Here’s my other idea. Remember the first season where they made zombie soup and soaked their clothes in it to go out among the walkers? Why not do that all the time when they go on runs? Sure it stinks but I’d rather stink than be mobbed by walkers at a moments notice. Take that up another notch and soak old tarps and sheets in zombie soup and hang them on the fences so the walkers can’t catch the scent of the living inside, maybe the herds would just keep walking instead of piling up on the fence then. Sure it would probably have to be reapplied daily but there is an endless supply of walkers to puree.
Also, I have to agree that the shopping bit was very badly organized. Everyone acted like they were shopping, taking time to look at items, they should have grabbed and ran and at least worked in pairs.
Yes, we need people making stupid mistakes for some drama but do they have to make them all the time? The caving roof was enough of a “whoops, we never saw that coming” moment.
True, but not really the point I was making. It’s not just that things go poorly, it’s that the comic, and the show, presents a world in which things will always go poorly, that all that’s good in the world is shattered and lost, leaving only a handful of immoral monsters to fight it out amongst themselves for the privilege of surviving for a few more miserable years of deprivation and brutality. It’s a stunningly nihilistic premise, that nothing except drawing breath is real or lasting, and that everything else can and will be sacrificed for those extra breaths.
When that is your show, you’d better take care that the audience doesn’t notice that with a few common-sense strategies, the zombies could be reduced to a nuisance, and the humans could work together and regain some sort of normalcy. In short, the issue isn’t that things go poorly for the characters, it’s the way in which they go poorly. If the problems were due to the nature of the zombie-world, or the result of the characters’ tragic flaws (a la Breaking Bad), that’d be fine. Instead, they are due to the need to have zombie mayhem.
Indeed. In rural Georgia, he could have assembled that arsenal from looting just two or three houses.
The zombies seem slow and hapless enough, that, when coupled with their attraction to loud noises, firearms seem to do more harm than good.
Yes, yes indeed. When I was a child I would actually yell at the people on the TV. “Don’t go in there!”, or “NO Oh GOD NO! Run! Run!” or “What? No! Don’t split up!”, or “God these people are so stupid!”. I would actually get mad at how stupid people were, especially when faced with dangerous aliens, zombies, vampires, insane murderers or giant shrews. OK I was kidding about the giant shrews. That movie was awesome.
But you know what I mean. After reaching the age of reason I realized they were actors following a script, and I would become annoyed at the writers. Who must think we are stupid.
At some point I simply stopped watching horror films, unless it was like Aliens or other SciFi, but in any case, I enjoy TWD enough to not yell at the TV. Now I argue with strangers on the internet instead.
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Shouldn’t they be getting to the point that the bulk of the walkers, those infected in the initial months, should be rotting to the point of falling apart and becoming harmless?
I accept the premise of zombies being able to reanimate, move without energy, etc. as just unexplained facts that are necessary for the story. But they’re still made of physical, human flesh and bones. We’ve seen that they decay, their bones still break, parts fall off, they can be made immobile by removing limbs. So it seems that if the survivors can be patient, eventually the great majority of the walkers will decay so much that they fall apart, can’t stand or walk, and are just disjointed skeletons with the jaws snapping. Even the brain, which obviously is necessary for them to function, would eventually turn to goo and presumably stop providing the zombie spark, the same as when a spike is driven through it.
Under this theory, you would have to wait a while but then all the early walkers – sort of the “baby boom” bubble of those infected early on – would decay and become harmless. Then there would still be more who were later on the decay timeline, but eventually you’d be down to a relatively small number of the more recently infected.
I suppose this could all be countered by saying that the infection slows their decay to something much longer than a normal human body. But it sure seems they’re getting stinky and gooey.
It could be that whatever’s reanimating them is also drastically slowing the rate of decomposition. That was the case in both the Living Dead films and the ZSG/WWZ verse. Milton established that zombies can slowly starve to death; maybe they don’t decay as much if they’re eating on a regular basis.
I popped on here the day after the premiere. There were only a couple of dozen posts. I was crushed!
Talking about it on these threads are as much of the entertainment for me too! I would have missed a lot of subtle points - like the weepy eye thing. But, now I feel up to speed!
Plus I have a few IRL friends that watch. They’re amazed on how insightful I am about the subtle plot points. I should give credit where it’s due, I suppose.
It would be fun, and show a learning curve in action. Some armor would fit in, too, something bite-proof: mail, leather, or just duct-taped clothe. The armor they are presently wearing appears to have a lot of gaps.
That’d also present issues when it came to fighting off fellow humans, for which you’d want a gun and stealth, not a pole-axe and bulky armor. We got a bit of that last year with Woodbury, which had defenses oriented around repelling zombies, but not humans. For instance, the troops manning the walls were fully exposed and silhouetted - good for observing oncoming walkers, bad for being fired upon.
Heck, the body armor and riot helmets the prison zombies were wearing would work very well as a defense. But if you have people wearing zombie proof armor it sort of takes the fear out of it.
But then, I just watched The Killer Within episode again, and realized how horrific the series actually is. Even with the zombies under control, the other people are the real danger.
I will admit that when Rick found the buried 1911 handgun and magazine in the garden plot, I was hoping the producers wouldn’t have him do something stupid with it like, oh, I don’t know, slap the mag in, chamber a round and fire at a zombie with it, seeing as the barrel was likely obstructed by dirt, and the gun would end up catastrophically self-disassembling in his hand (colloquially referred to in the gun world as a “Kaboom”)
Thankfully, even though the characters may be stupid, they’re not * THAT* stupid, the weapons consultant did their job on this one…
