Walking Dead Recap: Infected

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18 Responses

  1. Glyph says:

    As far as the rats, I assumed it was the girl (who was chastised by Carl last ep for naming the walkers). Maybe she does it without being observed whenever Glenn and Maggie are having loud sex in the watchtower every night.

    And yeah, their internal security is TERRIBLE. In an environment where anyone who dies (forget the flu, what if Herschel has a heart attack in his sleep?) becomes lethal, they should have the buddy system / regular check-in / headcounts. They should lock themselves in their cells at night.

    Pretty-Voiced Blonde Herschel’s Daughter Baby-Sitter Girl (that is the character’s name, right?) knows Tom Waits songs. This is only slightly less plausible than her being familiar with the Ramones or Scarlett Johannson cover versions.

    Gotta admit, Michonne acted the heck out of the baby scene. Or maybe I’m just sensitive to that stuff right now.Report

    • North in reply to Glyph says:

      Agreed, at the very least there should be a tradition/policy of tying your ankle to the bed at night or something. That’s not going to impede you much if you need to go to the bathroom but it’ll be a near impossible or at least noisy obstacle for a newly animated walker.Report

      • Glyph in reply to North says:

        Man, if I wanted to go to the bathroom, I’d wait for daylight. They’ve never heard of chamberpots?

        Seriously, each cell has a BARRED DOOR. Lock that thing at night. Go scavenge some bike lock/chains for the purpose and jam/wreck the cell door’s internal lock if you are worried about being locked in against your will.

        Though the image of a zombie dragging a bed around by the ankle is pretty funny. I’m sure one of these goobers would STILL manage to get et by him.Report

      • North in reply to North says:

        Agreed, you could even just tie the door shut. A bike lock or a simple knot are equally impenetrable to a walker at the door.Report

    • Don Zeko in reply to Glyph says:

      Seriously. If they cared about plausibility, Judith would be getting a steady stream of Taylor Swift or something. Still, I like the idea of how popular music would propagate in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. It’s be sort of like how in The Dark Tower ‘Hey Jude’ is a folk standard that people play at saloons.Report

    • Hoosegow Flask in reply to Glyph says:

      With the number of people they have, there is no excuse for anyone to ever be alone. You should have a small group of guards at night, to run routine patrols and even escort people to and from the bathroom. It’s conceivable that the people from Woodbury (who occupied cell block D) may be “soft” from living in a secure environment, but Rick’s group should know better.

      Bungee cords seem to be the easiest way to go. You wouldn’t have to lock the cell doors, just two or three across the doorway should make it really difficult for walkers to get in, yet trivial for the living. With all the pickups in the south, they should be plentiful.Report

      • North in reply to Hoosegow Flask says:

        I think you pretty much nail it with bungee cords Hoosegow. String a couple across your cell door with a few empty cans dangling from them and an invading walker would wake the living trying to get in (or out). They’d also make good “if I should die before I wake” straps on beds while remaining easy as pie for a living person to remove with ease.Report

  2. Patrick says:

    The Walker crowd at the fence doesn’t make much sense. We know Walkers are (at best) human strength, they’re not the rending sort of zombies that have superhuman strength.

    Now, I’m no expert on prison facilities, but if there exists anywhere in America a prison fence that can be budged by less than a thousand people (literally) crushing themselves up against it, I’d be gobsmacked. So the whole “zombie at the fence” thing seems implausible from a storyline standpoint… but even aside from that, they’ve seen the fence bulge inwards in previous weeks, they haven’t done any shoring up of it… why? You know, they can just put up one of those spear palisades *outside* the fence and the zombies would impale themselves on *that*. A trench?

    Their interior security sucks, too, as everyone already mentioned. At the very least you’d figure the kids would be locked up at night and they’d have somebody patrolling the floor.

    I dunno, I like the way the characters are interacting with each other, but the way they’re addressing their situation is knocking me out of the story just as much this season as last season.

    They *still* don’t have radios. They haven’t set up a HAM station (this seriously bugs me, Rick as a cop should understand the importance of tactical radio communications).. Nobody has bothered to collect enough vehicles to transport all of the occupants out of the prison if they even need to escape it. Ammunition must be pretty easy to come by at this point (given the speed at which the zombies took over) nobody’s made a stockpile. Nobody has picked up a reload kit from a gun shop and started recycling brass. I haven’t seen a solar panel, or a gas powered generator. The prison would have a diesel generator, why haven’t they gotten it running? Where’s the water coming from?

    I get that they’re aiming for suspense, and the writers do a pretty good job of that part of it, but it wouldn’t be hard to fill in these blaring detail bugs and for cryin’ out loud, they can’t possibly be unaware of the critiques of the show on this score.Report

    • North in reply to Patrick says:

      Agreed on every count.Report

    • aidian in reply to Patrick says:

      I think they started the prison’s generator last season. And I saw an electric light bulb in this episode. Where they’re getting the diesel/propane/kerosene/whatever IDK.

      The suspense angle isn’t great, imho, either. There’s a lot of “what’s outside the frame” and scary music cues combined with dark corners that might have something lurking within. That’s a shortcut to suspense.

      Everything else you said is dead on.

      Walking Dead frustrates the hell out of me. It’s almost a really good show, and in a way that’s so much worse than just being trash.Report

      • North in reply to aidian says:

        And what’s especially odd is that it gets enormous ratings despite all these problems. People must really really like zombie special effects or something because that’s the one thing the series does with unambigous and reliable success.Report

    • Mike Dwyer in reply to Patrick says:

      Patrick,

      Do you watch Revolution? For some reason I keep getting my shows confused and thinking they have no power in TWD. Then I see them driving a car and many of the things you mention drive me bonkers.

      I also think it is ridiculous that they haven’t shored up the permiter better with spikes. Or for godsake, find a backhoe and dig a moat.

      I also refuse to believe they couldn’t keep up with killing walkers through the fence. It’s amazingly easy work.Report

  3. Fish says:

    Concerning the disease, I happened to catch the first few minutes of The Talking Dead after this ep and Chris Hardwick had a writer/producer/some-guy-connected-to-the-show on and he explained that they modeled this new disease after the 1918 flu pandemic (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic). This particular strain struck mostly healthy 20-30 year olds and could kill within 24 hours. One can easily see how problematic such an outbreak could be for the group.Report