The Walking Dead Season 4

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by Dream, May 6, 2013.

  1. Conundrum

    Conundrum Commodore Commodore

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    It is.
     
  2. Scout101

    Scout101 Admiral Admiral

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    Then again, having read none of the comics, i already know more than I wish I did about Abraham, despite his 5 minutes of screen time. And people are dropping cute 'wink wink' comments about the sat phone as well. And can't pretend the cannibal comment was made as a random guess, as there's bit about that coming up that you're speculating are involved, no?

    SO yes, you're making a guess, but a guess with some pretty specific backup, seeing as that's the source material to draw from. Don't HAVE to go that direction, but you know it's an option and can't help but spoiling everyone else on it.

    Otherwise, what in the TV show has given even the hint of cannibalism on the show? Don't think it's been mentioned at all, so what prompted the guess? Right, spoilers...
     
  3. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Oh? Did you feel the "Venus probe" radiation explanation in the original Night of the Living Dead ruined the entire film? Did that alter one bit of the isolation and terror?

    Explanations do not ruin plots. It adds dimension to the background and motivations.
     
  4. Sindatur

    Sindatur The Gray Owl Wizard Admiral

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    I'd like to call your attention to the word I bolded. One movie can be an exception, and not necessarily included in Most, and BTW, they didn't go into how things went South, which is also part of what you quoted and responded to.

    And yea, if folks are taking comic spoilers and dressing them up as simply Speculation, that's pretty crappy, I have not read the comics and I deliberately do not open the spoiler code.
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2014
  5. Silvercrest

    Silvercrest Vice Admiral Admiral

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    This is aside from all these dead guys shambling around eating people, right?

    :p
     
  6. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

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    General scarcity of food? Demonstrated desensitization to dismembering human bodies? Multiple run-ins with different groups of not nice people?

    I stopped reading the comics after about issue 30 and could have guessed that cannibals would show up in a storyline eventually.
     
  7. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    I would say any show (or movie) based on a source material, as this one is, you take a degree or two of risk on getting spoilers from those who are familiar with the source material when entering in a discussion about it.
     
  8. kitik

    kitik Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Wow, strongly disagree. It's taken them a good 18 months to turn into headshot experts. That is just radically different from your expectation that people should have turned into headhsot experts in the first 12-18 hours of the ZA.






    Keep in mind that when this all started, they were not fighting zombies. They were helping "sick" people. And a bunch of police and nurses and doctors probably got bit and then kept on working. And then within a few hours they were infecting other people.

    Think about how many millions of folks' last words were something along the lines of "calm down now, lets talk about this". (Or at least their last words before being bitten.)

    By the time folks realized what was going on and how serious the problem was, more than half the population could have already fallen.

    Generally, when people get sick, the first thought is to help them, not to kill them.
     
  9. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    Rick, a sheriff's deputy in Bung-Hole, Georgia who had been in a coma for some period of time just a couple of days earlier was popping off head-shots with his pistol like a pro in the second episode of the series as he's running from the tank to the alley Glenn meets him in.

    Now, granted, it took the time between S2 and S3 for the surviving group members to become head-shot experts but, still, it's hardly something that I would think is easy to do outside of controlled conditions. It's not like they went to the shooting range every other day.

    Military personnel, I would suspect, would be able to more accurate when it comes to aiming their weapons. Sure they're taught for "center mass" but they may be more able to strike the head than a civilian.

    That said, I agree with your assessment on how the ZA probably first came down. Initially people probably weren't too concerned after a bite beyond cleaning and then bandaging it. Maybe after a bit some level quarantine. But, again, we've pretty much been shown that whatever happened happened pretty fast.
     
  10. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I'd like to call your attention to the the Venus probe--that was an explanation for the ZA. It sis not ruin anything, and it would be the same for TWD--as long as the writers tell compelling stories. If the series falls flat, it would have nothing to do with providing an explanation for the outbreak.

    Most of the points have no basis in the comic, and again, the TV series is known for altering or ignoring comic plots so much, that any references here are not likely to spoil anything.
     
  11. Sindatur

    Sindatur The Gray Owl Wizard Admiral

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    I still don't remember NotLD (Or any Romero Sequels) going into how things went South and got out of hand

    regarding the Comics, yes, I understand things take turns, but, there are still quite a few broad strokes and Comic events that do still happen, so, it is spoiling to blurt things out, claiming them to be merely speculation, when they are taking comic Spoilers into account
     
  12. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    The "most" NOTLD goes into "explaining" things is perhaps some lip-service played to radiation from a Venus probe. But it's on the background on either the TV or the radio at some point during all of the nailing-up windows action.
     
  13. Sindatur

    Sindatur The Gray Owl Wizard Admiral

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    Yup, that's all I remember too, and wasn't it just speculation, at that, and not a known fact?.
     
  14. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    Pretty much. But I think it's the movie's way of "explaining" things without having to explain them.

    Much like in TWD the characters in NOTLD were not in a place, position or even of individual intelligence to know exactly what was going on. Sort of the appeal of the movie and even this show. Shit is happening but how you or I would be in such an instance we'd be clueless on what exactly was happening and why.

    I really think the most TWD is going to explain things is what we learned at the CDC way back in the end of Season 1 and, really, that's probably all of the explanation we deserve. There was a virus the CDC and other organizations were battling a few months before the series started then a few weeks before the series started the infection "went global" and apparently overwhelmed humanity and its capability to cope with and deal with the crisis.

    Everyone already has the infection and anything short of a severe brain injury causes you to reanimate after death after some period of time.

    That's probably all we're going to get.

    How did society collapse in a matter of weeks? Hard to say. We were ill prepared to deal with everything. And at first the seriousness of getting bitten/scratched by the "walkers" wasn't realized. It then balloons from there.

    One zombie bites/scratches a nurse or a soldier. That soldier dies from the infection and you now have two zombies. And early on it seemed officials weren't proactive enough when it came to killing those suffering from the reanimation. Hell, even in Rick's hospital they didn't kill all of the zombies and had just locked some in some wing of the hospital behind a metal door.

    Overwhelmed, initially not being aggressive in dealing with the problem and eventually sheer numbers caused society to fall.
     
  15. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    It was written for a reason--to provide the cause for the ZA. There was a choice to bypass explanation and simply focus on the problem in progress (as seen in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake's news reports), but the script created a specific point about the Venus probe's radiation. NOTLD had a tight script with few--if any fat, so everything had a point, and again, the explanation did not take anything away from the horror.
     
  16. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

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    The thing is, in NOTLD, even if you take the radio report about the venus probe as being the reason for the ZA, it makes absolutely no difference to the story. None of the characters make use of the information.
     
  17. Mister Fandango

    Mister Fandango Fleet Captain

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    So why aren't you losing your mind screaming and yelling about how stupid a reason "Venus probe radiation" is for a cause? And how are you accepting just one random guy's equally random guessing about what might have been the cause as the actual cause when, within the movie's own universe, no one can agree on what that cause was? Does "verifiable facts" mean nothing to you and your oh-so-mighty intellect?

    Oh, and how are those slow moving zombies a threat in the first place? Surely the military -- comprised of all the Special Forces black ops superheroes that you seem to think the entirity of the armed forces is made up of -- would have swooped in and stopped it from spreading as soon as the first zombie showed up, wouldn't they? Not to mention every redneck with a shotgun, which you also seem to think is the norm in every single location the world round. I mean, only part of the U.S. is being affected by the none-apocalypse during the movie, so surely they could have cleaned that up lickity-split. Isn't that your main point of bitching about The Walking Dead? Nevermind that in TWD it's (presumably) a world-wide phenomena. In NOTLD, though, it was a much smaller situation, so there shouldn't have been a problem at all and it never should have escalated to the scale it did in the film. Doubly so when everyone, somehow, instantly knows that you just have to bash them in the skull to kill them. Because that's just common knowledge, apparently, and something any normal person would assume when faced with one in a universe that's never heard of them before.

    Right?

    Oh, and let's not even talk about the original question I asked: How stupid is that for a reason? Why would "Venus probe radiation" turn a completely alien lifeform into a ravenous brain-eating undead monster? I had no idea the electromagnetic spectrum had the power to do that, Venusian probe or otherwise. But, pfft, YOU accept it, so clearly it MUST be a sound and logical reason above reproach. Fuck viruses, though.
     
  18. Conundrum

    Conundrum Commodore Commodore

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    It's pretty insulting to everyone for them to sit there and post comic spoilers then try to pretend like it's not a blatant spoiler. Like I said...it's like some strange form of OCD...
     
  19. RJDiogenes

    RJDiogenes Idealistic Cynic and Canon Champion Premium Member

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    Not only did Night of the Living Dead provide a (silly) explanation for the ZA, but the ZA was pretty much over by the end of the movie. It's a lot different than TWD. It's even a lot different from Romero's other movies. The ZA may have become a genre unto itself, but each example is different. Return of the Living Dead had an explanation, too, but for the most part we're presented with a scenario where the recently dead come back to life and society collapses because of it. If Walking Dead ends with an explanation for the zombies and the restoration of society, I'll be fine with that, but it's not really necessary.
     
  20. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Your view of the quality of reason is irrelevant. That reads as a dodge for the lack of an explanation on TWD.

    However, the fact a reason was created is relevant. It shows NOTLD (or The Return of the Living Dead--with its military canisters, for that matter) did not cop out of a reason because the writers were too afraid (or creatively challenged) to have characters (or a source of information) do what ANYONE would do in such a situation: ask or provide the "why."



    Yeah...because the super-Clonetrooper-Jedi-Kryptonian zombies you are obviously implying exist just got the jump on everyone--including people trained to take down anyone considered a threat. Meanwhile, you accept that a small band of untrained people seem to march through towns, prisons, the forest, etc., slaughtering zombies with the routine of turning on a light.

    You just need to stop, since it is clear you do not have any idea how armed the world is--and its not just your "rednecks." There's no shortage of armed people, or violent people who are quite comfortable killing with anything they get their hands on.

    Who told you that? The film never suggests the problem was limited. Even after Ben's "group" dies, it is clear the zombies still exist, and posses were still necessary.