Yeah, but the tension was destroyed for me since the opening of the show makes it clear he survives (which you missed, so that probably made the scene more effective.)
So here’s a question about zombies in general:
Zombies attack living humans. This is because they eat living flesh. Once bitten, a human becomes a zombie.
So are zombies just easily sated in their appetites? You saw what they did to the horse- flesh and guts and eyeballs and then they took the hooves and made Jell-O and one probably went for the saddle, so why don’t they do that when they attack humans? You’d think there’d be next to nothing left to convert into a deadwalker, and with a couple of the ones in this ep there wasn’t much but mostly they seem to stop eating after a couple of bites of jowl and then they leave the rest.
Nope - the prelude was set between being back home with the black guy and his son and running out of gas on the way to Atlanta.
They do - that’s probably what happened to the 1/2 zombie Rick put out of its misery. But most people don’t survive encounters with a large pack of zombies like that - most infections are received from a careless encounter with an individual or small group of zombies.
This is a proper Romero-style outbreak.
Not being bitten is not a preventative to becoming a zombie. It just means you won’t get the lethal fever. Anyone who dies becomes a zombie.
Everybody in the morgue?
Zombies.
Everybody who died, but hadn’t been moved to the morgue?
Zombies.
Every doctor, nurse, orderly, ME, and patient surprised by those zombies, and not consumed completely?
Zombies. (Or infected with the fever, and dying fairly quickly from that…THEN they become zombies.)
It IS weird that Rick’s room was untouched (however, with the door closed, I guess they just never sensed him, and the door never got opened), but there’s nothing to explain about how the hospital was overrun…it’s a hospital. In a Romero-style outbreak, there’s only two worse places to be - a mortuary, or a graveyard.
Though in this universe, it doesn’t seem like hospitals are necessarily more dangerous than the surrounding area. It looks like the hospital Rick was in continued to function for some time after the outbreak was in full swing - the authorities were dumping zombie bodies there, there was a military encampment outside the hospital, and so on. It doesn’t even seem like the place was completely over-run by zombies - the halls were empty, the room full of zombies was still barricaded, and so on.
My guess is that the hospital was evacuated when the surrounding area became too heavily infested, and at least the first stages of the evacuation were fairly well-controlled. It probably got a bit hairy towards the end - hence Rick being overlooked, military equipment being abandoned, and so on.
I thought graveyards and mortuaries were fine - previously dead corpses didn’t rise, it was just any newly dead once the outbreak begins.
What do you mean “nope”–that’s the way I interpreted it, which is something you can’t negate. Whether it was actually true or not doesn’t matter–I was under the impression that scene showed something later and destroyed the tension. If the scene is as you believe, then it was poorly done (several of my friends were also under the same impression).
At any rate, at what point was it clarified when it took place?
I’d want to pad lock the cooler door just in case, but you’re right graveyards would actually be pretty safe, especially one in a rural area with high walls and a gate. In the begining there could be overlap were a recentely deceased person get’s sent directly to the funeral home and rises while the mortician’s working on it. In NotLD '90 Savini had a cadaver reanimate just as it was about to be buried, open it’s casket & attack the mourners before chasing after Barbara. Funny he got the mortician’s slit right (it’s clothes were falling off), but ignored that it’s eye’s would’be been glued shut and it’s mouth stuffed with cotten before it’s jaw was wired shut. A fully preped zombie from a funeral home would be pretty amusing to watch.
So you watched the scene involving Rick’s acquisition of the horse, and you’re still confused about when the encounter with Little Girl Zombie was supposed to have taken place? That may not be the film makers’ fault.
Can you elaborate? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.
Well, the horse scene gives several clues regarding the timing of the opening sequence, in which we see Rick drive his sherriff’s vehicle up to some abandoned/wrecked vehicles before walking to the gas station, gas can in hand:
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Rick approaches the country house with the same gas can in his hand, which indicates that he’s
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still searching for gas that he didn’t find at the station. We know it’s after the gas station scene, because
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Rick leaves the scene riding the horse instead of driving the car he had in the Li’l Orphan Zombie scene. We know this all happens before Atlanta, because Rick rides into the city on the horse he liberated from Suicide Mansion.
That was my interpretation of the sequence any how.
Sequence of events.
#1. Rick leaves town in the police cruiser.
#2. Rick encounters the little girl zombie while attempting to acquire fuel.
#3. Rick gets a horse.
It didn’t seem unreasonable to me that he found gas and reclaimed his car (either by tracking back or getting a lift from someone else), particularly after losing his horse. The gas can does make sense, but that’s a really subtle detail.
That timeline does make sense, but I’m not changing my stance of it being poor storytelling by infusing apparent confusion (as I said, other people I know didn’t know when it took place either–if one who had read the comics) which negated later tension…which was also mostly negated by the fact he’s the protagonist and very likely wouldn’t be killed in the first episode (something that I suspect may be a problem for throughout the series, assuming both that they incorporate similar scenes and that I were to continue watching).
You forgot #4, where Rick loses horse.
I loved it. But that may have just been due to low expectations. I generally am not fond of zombie movies (except comedies like Shaun of the Dead / Fido / Zombieland). But wow, this was a really great show. I was stunned by the cinematic quality. It really had more of a film feel than a TV show. The effects were great. I was blown away by the half-zombie and the highway to Atlanta. Anyone know the budget? The hospital scene, and the scene where there’s a abandoned city until you turn the corner and see a waiting horde of zombies, were powerful.
Granted, in hindsight, problems people have mentioned I can’t disagree with. But I didn’t notice them at the time. I did think the shoot out was stupid. Seriously how can you not check the vehicle for other occupants? I also didn’t buy the ease with which the zombies dehorsed the cop. I would think a horse could ease plow down a crowd of staggering humans. I wasn’t fond of the prelude - they should have left that out.
I was under the impression that freezing prices was standard practice during martial law. And eventually rationing.
The only people who get devoured like that are those attacked by a swarm of zombies and there’s nothing to distract them. Even if a zombie has a fresh kill right in front of it it’ll still loose interest the moment it senses a live person or animal. And if you think about it it’s unlikey that even the swarm victims still have intact brains (a skull is a very hard thing to crack open) so even a completely imoblile head would still technically be a zombie.
Or it was longer than a weak, and the nursing staff stopped shaving him at some point.
Rumour has it AMC started planning for a second seasom before the premiere.
The remake of Dawn also had a little girl zombie mistaken for a living girl. The original Dawn also had two you zombie boys escape from a locked closet in an abandoned airport.
I mean “nope” as in “you (and your friends) are incorrect”. I thought it was pretty clear that that’s when the little girl incident took place. (Not at the time - mind you. I was under the impression that the prelude was going to lead up to the shootout, since I’d read the comics and knew that’s how he ended up in the hospital.) It’s extremely logical to put the following incidents in order:
- Leave Hometown USA in a cop car.
- Arrive at an abandoned gas station looking for gas in that cruiser (with gas in the tank) and encounter Zombie Girl.
- Run out of gas.
- Hop on a horse.
Going back to the DVR, we see that the cop car he leaves in is cruiser #134 - same as the cruiser that pulls up into the gas station in the prelude. Of course, that doesn’t mean after he survives the tank situation he doesn’t backtrack all the way to his cruiser, find gas somewhere and then go to a gas station where he has Zombie Girl encounter - but that’s overly complicated and doesn’t make any sense (there’s no reason to go find that particular cruiser any more, the person on the radio in the tank is a new plot point/direction - why backtrack?, etc.).
Your account of the situation would be:
- Leave Hometown USA in cruiser #134.
- Run out of gas.
- Find a horse, go to Atlanta.
- Get stuck in a tank.
- Talk to Radio Guy.
- ???
- Leave Atlanta and walk past thousands of vehicles to go find trusty old cruiser #134.
- Go to a gas station and have Zombie Girl encounter.
To make it clear - there is no reason whatsoever to backtrack and get that exact same cruiser. You may have noticed that there is no shortage of abandoned cars already on the roads.
- Could have happened at any point after 7. And #7 is no more idiotic than him going to Atlanta in the first place–we’re dealing with Zombie-movie logic, and clearly this show has it in spades.
The fact that you went back to the DVR is telling. That’s poor story-telling; it would have been better had they omitted the opening scene entirely. It added nothing but a cheap zombie scene reminiscent of the also unneeded opening to Jurassic Park.
For some reason in reading this list I heard them sung by Ernest T. Bass (around 0:40). I could totally see Ernest T. falling in love with a zombie woman who still won’t have anything to do with him.
I was going for more of Ranger Brad.