We have a bunch of civilian walkers with their hands bound.
A field full of dead soldiers, badly decomposed, in left-where-they-fell positions. (Some of the weapons R&M collected were from hands, so definitely human when they stopped moving, not walkers. Also, since they weren’t walker remains, someone had to come through and double tap them all…but left their weapons lying there with the dead)
Several soldier walkers with weapons still slung. So they died “peacefully,” but suddenly enough to have rifles over their shoulders.
A carnival that didn’t even have the windows secured for the night. Another clue that something happened “suddenly.”
A building (that apparently was scheduled for condemnation for a bad roof…sigh) chock full of pallets of supplies still all on the pallets, and the pallets still wrapped in plastic.
Boy it is really tempting to assume all these were intentional clues carefully shown to the audience to build up to some revelation. But I suspect it was just lets toss lots of elements out there with no overall significance in the mold of LOST.
Well, given the inconsistency of the writing up till now, this entire scene could just be a bastard mess of images and contradictions having no real purpose.
Or maybe……. The bound hands says prisoners, the civilian clothes says police action. But regular armed forces don’t do civilian policing except under very special conditions. So the timing had to be after the initial stages of the emergency, but before total breakdown of society when even military garrisons dissolved. So maybe it was a raid on a carnival suspected of hoarding or trafficking in stolen supplies? The fencing was just normal perimeter fencing for a town fairgrounds.
Or it was closer to the end, near to total chaos, and these were rogue soldiers raiding and taking prisoners/slaves? And somebody decided to fight back, from an elevated perch, taking out lots of soldiers with head shots. Or not exclusively head shots – killed but not brained would later turn and get up, while dead-heads stayed to rot. So the count is biased. Maybe several carnies and roustabouts objected to being enslaved? Somebody after all drove a car into a soldier at enough speed to insert him in the windshield. Maybe somebody grabbed a gun, and once the shooting started and people started dying, walkers would make everything even crazier. Or everybody just went nuts (yeah, I know – when everybody around you is nuts, can you go nuts-er?) to the same effect. Crossfire and the walkers finished off whoever was left. And the fortuitously present fence maintained the tableau.
Look, I’m trying here, all right? I’ve made my share of complaints, and I am far less than satisfied with these recent episodes. But I’m trying to appease myself by inserting some level of rationality. Bear with me!
There was a prop from Fear the Walking Dead that was printed instructions for medical personnel to “Humanely restrain the ill”. I wonder if the army was containing people they believed to be ill instead of zombies, and, of course, it fell apart.
I remember reading an article that the Powers that Be like creating scenarios for their Zombie set pieces so that the set piece tells a story you can work backwards from. This one was an interesting one.
One way you could explain what happened: It was a prisoner holding camp shortly after Z day, and it suffered a gas or biological attack. Everyone died in the state they were in. The soldier in the windshield was either hit by someone trying to crash the gate, or someone died in their car and it went out of control.
Well we know the Military was very heavy handed in the early days of the crisis so maybe the military gassed the area to try to contain the disease (futile of course).
