Is that what we are supposed to think? I have no recollection of when he became sick but I was just figuring it was some generic infection that required antibiotics, not something zombie related.
Eugene has stuff on his mind. Just because a ‘hot girl’ speaks a few words doesn’t mean he’s going to drop his pants and start wanking (as some viewers at home might do). As if he had a shot at her anyway and they were going to slip off to a closet or something!
Wasn’t she one of Negan’s wives? Nice black dress, not covered in the usual mud, blood, and fear. Supposedly she just stopped by to help out, or because she was bored. The average Savior worker bee doesn’t have that option. Plus, Negan didn’t mind that she was there. I assume that Eugene was originally afraid that Negan might not like it and would make Eugene want to piss in his pants.
My understanding is he got sick when him and Negan smeared guts on themselves to escape that trailer. I am not sure if that’s what the show is meaning to convey but that’s how we’re taking it here. We will see I guess. If the writers paint themselves into a corner on this it’s gonna be hard to break out.
The immunity to zombie bites is a major plot point for a main character in the show “Z Nation.”
Didn’t Negan tell Eugene that he was sending her to cook for his crew?
I viewed that scene as power going to his head. Negan put him in charge of that outpost, so he turned all “bitch, go make me a sammich” to show who was in charge.
Which may be foreshadowing if the story moves toward Negan getting killed and Eugene becoming the new Negan.
I saw it more as Eugene being afraid that Negan would pick up on his role in Carson and Gabriel getting away, and decided that he was going to toe the line to dispel any lingering doubts. And to show that Negan made a good choice in promoting him. New boss is a hardass and all that.
We could not possibly be so lucky.
I sure hope that Gabriel does not develop immunity. I say that for two reasons: a) I don’t like the character and b) because it would further feed his idea that somehow a god who would allow this to happen has chosen him to survive over others.
I did not pick-up on the possibility that Gabriel’s sickness is due to the zombie blood/guts. I also thought it was just an run of the mill infection as a result of his injuries. I really hope they’re not going down the road of tying this to his exposure to zombie gunk. As already noted the show has established on multiple occasions that contact with zombie blood/guts is not a factor for infection. And if they go with an immunity angle - GAH! Additionally, one would think if simple exposure to the blood/guts and antibiotics could create immunity the damn CDC would have identified exposure (not a bite) as an infection risk and tried antibiotics already. Well, the CDC before it went all self-destruct in season 1.
I want to give the show’s writers the benefit of the doubt that they’ll not think we the audience are this stupid but you know… the show writers have routinely assumed we were in the past.
You are correct. I missed that part. I did remember Eugene asking about wine, which directly followed Negan’s promise of Frankie giving Eugene massages, and Tanya cooking. “You know that gal was a chef?”
Now I wonder if Frankie, or Tanya, were part of the group that had asked Eugene to supply them some sort of poison pills? (The same pill that Sasha eventually swallowed in her casket.) It seems that the number of people who could blackmail Eugene for not following Negan’s orders could be growing. Except for the ones who keep dying off, of course. 
Negan doesn’t seem to be aware that everyone already has the walker virus, unless Eugene told him, which it doesn’t appear that he did. I’m not sure that people who spend their days killing walkers would be distraught by seeing arms, legs, and snapping heads sailing over their walls. Flaming body parts, OTOH, would definitely be an attention getter.
Walker guts-covered weapons would be more of a hand-to-hand melee weapon, which means more Saviors would die in combat. Win some, lose some?
Negan is still not aware that Simon killed off Negan’s resources at the trash heap. He’s still assuming that the trash people will be resupplying the Saviors, and that he can afford to lose a few resources at Hilltop. Since the Kingdom’s survivors escaped Simon’s round up, and the Alexandrian’s escaped Negan’s assault, Negan is running out of food faster than he’s running out of bullets.
By this point he has to have seen plenty of people die and become zombified without ever being bitten. Maybe he doesn’t have evidence from the CDC like Rick did about a virus, but he should damn well know only severe head trauma prevents rising. Like, you know, how he prefers to use Lucille to smash skulls in.
That could be working against him figuring it out. That is if he is doing it just to appear to be so brutal that nobody dares cross him. Which seems to be his MO.
But, I can’t remember and haven’t had time to rewatch the episode where Negan killed Spencer on the streets of Alexandria. He used a knife for that instead of Lucile – right? Was that specifically so Spencer would become a walker? Anyone have a clear memory of how that shook out?
I think he just wanted to impress the Alexandrians with his huge knife.
I don’t remember what happened to Spencer when Negan gutted him. I remember Negan cutting Rositas face, after She missed her shot. Stuff happened really fast after that.
Gah! Finally got around to watching this, and was enjoying the episode reasonably well until Negan’s big plan was revealed.
Look, there is NO WAY that zombie guts alone would be enough to kill you, even if they got into a wound. It has been established over and over again that only a bite will kill you. After a zombie fight, no one asks, “Did you have any open wounds that might have gotten some zombie guts in them?” No, they always check to see if you’ve been bitten. And if not, everyone assumes you’ll be just fine.
Sure, if you die from any cause you become a zombie, but if zombie guts were that deadly, there would be no one left. We’ve seen people get the stuff in their mouths, we’ve seen people with open wounds fighting zombies, getting covered in them, and surviving. People have intentionally hidden in mounds of dead zombies, and smeared themselves with zombie guts to blend in with the herd.
Even in today’s episode, the doctor already had a very severe open leg wound and walkers clawing at those legs and climbing all over him, and no one was worried about anything other than being bitten. Dwight also had an open wound on his arm, and was thrown into a struggling zombie. The people in the swamp no doubt had all sorts of open sores on their legs, and yet they wandered into fetid water filled with zombies with no worries about infections.
If this show suddenly portrays zombie guts as some kind of biological weapon that will kill you if it gets in a wound, we can throw out everything we thought we knew about this world. And if the characters believed that zombie guts were this dangerous, they’d have A) thought of Negan’s trick years ago, and B) would dress in head to toe coverings and never go out without gloves and a mask. They’d also be fanatically washing themselves whenever they came back from the outside, because there are dead zombies and guts everywhere.
Someone up thread pointed out that Negan doesn’t know shit about how the zombie infection works.
They confirmed on Talking Dead afterwards that Gabriel’s infection was from the zombie guts. Maybe it’s just “normal infection from rubbing rotting human corpse in your eyes/mouth/open sores”, not the “zombie death bite” infection, since it appears treatable. But the showrunners specifically said that’s where the infection came from and is one of the reasons people don’t just walk around with zombie-gut shirts. Also because it smells like shit.
Honestly though, I question the tactic of “zombie guts”, even if it works. It doesn’t seem any more or less effective than just shooting someone where there are no trauma centers or even real doctors. We haven’t seen the Saviors using melee weapons, so hand to hand would tend to favor the Hilltop and Kingdom folk.
Then again, I’m still wondering why they didn’t just drive a gasoline truck into the Sanctuary and blow them all up when they had the chance.
Plus how many people can both sides possibly have left at this point? I read that the Saviors had about 300 to start and the combined communities much less. And they’ve been murdering each other wholesale for how many episodes?