I imagine the old-style fortress-prisons (with walls of brick & mortar instead of metal fences) would be a lot safer. As for this episode; it’s terrible & Daryl’s reaction to Rick exiling Carol is the only thing about next week I’m looking forward to.
I bet a lot of castles in europe are getting plenty of use too.
Brain is fucking schizophrenic.
Killing walkers makes it come back. He doesn’t want to be that way, but he is fucked up.
The sooner someone kills him, the better, little girls or not.
Heck, any sturdy apartment building could be easily made defensible, and with plenty of balconies for lookout posts and sniper nests. Cover the roof with solar panels, raincatchers, antennas to look for signals, and everyone gets an apartment with the understanding that they lock themselves in at night.
What really bothers me are the missed opportunities to show really neat, clever solutions that people might actually come up with in a zombie apocalypse. Show us bands of survivors living in abandoned mines, in forest canopies in treehouses, in water treatment facilities, whatever. Let’s see what kind of really cool habitat you could build out of an abandoned refinery. Let’s see some really clever large-scale zombie traps or elaborate escape systems for when the horde finds you.
Instead we get weekly doses of soap opera as people camp in the open in tents, sit around in temporary structures and unsecure homes, and whinge about life and petty power squabbles. Gah. They all deserve to die.
And one thing they almost completely ignore is the problem of supplies. You wouldn’t want to do individual foraging expeditions to grocery stores and pharmacies - you’d want a systematic plan for collecting things on a large scale before they decay and become useless. Gasoline will break down eventually. Motors will stop working. Batteries will no longer exist. In a situation like they’re in, the most important person to have is an engineer or a mechanic - someone who knows how to build things properly and who can figure out how to set up systems that can be sustained for years or decades.
Hell, they don’t even have horses. I imagine the zombies have cleaned the land of most game, too. They can’t be hunter-gatherers for a long time. And that pathetic little garden Rick scrabbles away at wouldn’t feed one person, let alone a prison full of people.
The zombies aren’t their biggest threat in the long run. The biggest threat is starvation, coupled with the loss of power. Without power, you don’t have cars. You don’t have lights. You don’t have decent heat. You don’t have mechanization for agriculture. Once the cars no longer start, the food supplies in the area are exhausted or spoiled and their batteries die out, they’re in big, big trouble. Donner party trouble. Winter will kill all of them. No zombies required.
Woodbury was really annoying in this respect. The people made apparently no effort to conserve their energy or food. They didn’t work particularly hard - lots of them seemed to be basically welfare cases - shuffling around inside the town trying not to be bored. I’d like to see a story about a better ‘Woodbury’ - one where there were actually smart people planning and working hard for long-term survival.
Niven and Pournelle did a better job with a post-apocalyptic scenario in "Lucifer’s Hammer’. In that book, the most important thing left in the world was a functioning nuclear power plant, and protecting it was the major goal. Because Niven and Pournelle understood that without access to plentiful power the dark ages are just around the corner.
The smart people who have survived are doing the kinds of things that we suggest in these threads. We just never see them in the show because their stories aren’t as interesting as what is happening to the stupid people, the ones the show is about.
Heh, I would be very disturbed if you did like the Governor. (Although there is something about him…) I thought they did a really good job of playing with us–I started to think he was changed, saw some real conflict and complexity in him, and was always on edge about how he was going to be, what he would do or say. He’s very compelling. He’s terrifying and charismatic. Great acting, I thought.
I could not agree more. Well said Sam. I sometimes wonder why I keep watching. I really don’t like any of the characters. I don’t like the scripts. I guess i just like zombies.
I’m thinking that the only way to explain why the mud pit full of zombies would prevent the Gov and the girls (band name!) from leaving the camp would be; that is the only road to the camp (and no one has used it for a long time) and they arrived on foot from another direction. Otherwise it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I noticed this too. They showed us the leak a couple of times when it was very clearly NOT raining. At this point, I think the writers are purposely throwing us obvious mistakes to spit in our eye. We’ve accepted so much stupid writing and come back for more, they just want to see how much we will take. How many times will I groan over another zombie springing out of nowhere to take down an armed, supposedly alert, character yet continue watching. Even I don’t know. The writers seem intent on finding out.
It could be a pool on the flat roof, or condensate on the inside of the metal roof.
I wonder how much of it is the budget. Now, that doesn’t excuse bad writing, but it was given as an explanation for most Season 2. AMC saw a cash cow and wanted to wring more money out of it by making the producers do more with less money per episode. The show seems to change producers every season, the writers seem to have very few new ideas and do everything very slowly, and the show seems to think that the best way to keep people watching is with over the top ways to kill zombies.
As has been pointed out many times, zombies should be even less of a threat after a couple years than they currently are. Questions about ATP production and cellular respiration aside, they should be decaying very quickly and being scavenged upon and the initial wave should be pretty much gone by now. You have to hand wave away that problem with other explanations like super toxicity of infected flesh. They should have had to come up with all sorts of ways to deal with the threat if only from experience and need. Not to mention the questions of how do you keep up what remains of modern civilization as long as possible and finally have to transition back to a earlier technology until the threat can be dealt with and modern civilization rebuilt.
The defenders of the show and genre often say that it’s not really about the zombies, it’s about the human response. That would be fine if the characters actually made logical, consistent, and defensible decisions. Instead we’ve got a bunch of unlikeable or unknown characters, rehashes of previous seasons, and constant plot driven stupidity. And I simply cannot stand plot driven stupidity.
It’d be fine if they made recognizably human decisions. If the show’s thesis is that, in a pinch, humans are violent, irrational, and ultimately self-destructive, that’s fine. But have them demonstrate that in a human way. Instead, we get two-dimensional cartoons of evil, and the lapses in logic are totally unmotivated by anything beyond the need to have zombie combat.
Funny, I was thinking about that book during this episode as well. One of the main characters in the book, when the shit hit the fan, immediately “acquired” a Chevy K5 Blazer, and a bunch of jerry cans full of gas. A durable, capable, go anywhere, easily repairable 4WD beast of an off-road vehicle. Lots of cargo capacity, can tow things, and go through just about any terrain.
Yeah, who needs that when you can have a Hyundai POS.
But for fans of the post-apocalyptic genre (which is what I am), those would be the most interesting stories! Once again, the people in charge of making entertainment completely don’t get their fanbase - we’ve read all the post-apocalyptic books; we’ve seen all the movies; we discuss every little detail of how it would go down. Their product just isn’t good enough.
Yeah, David Morrissey is fantastic. They’ve got some very strong (and good-looking) talent on this show, which is one of the reasons I keep watching.
I hate show sponsor driven plots. 
Why are we back to the Governor storyline? I realize leaving the uncertainty was kind of a crap ending to last season, but really it was kind of a crap season. Why continue to drag it around like a dead body that’s only going to get more rotten.
Which reminds me. Lately the show has gotten on board the “musical interlude” bandwagon. I hate this trend with a passion. I’m not talking about songs performed by characters like Emily Kinney’s “Beth”. I’m talking about the plaintive guitar plucking, piano tinkling melancholy crapolla on the soundtrack that substitutes for actually writing a scene that tells us how the characters are feeling.
What I don’t understand is why, at the end of these episodes, I’m not hearing, “Download music from tonight’s ‘The Walking Dead’ from iTunes.”
Don’t give them any ideas.
For those of you missing Daryl, he was busy this week.
Personally I was excited to see Enver Gjokaj (from Dollhouse); alas, it was brief.
Obviously we have all the stupid plot holes and Idiot Plot elements we’ve come to er, tolerate. Zombies who exercise more stealth and planning than a team of Navy SEALS, the quickest, quietest massacre ever known (or just bad editing - you decide!), camping in the least secure locations possible, etc.
But what really grinds my gears is the plot/character arc for the Governor. I actually think I understand what they are trying to do, and its a defensible artistic choice. I just hate it. And they’re doing parts of it really badly. There’s a certain attraction in the idea that not only will Philip revert to type, he will actually do almost precisely the same weird, bad, evil things all over again, right down to keeping a pet zombie/victim to gaze at.
My big problem is they can’t decide if he’s a human character with motivations and emotional conflict, or an evil-producing crazy-bot. Am I getting this right: He murdered Martinez for offering him a leadership role. Then he murdered Enver for not being a good enough leader. Then he manipulated Enver’s brother into supporting him as despot of Camp Halfwit. Wha?