AMC's The Walking Dead Season 1 Discussion & Spoilers

[SicOne]

"Zombie Survival Kits can be purchased on my website at www.saveyerass.com, for the low-low price of $249.99..."

[Jack Bauer]

The break between seasons is gonna be rough on me...I want more now.

[PsychoPere]

^ Comics!

[Ryan]

FluffyUnbound wrote:

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Brooks made that battle work by having the military be too dumb to set up a simple stone wall 8 feet high in front of the advancing zombies. Or if there was no time for stone, city busses lined up nose-to-tail.

There were a million zombies. A stone wall or couple buses wasn't going to stop them. Just look at stuff like this.

Brooks does discuss instances where those tactics worked (the ancient Romans) and when they failed (the French Foreign Legion) in The Zombie Survival Guide.

[Ryan]

PsychoPere wrote:

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In the comics, Shane died in issue #5. He and Rick were in the woods near the camp and started arguing, and Shane pulled his gun on Rick. He was preparing to pull the trigger when he was shot in the neck - by Carl.

Dang, I forgot how that happened.

Carl really is going to turn out to be quite the little psychopath with all the people he's killed.

[PsychoPere]

Ryan wrote:

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Carl really is going to turn out to be quite the little psychopath with all the people he's killed.

A few days ago, I read hardcover books five and six, so I'm now up to issue 72 (closer to being caught up!), and you are not kidding.

The saddest part, I think, about Carl killing, for example, Ben is that it really did need to be done. The kid had become far too dangerous to remain with the group.

[Alpha Romeo]

Just finished the Compendium...All I can say is:

WTF!!!

[Base_Delta_Zero]

Aragorn wrote:

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I don't know if anyone here will get it, but he told him... "Yahoo."

Good ol' time-travelin' John Sullivan from the great film Frequency just lookin' out for his pal Gordo.

A little late to the party, but 50-odd damn pages is a lot to slog through.

I'll also chime in on the what did he say question with it being Andrea is infected. The everyone is infected sounds pretty stupid to me. Especially when they already established that if you are alive and infected, you quickly get ill and die. Unless they want this to be a story about a ragtag bunch of survivors racing around looking for a cure that the best scientists in the world couldn't pull out of their collective asses, they can't infect the entire cast.

As for the military complaints, they are all completely valid and have nothing to do with rah-rah US nationalism. Any modern military force, be it US, UK, Nork, Russian or Iranian, would put zombie wave attacks down hard and fast. Unless zombie brain cases are engineered using super-science or their bodies animated by magic fairy dust, high-explosive overpressure will liquefy brain matter not completely destroyed by the bullets, fragmentation and flame of modern weaponry.

If you want to claim that a zombie horde hit by artillery barrages, napalm strikes and daisy cutters, let alone tactical nukes, before facing direct-fire from the front line is going to keep on marching absorbing all those casualties, you are delusional. That zombie head might still be "alive" but it's going to have a tough time advancing through a sea of flames, under a hail of lead and over the mountain of dismembered zombie bits modern firepower just made of the horde.

Ever heard of WWI? Millions of men, faced with the modern weaponry of machine guns and artillery dug continent-spanning trenchlines in days. Reinforced over the weeks with hardpoints, flamethrowers, mines, razor-wire, they were killing fields for human wave attacks. Even chemical weapons couldn't break the lines for long or shift the fronts very far. It wasn't until tanks showed up that true breaches could be formed and exploited. Are the zombies going to develop armored warfare technology? Airpower? I don't think so.

Too recent? Let's flash back to ancient Greece and a little place known as Thermopylae. Seven thousand Greek hoplites armed with swords, spears and shields held off a quarter million Persian troops for 3 days until they were betrayed and outflanked. Are you all touting the apocalypse trying to say that the entire zombie population of Atlanta is going to be able to simultaneously engage whatever the US military throws into the cordon around the city? That they're not going to be funneled down city streets into killzones, their numbers negated by frontage?

Please.

Some explanation along the lines of the already mentioned anthrax vaccine dooming most of the military in the US would end the discussion cleanly, without having to come up with a non-magical means for human wave attacks to overwhelm a modern military. Frankly, it's what I'll choose to believe happened, rather than the "oh noes! weapons that render men into a red mist on any other battlefield suddenly can't sever a zombie brain stem! Military gets pwned."

Great, great show. Highly entertaining. But shambling zombies have never made sense as a global threat.

To end, where are all these million-man zombie hordes? Where is the evidence the zombies even form such large groupings? We've seen what? A couple hundred, a thousand maybe in that pull back from the Atlanta streets? I know it's a tv show, and budget restraints and all, but it seems like maybe people are making an assumption about how these zombies operate. They don't seem to have the attention span necessary to congregate in such large numbers and then move in a single direction for any amount of time. The ones attacking the department store couldn't even gather up the stragglers from one block away.

EDIT: Didn't Jenner say it wasn't a virus? That they thought it might have been at first, but it didn't behave like one and might be a completely different organism?

[PsychoPere]

^ There are very large, very dangerous hordes later in the comics. Whether or not we end up seeing the horde on the interstate near another certain large city when the series reaches that point in the storyline will, of course, depend entirely on the show's budget. Presenting evidence at this stage isn't necessary because hordes haven't become part of the storyline yet.

[Kimi3013]

[QUOTE=Base_Delta_Zero;4620331]

Aragorn wrote:

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I'll also chime in on the what did he say question with it being Andrea is infected. The everyone is infected sounds pretty stupid to me. Especially when they already established that if you are alive and infected, you quickly get ill and die.

It's shown in the comic (issue #015), that when someone is killed/dies they become a zombie, no matter what the method of death is. Being infected with the zombie virus doesn't kill you, it just means you become a zombie when you die.

The zombie bite kills you by opening a wound and delivers bacteria (could be poison, venom what ever you like) into the body that kills you. Like a cat bite, the puncher hole isn't too deep and you won't bleed out, but their mouths are full of bacteria which will get really nasty if you don't clean it out.

They're a bit different from the normal 'I bite you, you're a zombie too' kind.

As for the military stuff, meh. I really couldn't give a crap about how good you think your armed forces are. In this story, they failed. The end. The zombies won, zombie apocalypse has happened. If we were following an group from the forces then it would be relevant, but as far as this story goes it matters little more than the fact they the sky is blue and the grass in green.

[PsychoPere]

Details are now available on the DVD/Blu-ray release, which, as previously mentioned, will be out on March 8th:

Each will be a 2-disc set containing all 6 episodes, along with 5 behind-the-scenes featurettes [...] 6 Extra Footage clips [...] and a trailer.

(See the link for descriptions of the featurettes and clips.)

[marillion]

^^ Brilliant!

[Dream]

I picked up the first season now that the series is finally out on dvd. Rewatched the first couple of episodes and it is still awesome! I heard that the series is selling well.

I'm so glad the next season is going to be 13 episodes, the first season is way too short! Props to AMC for taking a chance and greenlighting this show. Who knew a show about zombies would be so big?

[Temis the Vorta]

Who knew a show about zombies would be so big?

I keep hoping that the counterintuitiveness of a zombie show hitting big on high-toned AMC will make some cable network more intrepid about trying out a space opera series. Couldn't you just see a space opera show with the same intelligence and heart as TWD succeeding on Showtime, HBO, AMC, Starz, FX or TNT?

They'd all have their own take on it - HBO would be more classy, FX would be more macho, Starz would have more sex and silliness, but it could work on any of those.

[RJDiogenes]

That sort of thinking is too complex for execs. They'll just think something like, "Zombies-- popular."

And I'm a little worried that the Zombie fad will burn out by the time the second season of Walking Dead comes on.