I wonder why The Kingdom kind of gets a pass with Negan? That is to say, they get a grocery list of what to provide and get to conduct the transaction off site, as opposed to the Saviors rolling up in force and just taking everything they want?
Here’s something that has bothered me about the show though. Other than ex cops like Rick, people who were avid hunters or troublemakers like Daryl or people we actually see train extensively with a weapon like Morgan or Michione, how do these characters actually become “bad ass”? Like Carol the Battered Housewife had some untapped gift for infiltration and assassination? It’s not like you learn a lot of combat tactics from stabbing zombies in the head. Maybe you build up your stabbing arm a bit.
They get a ‘grocery list’ because they’re farmers, and not scavengers. Negan knows what they produce, and it makes more sense collecting the tribute in the form of what they’re good at, than to demand tribute in the form they are not.
As a victim of domestic abuse, Carol has always had to become as invisible as possible to avoid being beaten up by her late, unlamented, husband. She also had to assume a not-victim character around her friends. She had a lot of practice hiding her true self. So that’s the ‘infiltration’ part. As for ‘assassination’, shooting well isn’t that hard. We don’t need to see endless scenes of each character practicing. We just need to see enough, or none at all if we assume that everyone gets trained. As a ‘battered housewife’, Carol has probably had many, many fantasies about killing her husband. So she probably has pretty good planning abilities.
Another possible explanation for The Kingdom getting it easier than our erstwhile group is that Negan and company are more familiar with the residents. He’s already talked to, sized up, and shown force to them. He’s harder on Rick and company because he has to be. They’re new to Negan’s group, and led by a law enforcement officer. In Negan-speak, he’s got to stop that shit before it gets to be a problem.
Yeah, surrender half (or all) the guns Negan finds, but unless his spies have a copy of the inventory, he wouldn’t need to find all you have. It might raise issues if a spy spies you with a gun later, but you are under a mandate to deliver booty - it was found on a scavenger hunt, right?
Er, you quoted my explanation for why I thought that.
We have never seen Negan’s group use walkers as offensive weapons before. We’ve seen the Savior’s chain a bunch of walkers across a road to prevent passage and they tie them to the fence at their base as some sort of security system/warning to others that even in death they’ll serve Negan. But to actually use walkers as an offensive weapon is the hallmark of the Wolves. We’ve seen them use elaborate booby trapped vehicles to attract walkers. The attack on Hilltop looked more like a Wolf attack than the Saviors. And it looked to me like Simon was bullshitting Gregory about it being a message. Just a theory.
I think what he’s saying is that the old loud-car/walker trick is a Wolf tactic. Simon & Co. showed up to collect Negan’s tribute, and just took credit for the Wolf attack because Gregory was giving them credit for it.
I disagree with this hypothesis because the ‘elaborate booby trap’ was a defensive tactic on the Wolves’ part. They used the walkers to protect their stuff. The Wolves didn’t use the zombies as weapons at Alexandria. The dead were already there because they happened to make their attack right as the hoard from the quarry was passing.
At Hilltop, the zombies were intentionally used in a non-defensive role. Also, the doors to the trailers were locked, so as to keep the Hilltopians safe inside. The Wolves would not have done that. (Not to mention that they’re probably a little wary after their defeat at Alexandria.) Clearly, whoever lured the zombies into the community wanted to keep the Hilltopiites safe while they delivered their message. As Simon said, they were going to ‘save’ the Hilltopers from the ‘threat’ the Saviours created.
I agree. If Simon was surprised and so quickly recovered to the “we worked our asses off to provide you an example” line, then the writers are showing subtlety not in evidence before.
The whole drift of their conversation was accuse / deny colluding with Alexandria. I think Simon was just letting Gregory talk to see if he would slip up and say something he shouldn’t.
I fear the Wolves’ storyline is over. They seemed interesting, and were built up to be waaay more than they turned out to be.
Also…Hilltop apparently doesn’t post any guards at night.
And did the budget for extras get cut? For all the viewers know, the population of Hilltop is like eight people.
Smiling and playing “Carol Homemaker” I get. Making Ghillie suits out of zombie guns, destroying the shit out of armed compounds with a scoped sniper rile and single-handedly wiping out a “technical” full of armed Saviors I do not.
LOL…no, it was rhetorical. As in “that doesn’t make sense” as opposed to “what is your reason”.
I find I’m having a hard time getting into it this season.
Part of it might be the constant cycle of road trips, zombie sieges, encounters with other groups who are always at one or the other extreme of “clueless as shit” or “evil as fuck” and “heartbreaking season / mid-season finales”.
Or it just might be I’m getting burned out on bleak, emotionally draining TV series.
Also…burning their mattresses? Yeah sure that was a dick move. Is there a shortage of abandoned mattresses in the greater DC area? Is there really a shortage of ANYTHING if 99% of the population effectively dropped dead overnight?
For that matter, at what point do they say “fuck living under Negan” and simply get in their cars and drive somewhere else? Maybe head out to a lower population state with fewer zombies or up north where the zombies freeze during the winter? They have cars and trucks. Why are they always stuck within walking distance of wherever “home base” is for the season? It’s not like their fortified compounds ever do any good.
Well, if they go far enough west, they could run into the Last Man on Earth survivors.
And after a week of living with Tandy and co., they’ll turn around and return to the stern but merciful embrace of Lucille!
So, who would you rather follow, Rick or Z Nation’s Roberta Warren? I gotta go with Warren, myself. At least she never had a one-person conference call.
Surely Negan doesn’t have the manpower to block every possible road out of Virginia, though. If it ever occurred to the characters to just cut and run (and by “run”, I mean “use a vehicle”, not just meander off on foot like that guy Dwight chased down and somehow managed to find), there isn’t any credible way to stop them. He can try to scare them with threats along the lines of “if anyone runs, there will be reprisals against the people left behind”, but that doesn’t work if his standard behaviour is so casually brutal (i.e. killing or maiming people for minor, even trivial or imaginary, offences) that it forces his serfs to abandon others just for the sake of personal survival.
Up until this season, The Walking Dead has been appointment television for me, where I very nearly watch it live. The only other show that maintains such a status for me is Game of Thrones.
But this season hasn’t been fun at all, to the point that I fell behind/let stack up three episodes on my DVR. I did finally catch up a couple days ago, but much of the fun has been sucked out of the show for me.
It’s not just the bleakness. I think I’m bothered by the radical change in setting. Maybe it’s a wry indictment of southerners, but everything we saw in Georgia was small pockets of survivors struggling to just stay alive. Terminus was the biggest settlement we saw, and that had what, a couple dozen people?
Cut to Virginia, and now there’s more large, thriving communities than you can shake a stick at. So many large communities that their collective economies can fund a MASSIVE community of mob-style shakedown artists running “protection” rackets. (We saw Rick’s group kill upwards of 50 of them, which apparently didn’t make a dent.) Even the rando scrabblers have (had) large numbers, like the Wolves.
I think the story has lost the plot. It’s one thing to show a small community getting larger, and then meeting up with more communities. That could be interesting. But we never got that. What we got is small pockets everywhere we looked, then jump cut and now there’s a bunch of huge communities that have already formed. We definitely skipped a step or ten, so much of this doesn’t feel earned to me.
EDIT: I forgot Woodbury, but I think my point still stands. In retrospect, I think Woodbury felt a bit off to me for similar reasons, but I could just be retconning my feelings on that.