The Walking Dead Season 3

Not Totally.

 

She was eaten by a large group of zombies.

If zombies ate a person and literally all that was left was the brain which the zombies couldn't get to through the skull, that brain would be an active walker brain with no body to control.

And to address a few misconceptions relating to zombies I'd suggest checking out the early Romero moves this series is based on, to clear up a few points;

* Anyone who dies through any means will reanimate as a zombie unless there has been brain trauma.

* Being bitten by a zombie doesn't give you the 'zombie virus', but it will lead to death due to infection which cannot be treated (aside from immediate amputation), it is this death which leads to the inevitable reanimation.

* Zombies behavior is controlled by instinct and they have a drive to eat, but the food they swallow is not in any way processed by their body, which is dead and doesn't have working digestion etc. You can remove a zombies stomach and it will still eat, with the chewed up food falling out onto the floor, this would not lead to a quicker decomposition.

* It is unknown whether zombies continue to decompose or at what rate, they do become damaged over time though as their bodies cannot heal as they are dead.

* Most importantly, nobody knows why everyone reanimates and they never will. The zombie plague isn't an important part of the story, it is a plot device to justify an apocalypse in a horror setting. The story is always focused on the characters and how they react to the situation.

 

The virus allows them to decompose enough to be wicked scary, but no more.

No, that's completely different. Flying would violate laws of physics. There are many ways to mummify a body or prevent or slow decomposition. The toxic cell idea is a good one.

 

Zombies flying would be ridiculous, but zombies spontaneously developing a perpetual, self-sustaining energy system is totally believable?

Requires energy to move the muscles in a human body. Zombies aren't eating, or at least aren't getting anything from it, as stated above. Where's this energy source? Perfectly believable under current laws of physics that the virus could provide a boost, and this would keep the zombies going as it burned through all the reserves and the zombie ran out of gas eventually. Not something that can be maintained forever, though, unless the magic virus also has the key to unlimited energy sources that require no input or fuel to maintain.

So really just a matter of which laws of physics you're ok with breaking. Flying isn't any more or less impossible, just sillier. Mumifying a body requires drying it out, and NOT having it running around anymore. Slowing decomposition is all well and good, but still need fuel for the electrical energy moving those muscles requires. If you don't put more wood on the fire, it'll eventually burn out. Even if you treat the wood to burn slower, it's still consumed eventually...

 

Max Brook's argument makes sense and works for me. I really think that alot of people have mistaken drying out for decomposition. If we assume that the bacteria responsible for decomposition will not consume zombies, the only thing that will ultimately impact the zombie is drying out (this is kind of supported by the fact that zombies can also be destroyed by fire). Actually the one thing that they might get from consuming bodies is water (though they have no functioning digestive or cirulatory system). Once free of the spectre of decomposition, zombies in temperate and colder climates will have an advantage over those in warmer, drier climates.

Zombies in the desert out to just dry out including the brain. Zombies in temperate/cold climates might freeze in the winter but they will benefit from enough atmispheric moisture to keep them "viable".

 

Flying zombies might look silly to me but I have no objective reason to oppose the concept since its already a creature that operates outside of normal biological processes.

No one seems to think its weired that Vampires, which when you think about are nothing more than high functioning zombies, have superpowers. Hell Vampires, who are dead, have no circulatory system, and don't need to breathe manage to heal, have super strenght and speed, sometimes fly (depending on the mythos)...and all of them seem to have sex.

 

Like I said, though, the trick is getting the energy required to MOVE (or lurch) that undead citizen around. You're not taking anything new in, so you're stuck with the energy you started with. Once you burn through the reserves, no more functioning zombie. You aren't pulling energy from a ZPM, it's gotta come from something. And that jellifying of the blood is fine as far as that goes, but it also means it's not circulating, so no new oxygen or blood to those cells. Like the ones in the brain. So they'd be borked almost within minutes. Since they are ok without even HAVING lungs, they don't appear to need oxygen. No blood circulating means body temp won't regulate either, so they'd be even MORE screwed with hot and cold, things would be falling off everywhere! You appear to still need a functioning brain (even if they don't really use it) to be a live zombie, the jelled, non-circulating blood won't lead to that, it'll lead to dead zombies.

So: no oyxgen to tissues, no circulating blood, no new energy into system. Kinda bad that by trying to explain why they don't rot, you killed the thing that was allowing them to MOVE.

You're into just accepting "a wizard did it" within about an hour of infection. Hand-waving part of it away just makes more obvious problems in other areas.

 

In the Walking Dead however on the CDC episode, Jenner says that ..'the French were close,' to a cure.

 

Maybe they thought they were on to something, but that facility fell as did the CDC, and there's nobody left with that kind of technology. It's also entirely possible that they would've eventually run into a brick wall with their possible solution.

Jenner didn't even know if it was a virus/ microbe/ bacteria etc with all of his resources, he had been in contact with the French and if they knew this basic bit of information one would have expected them share it with him.

 

I think that's why they went with an entirely different type of outbreak in such as the 28 Days Later movies, the zombie outbreak isn't remotely plausible due to basic thermodynamics.

 

Really, and this theory has its own flaws, but the most 'realistic' explanation for how the virus works is that it's some sort of nanotechnology gone horrily awry.

 

I'll just go with "a wizard did it".

 

for all we know the "wizard" really did do it! This all could be supernatural we just don't know it yet

 

Is there any other sort?

 

Yea, you can't appreciate Trek without accepting Warp Drive, likewise, Zombies Reanimate and have an unquenchable hunger and drive wether they should've burned out by now or not, if you can't accept that, you can't enjoy Zombies

 

What if whatever the infection is, it possesses photosynthetic capabilities? So that the infection itself can get energy from the Sun and it shares some with its host so its host can still somewhat function?

Also the way Jenner explained it, the brain stem is reactivated. Which means that all lower functions like respiration, digestion, pulmonary should still work.

 

^^ I thought about the photosynthesis angle as well.

No, just easier to spin. You can say that the Zombies are eating rodents or bugs when no one is looking. Or perhaps they are absorbing or somehow feeding from the very bacteria that would cause decomposition. There's really no good way to spin a flying Zombie (so to speak).

Maybe the Zombie outbreak was the result of cold fusion experiments gone awry.

 

Nope those systems don't work. A zombie is perfectly capable of functioning without a heart, lungs, stomach etc. Hell in last weeks ep, we saw a head still chomping without a body.

 

Speaking of which is seems inconceivable to me that with the vast resources the US government has - especially the multiple safe houses the President and his staff in the case of nuclear war that someone out there hasn't made more progress on the infection.

In the novel series World War Z the US government has transformed a aircraft carrier to the new seat of power and Hawaii is zombie free.

Yet, in the Walking Dead the whole world has gone to shit and there doesn't seem to be any organized military effort to eradicate the problem. Why?

 

Because outside of the quick CDC arc, they've just ignored the outside world and focused on our small merry band of zombie slayers. While it's more intimate this way, I wouldn't mind a peek at the larger issues occasionally, even if it's just showing us that the world is borked and not coming back any time soon. At least show us some more failed attempts, or to use your example, that the US tried to hang on, but that carrier eventually failed too...