.
I need to watch the first few episodes!
I’d say less than 1% actually.
Definitely. Even 1% would leave 50,000 people alive in the Atlanta metro area, and that’s clearly not the case.
I dunno, I thought that had been pretty well ‘spoiled’ well before the pictures came out. I remember reading an article that made it pretty obvious something like that was going to happen.
SOMETHING LIKE WHAT?!?!?!
Ahem.
Sorry.
Er, what has been alluded to?
Well click the image links above to find out! 
It’s a pretty big spoiler so I don’t even feel right spoiler boxing it here.
“Contrived and silly” is a great way of putting it - those scenes were just terrible. They would have been dramatically improved by Tyrese not being all understanding and helpful and just walking away from the idiot being idiotic. I would also accept Tyrese and Sasha saying to hell with all of this drama and just leaving themselves.
Unless the writers forgot about it, the zombies will become fast. I am sure of it. When Shane died, he zombified really quickly and jumped up in a matter of minutes. I thought that was a plot point, and am waiting to see it. I hope it happens because the zombies are becoming an afterthought. No more than swatting a mosquito while the soap opera goes on.
The zombies are the main point in this post-apocalyptic nightmare! Start running you undead undeads! Let’s see what happens then.
You are probably right - however I wasn’t looking around for spoilers when I saw the image. I was on 4chan /tv/ and I saw them.
My understanding is that it happened because instead of being infected by a zombie attack, as in the early days, everyone had become fully infected - that was what the CDC guy told Rick. So the transformation has the potential to happen much more quickly in the latter days.
I doubt it. The CDC guy in season 1 explained that the reanimation time varied wildly, anywhere from 2 minutes to 14 hours. Shane’s quick reanimation was well within the confines of that original exposition, as was Amy’s super long (all night) dormant period way back in season 1.
I wish they would do more flash back episodes
I’m a little late to this party, (this being my first post in nearly 3 months, owing to a new job) but am I the only one who immediately thought the arsonist was Morgan, the guy who saved Rick in the first episode that they recently ran into? I’m not saying it makes sense for him to have somehow found out about the trapped zombies and for what they were meant to be used, but the writers have already revealed that he uses fire to destroy walkers. Perhaps he randomly stumbled upon them and overheard Martinez and Tyreese’s exchange from the bushes?
Anyone else expecting Morgan to show up all deus ex machina-like at some critical point in the next two episodes, dispatching someone at the most dramatic moment possible?
I’m expecting to see Morgan again, but I don’t think he was the one that set fire to the pit walkers.
Morgan wouldn’t have left any of them still moving.
I’d be very surprised to see Morgan again, just based on how busy Lennie James is. IIRC, they wanted Morgan to return sooner than he did, but scheduling just didn’t work out.