The Walking Dead Season 3

I think the word is that one or both of them may be introduced into the comics because of the show. But I'm not a reader either.

If that guy was one of Morgan's victims, then he's either lost or has no sense, since he was walking TOWARD the town.

The first encounter with him stunk of "trap", but the second did not. If he was the bait for an ambush in that first encounter, there would be other guys back in the trees waiting to shoot the car, rush the car, or whatever. But in the second encounter, the guy was running full-tilt along the road toward them. There's no way anyone in the trees could have followed quickly enough and remained concealed.

 

The second encounter with the hitchhiker may have suggested he wasn't trap bait, but his attitude certainly suggested he was naive. Screaming his head off to attract walkers was bad enough, but hadn't he learned the living aren't to be trusted either? Michonne and Rick could've killed him.

 

Can't be sure, but I've been under the impression the Merle was indeed a character from the comics, but Darryl was created for the show.

 

I don't believe Daryl has ever been planned for inclusion in the comics. The character with a crossbow on a cover in the lead-up to issue #100 was an entirely different individual - and was not remotely friendly.

Both Dixon brothers were created for the show.

 

Wasn't he walking toward the town only after he saw the car? Maybe he was hoping to catch up to them, or head in a direction they might be going

I agree it's an unlikely scenario though. If you'd just gotten screwed out of your weapons & run out of a town by Crazy Morgan, would you be looking to immediately encounter more new strangers in the vicinity? Probably not, but you can't blame me for trying to come up with a reason that a year long survivor would be so monumentally stupid & still manage to live this long

& sure, the second encounter was more of an indication that it probably wasn't a trap, & more about how our heroes are not open to giving people a chance, even with each other, which was the setup for the lesson learned from crazy Morgan. People on their own got problems. Remember that sleeping kook in the shack that was yelling about calling the cops? That's what being alone gets you, a one way ticket to nuttersville

Having said that, I still didn't trust the hitcher in the 2nd encounter either. It was still fishy imo. The bottom line is, it would be exceedingly difficult to have successful 1st encounters with strangers. A year in, people should know this, and if you're lucky enough to get through it without a firefight, you should probably give people a chance, because the more common encounter would be like the bar in season 2

 

I was hoping that when Rick and co were leaving the town, they would stop and tell the hitchhiker that they couldn't take him with them, but that there was a guy in the next town that may need a friend...

 

Okay, we need more webisodes to tell the story of the hitchhiker.

 

Eh? Why would they do that? So that he could surprise Morgan and get killed?

 

I know we go on about the gasoline situation, but shouldn't food also be a concern at this point? Not just the scarcity, but the fact that canned foods have an expiration date, for two reasons. First the food will spoil over time, preservatives or not, and second, from contamination from the metal container. The acids and preservatives can eat away at the cans over time.

Food poisoning should be a real problem for those people not growing their own food. And without ways to treat these gastro-intestinal infections, death is a real possibility.

 

Well, once you accept that the dead are walking and stalking you, what else needs to be justified?

Of course, TWD isn't about a post-apocalyptic society trying to rebuild itself, it's about a small tribe trying to survive, so we probably will never see any practical difficulties like gas shortages or food poisoning.

 

Not quite yet on the canned food. Remember, at most it's been a year. The scarcity of food is a little hard to believe. They need to get smart and hunt down some of the distribution warehouses for the grocery stores. Even the British show Survivors got that right.

 

This is true. We can expect every local grocery store has been cleaned out, but in the U.S., "whareouse" stores such as Wal-Mart, Smart & Final, and Sam's Club truly are warehouses in the stockrooms, so there's bound to be a wealth of food items left over (if the stores are in the smaller towns). Why the Atlanta group did not seek out more of that when running around the city generates more questions than answers.

In addition to food, if I were in that world, vitamins (pill and liquid) would be a must to keep up overall immune strength, and as support for the eventual lack of fruit and vegetables.

 

Let's not forget raiding every pharmacy for antibiotics, blood pressure medication and any number of common drugs. I would be stopping at sporting goods stores for weapons, ammo, camping supplies and duffel bags, and load those bags with drugs.

 

As others have pointed out, canned food can last for years.

I would think clean water would be a bigger problem. Every time some city experiences a halfway significant power outage there are warnings about water contamination....and that's without zombies decomposing in the supply.

 

I have to admit I used to think TWD was a really accurate realistic look at an apocalypse, but now that we're talking about this stuff there are a lot of things that could be addressed. That is one nice thing about Revolution being set mostly 15 years after the apocalyptic event, at that point the characters have mostly moved past having to deal with a lot of these issues.

 

While not directly on point, the documentaries The World Without Us and Population Zero both do a pretty good job of describing how quickly things would fall apart in the apocalypse and why things would be even worse in TWD than seen so far. For example, after just two days without human intervention, the New York City subway system would be flooded. After one year, every nuclear power plant on Earth would have failed or melted down.

 

Sure, but that is assuming no one shuts them down before it gets to the point that they are likely to be unmanned. This wasn't an overnight thing, and nuclear reactors generally aren't in highly populated areas.

 

It does bug me that the only time they bothered to swing by a pharmacy for meds is to pick up some abortion pills. Every wound, from Rick getting stabbed by Morgan to Hershel's leg being chopped of with a dirty ax would require antibiotics to prevent infection & sepsis

I just end up having to let that one go, along with what constitutes exposure to the disease. Michonne had an aquarium of zombie heads spill out all over her wounds & open body cavities. If that don't infect you, what does?

 

Perhaps the zombie virus also adds a certain degree of protection from infection (it must kill microbes to slow the rotting process in the zombies). In any case, there have been mention of scavenging antibiotics on several occasions. In fact, when Daryl first appeared he shared some antibiotics for the benefit of a deathly ill T-Dog.

 

Understood and that is one of the reasons that I said those series were not directly on point. However, they do tend to show how quickly technology and other things would break down without constant human maintenance.