Nah, not really. In past seasons he went completely off the rails and was relegated to practical nothingness until he had his “comeback” moment. He is the main character, and has been a pretty good one IMO. But he’s hardly a philosophy.
Wow, I had to go back and rewatch that but you’re correct - it’s incredibly misleading though, because the person painting Glenn’s name just happens to be a female of the same size and build as Maggie, with the same shoulder-length brown hair, whose face we never see: screengrab here. But we know it’s not her because in the next shot, Aaron turns and sees Maggie, wearing a different outfit and her hair in a ponytail, over by a pond, and then follows her into the armory.
I’m halfway through this episode and I had to pause because I was saying “Oh, my fucking God!” too often.
When I saw them painting names on the inner wall, I said “Oh, my fucking God, is there really no better use you could find for your time?!”
Now the blonde woman whose name I never learned has put down a woman who I gather killed herself (and rather inconsiderately did so in a way that would endanger others), and blondie is now making an emotional speech, I think the fifth such speech in the episode so far.
Oh, my fucking God, this is terrible. With a little patience and minimal effort, the townspeople could have killed at least a thousand walkers by now, just by head-stabbing them through the gate or dropping objects on them from the top of the fence. Instead, we’re getting vapid speechifying set to sad music.
Oh, my fucking God, I have to wait four more days for the next episode of Z Nation, and it can’t come soon enough.
And then what do you propose they do about the ensuing pile-up of bodies that would eventually create a convenient corpse-ramp over the wall for the remaining walkers? (and that’s not even considering how bad the stench in Alexandria would get, although it’s gotta be pretty awful already)
Unless they can kill all the walkers and remove the bodies, or carry out their alternate (and more practical) plan of leading them away, there’s really no point in killing just a few of them.
Walk down the fence a ways, bang on fence. Walkers follow. Lead them up to the spot where the scaffolding with four-five people with long spears is set up. Kill a bunch of walkers until they pile up some. Move scaffold down a hunnert feet. Bang on fence. Walkers follow. Lead to new area of scaffolding, etc. After you’ve led the remaining ones around a curve in the fence so they have no line of sight to the first pile of bodies, run out with a pickup truck, gaff the bodies into the bed, drive a mile, dump bodies. Come back for next pile. By the time you went once around the perimeter you’ll have thinned that herd something fierce AND you’ll have used the walkers to check the integrity of your fence along the entire perimeter while you’re there to keep an eye on things.
The problem with stuff like this is that it’s not exciting and new and super dangerous. It’s a damned cleanup chore, just like mucking out stalls every morning or cleaning the catbox. It’s gross, nobody likes to do it, it can be hazardous but you have to take care of business so you learn how not to screw it up. Makes for dull teevee, don’tcha know. Much better to have idiots wandering around randomly doing absolutely nothing while the fucking zombies keep bashing into the walls like the world’s stinkiest battering rams. Because that will fix everything. Yeesh.
No, that’s not the problem with it. They did that fine at the prison. The problem with it is that there’s enough walkers to surround the entire fence 20 deep.
They’re waiting a day for Daryl, Abe and Sasha to get back, honk their horns and lead the back half of the herd away. It’s a proven successful strategy provided nobody lays on an air horn back at Alexandria while the herd is being led away.
The problem with the staging in the show is that yes, they can easily kill off every last walker we’ve seen attacking the walls.
The way the characters are treating it, there are thousands upon thousands outside the wall right this moment, but from what we’ve seen, it’s more like hundreds after a half day of build-up, and they could have just been mowing them down with a few squads of people with makeshift spears. Most of that can be done safely from the top of the walls, and then go out in a secure group to get the stragglers, with lookouts on the walls with guns in case things get hairy.
Even if there were thousands upon thousands, I don’t understand why almost every single Alexandrian isn’t just going nuts with spears. It may take days or weeks, but you’ll get enough of them to thin out the herd considerably, enough to go out.
Yes I understand the suspension of disbelief, but the fact that zombies are a finite quantity, and that you can significantly cull or come close to eliminating the local supply is not a difficult one to grasp. Hell, they grasped it at the prison, but for some reason it’s just gone by the wayside.
Yes, they could easily kill the walkers in so many ways. They couldn’t as easily kill Wolves, an unspeficied number of whom remain out there. As Rick says to the kid at the lookout post, the walkers are guarding them now. That suggests more faith in the fence than I have, but it sits well enough in the story.
Do de-animated undead stink worse than they once did? Are there similar health risks to surrounding yourself with corpses that you can’t safely clear, that aren’t presented by a zombie horde? Violence isn’t always the answer…
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Thin out the herd a bit while you can take advantage of the wall’s height advantage. Be a little bit proactive, for cryin’ out loud!
Who’d do that? The housewives and intellectuals, devastated by the scope and scale of the terrorist incident that just shattered their community? Excellent idea, let’s waste what energy they have constructing unwieldy weapons for untrained warriors, who will probably be prone to falling off the fence they’re leaning over to get some good downward force.
There are some veterans there of course - though Rick is injured and exhausted, Maggie’s otherwise engaged and so on. It may be that someone’s in their garage fabricating a fence-clearer, but I imagine Rick would still argue that the walkers are keeping the Wolves away.
Will the fence hold? When we saw them building the detour fence for the herd, did it show how deep they were buried? They did have an architect on hand, if the story says it will hold, then it holds well enough if you don’t spook the walkers. Everyone is safe from Wolves for a while, and we wait for the Walker Guides to return and pick up the stragglers.
How could the walkers get spooked? Erm…light, sound…we know that. Oh, also, gallivanting about on the walls waving pointy sticks at them and lobbing rocks.
Probably a good idea to prep that sewer escape route all the same…
I don’t think I’d want to do that. Figure you spear 500 of them, thousands remain. Walker Guides return and lead the several thousand away, now you have 500 walker corpses to dispose of.
Seems like a lot of wasted energy.
I was thinking it might be good way to toughen up the softies, but, yeah, they would probably wind up falling off to certain death.
Then they should do and reduce the surplus population. Seriously, if anyone is so fragile and clumsy that they can’t use a spear (or just drop a ten-pound weight with a rope tied to it, retrieve the weight and drop it again) under these controlled conditions, then they will probably never be useful in defense of themselves or the community.
Meanwhile, zombies are pressing up against the front gate - get a spike of some kind, spend an hour so delivering head-punches. Rocket science, this ain’t. Brain surgery, maybe. I don’t buy the World War Z “human pyramid of zombies” thing - it looks cool but is completely ridiculous.
Besides, if the smell of zombie guts is enough to cloak humans (as has been demonstrated when plot-convenient and forgotten when plot-convenient), then surrounding the walls of Alexandria with piles of killed zombies should be an effective, if unpleasant, passive defense. Letting them continue to circle the walls all hissy and growly just generates noise to attract more, irrespective of how quiet the Alexandrians make themselves, and it doesn’t really look like they’re trying that hard anyway.
So you’d like to have them constantly pushing against the wall all day and night? That seems like a sure case of allowing the wall to collapse at some point in time.
I think the Wolves are totally nuts and I don’t think a hoard of walkers would stop them from coming back honestly. They could always find out how many Wolves there are, if Morgan ever gets smart and tells someone he’s got one held captive.
So, about that blood on the wall. It seems like most people were interpreting that as coming through the wall. When I first saw it, my first thought was that it was dripping from above, even though that didn’t really make much sense given the corrugations on the wall. I was assuming that Spencer was up in the tower and had offed himself.
I have to say that I really, really, really hope that it isn’t coming through the wall. Sheet metal isn’t porous, and there were no rivets or other connectors or any hole whatsoever at the point they showed it coming through, at least as far as I recall.
Ultimately, I bet that people are correct, and it’s supposedly coming through the wall. It would be just another example of the writers thinking up something that would “look really cool” even though it makes no sense whatsoever.
I didn’t pay attention. Could it be passing between a seam in the wall panels?
I’m thinking of a weight on a rope swinging back and forth at less that head height, playing “Whack a Zom”.
BB guns would probably work on most of them, but I would really like to see a few million marbles placed in front of the herd.
Spencer is quite the politician, I hope he did not off himself because I can’t take blank look Deanna anymore.
I picture a farm windmill that makes noise and is covered in reflective strips of tape, but instead of being linked to a water pump, it drives (and is surrounded by) a series of tetherball-like weights on ropes, set about five feet off the ground. Walkers attracted by the noise and light of the windmill shamble toward it - whack! - off with their heads. Visit the site every few days to clear it and you’ve got an otherwise perpetual walker-killing-machine.
It’s pretty Wile E. Coyote, I admit. Morgan’s passive and quiet defense of just surrounding his hideout with pikes that walkers would impale themselves on is a lot simpler, though not as cool.
They need to raid a fair ground or an amusement park for parts to construct these infernal machines.