I guess they would outrun them and come back on the freeway.
You know, as exciting as this episode was, I can’t help getting a bit irked that they couldn’t have come up with a more “final solution” for the walker horde. At first I was thinking of having the zombies plummet off a cliff. A few well-placed giant boulders would have been exciting to see, as well. Crushed zombies, anyone?
Even if the redirection had gone off exactly as Rick had planned, who’s to say that there isn’t some similar settlement a few miles up the road that they are dooming to a slow, munchy death?
Of course, too many proactive measures would eliminate (or at least vastly reduce) the zombie threat, and there would be no basis for the show…
I thought about fire, too. But, with gas having been such a precious commodity, I’m not sure that it just wasn’t mentioned and dismissed in a cut scene. What about kerosene? Does it go bad like gas? What about rigging propane tanks? Then again, if propane is still good, a lot of people would be using it for cooking and power.
ETA: Did anyone besides me find it weird that Sasha was driving with the hazard lights on?
Carl was in the episode. Ron jealously spied on Carl and the girl getting cozy on the roof.
I think 20 miles is about as far as they could. At zombie walking pace, that’s probably over six solid hours.
I find the idea of fire-bombing them silly. Very comic booky.
Just leaving them there and fortifying the barricades is no good. It might be fine in a happy happy joy joy world, but not in this one. There’s always a Governor or Wolves just around the corner who would be more than happy to sabotage your barricades and let the massive zombie army overrun you.
Rick’s plan was the only sensible one.
To me that seemed like yet another reason why Alexandria doesn’t understand what life is like outside the walls, and how they’re naive to everything Rick’s gang has been going through.
I saw that too and was wondering why. At first I thought she was using the turn signals and I was wondering who she was telling she was turning.
Um, this is a comic book really. But why not try and throw large objects down there to try and crush as many as possible? I also thought they should have not only shot them on the walk, but put up wires to cut them up. I’m not sure how well that would work, but killing as many walkers as possible is far better then just leaving them away. Yes, Rick’s plan was a good one, but just leading them away should have just been one part of the equation.
It kinda bugged me that they didn’t have a bulldozer or two standing by. Once the zombie parade is on the road, just mow them down. Then when you’re at the end, turn around for another pass to nail the stragglers.
I think part of the problem here is the sheer scale of the problem.
Rick is terrified because there are thousands of zombies in that quarry. Thousands. And if they can get out en masse, Alexandria is toast, even if they don’t all head the same direction; simply the wandering of several hundred zombies is going to do it. It’s specifically referenced that the only reason Alexandria hasn’t had walker problems ALREADY is that the quarry’s noise is drawing walkers in THAT direction, where they fall in and get trapped.
So what do you do with a quarry containing thousands of zombies?
Well, I thought of “molotov cocktails,” sure. But it’s a drop in the bucket. Barbecuing a zombie won’t necessarily stop him; you need to cook him to the point where his brain cooks, or there’s not enough muscle tissue left for him to wander around. That requires a large pyre; humans don’t burn so good, being mostly water and all. So even throwing gallon cans of gas in there with burning rags is only going to cook a few. Even rigging explosives, you’re going to have to keep throwing them for quite a time… and how much boom do you HAVE?
Alternatively, you can station a team with sledgehammers down where those two semis were blocking the road. They’ll wiggle out one at a time, and you can smash them. And at one zombie about every two minutes, that’s… um… how many man hours of noggin smashing? And that’s assuming another way out of the quarry doesn’t open, which Rick made clear he was not willing to risk.
I REALLY like the idea of starting a caravan back up that ridge and letting them wander off the cliff, but I didn’t think of that idea until I read it in this thread, so…
And I found it wildly disturbing that apparently they assign people to gate duty who ask someone to watch the gate and then wander off leaving Eugene, of all people, to man the gate. Irresponsibility of that magnitude begs for death.
It also occurs to me that a good set of IR goggles and good batteries would be a handy thing to have when the Wolves show up. Zombies are room temperature; humans tend to be warmer…
I had the same thought when they showed the heavy equipment at the site Glenn had to clear, but I then I decided it would be a suicide mission. The plan would work great until it quit working - the machine stalls, or slips a track, or gets too many walkers stuck in the gears, or something. If you’re leading the horde and the car dies, at least you can get out and run. If you’re in the middle of tens of thousands of walkers, you’re toast.
Well, Plan A evidently didn’t work so there’s still time for Plan B next episode. Maybe Gabriel could be the one who leads them off the edge?
I would love to see that!
Well, you could wall in the cab, give the driver several days worth of food and water, and trust that if you have a breakdown, the others will find a way to clear a path for you.
Anyway, the quarry should have been the place to for everybody to take target practice - everyone head out there and start shooting to thin the herd a little, maybe even build a stack of bodies at the exits to act as improvised barriers. Not only does everyone get better at shooting, hopefully they become sufficiently desensitized that killing walkers becomes casual and easy.
…until you run out of ammo. Problem is, some of us keep thinking in terms of a non zombie economy, where fuel and ammunition don’t need to be hoarded. Hell, why not just call in an air strike on that there quarry? Or helicopter over it and drop cluster bombs? These are certainly functional solutions, but we need to be thinking in terms of Gilligan’s Island technology and sustainability.
And I vote that if we’re going to leave someone in the cab with several days worth of food and water awash in thousands of walkers, that it not be ME.
It occurs to me to ask: is there actually a road leading up to that dropoff back into the quarry? I’d hate to have to herd thousands of walkers somewhere if there wasn’t a convenient road to drive on.
It’s not established how fast the zombacalypse happened or how much time survivors had to raid the various stockpiles. One reasonably-well-stocked Virginia gun store could easy have thousands of rounds for various rifles, shotguns and handguns. I realize it’s a fine line between the zombies multiplying too slowly (thus they should have been fairly easy to handle early on) and too fast (thus the world should be full of abandoned resources, including ammunition), but if a driving plot element is that the first Alexandrians are too naive to deal with zombies, Rick shouting at them isn’t going to help.
Anyway, that’s why you have two bulldozers, with a heavy chain joining them, so one can be towed by the other if it breaks down. If there are tens of thousands of zombies in a narrow column, it seems foolish not to consider going all lawnmower on them.
That is a good idea, if your and Rick are driving the bulldozers.
I thought I just saw tractors, perhaps a backhoe.
Okay, let’s say bulldozers are out, which is a pity, I must say. Picture two pickup trucks, each with a bar across the flatbed at such a height that if two people were seated facing the back, they could comfortably rest their rifles on that bar such that the barrels were about 5.5 feet off the ground. Then drive the two trucks slowly, side by side, with four shooters blasting away. The noise keeps the zombies following, and each shot could easily take out three or four at a time considering how tightly clustered they are, and having two shooters per truck means they can take turns to reload or to change weapons if one jams or overheats. Equip a third truck similarly as a backup, in case one fails. Heck, equip a whole bunch of trucks and rotate them and the shooters all through the day. Efficient, effective and economical, and the horde should be fairly-thinned as you died-piper further and further away. By sunset, speed up and leave them behind, hopefully a good thirty miles down the road.
Of course, the air horn sounded by persons unknown will make a mess of any plan.
It is too bad that they cannot bury them in rubble from the quarry.
It would use a lot of precious fuel, and take too long.
Since it’s a quarry, why not use one of those Godzilla-sized dump trucks to simply run over and squishify all the walkers into a red paste? There’s no way the walkers could reach the cabin, and simply piloting the truck in a spiral path should get most of the walkers splattered.
Or, get a few garbage trucks, weld a dumpster onto the lift arms like a bucket, drive around scooping up walkers and dropping them into the compactor, when full, just run the compactor and dump the slurry into a disposal trench, heck, you could probably render the slurry into viable biodiesel fuel…
Concrete. Lots and lots of concrete. Leave 'em there, layer in more concrete as needed as more zombies fall in.
I realize that would be an utter fecktonne of concrete, and that it’s not very compelling TV. But my first thought was to just keep them in the quarry.