Spoilers Tales of the Walking Dead discussion = spoilers

When they did a flashback for Negan.. you don't think that helped his character a bit?

For the Alpha story...i am not so sure it was about making her more sympathetic...I would think the goal would be to build up how she was able to become a leader.

Which this didn't do a great job of... maybe a little bit about how insightful she was -- spotting the enemy no one else thought was the case...and her survival instincts.

But then didn't they retcon the origin of the WHisperers? i thought TWD made it clear in another flashback episode that when ALpha met Beta, THAT was the start of it?

But it turns out Alpha actually took over from someone else??? Which doesn't seem to mesh with the previous episode.

ALso, how did Alpha know that gutting a walker camoflages you? I know RIck and Glenn thought of it in the first season.... but seems like THAT type of discovery ought to be by accident... a dead body drops on you and you can't get it off...but walkers then walk past you, and then the light bulb goes off.

i didn't read it as a stright comedy... but the niche that Terry Crews specializes in (and something Olivia Munn is good at too) are characters who might be very strong, but are still socially awkward, which i think was the point of that episode

Not even a full review from @TREK_GOD_1 !

But he was right -- definitely nothing to be excited about.

Tales 2nd episode should nOT be surprising... it went up against the Games of Thrones spinoff premiere (airing at 8pm CST, exact same time as Tales). If anything -- it did fairly well considering...

But i don't expect things toget better. My wife actually did relent and watched Tales first (so if ratings went up...your welcome!)...but i don't think that will happen again.



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The problem with this show seems to be the writing -- they don't have any REAL stories.

They have picked the RIGHT actors, at least for the roles they wanted to show.. They just don't have stories where we ought to care...

 

Tales of the Walking Dead -
Season 1, Episode 3: "Dee"

That was Negan, who was a superior character overall. Although Negan became tiresome around the fall of the Saviors arc, there was still some interest in his breakdown as a prisoner of the heroes, maintaining enough audience investment to be interested in his origin--"Here's Negan"--which was a stellar episode. Every WD villain does not warrant a look back.

...but focusing on how she became a leader did not deserve its own episode. In TWD's past we witnessed characters once cowardly turn the page to inner-strength and heroism within a single episode (e.g. both Father Gabriel and Eugene as seen in TWD/S6's "No Way Out") after careful development of their push-comes-to-shove journeys, so I felt Alpha did not need yet another flashback to establish her turn to survivalist evil.

I believe that flashback episode did suggest that, since both were still "normal" at the point they met.

The WD franchise has screwed up knowledge of that technique more often than not; on FTWD, Morgan instructed others to use walker guts on coverings, but that was a nod to continuity, since he learned that skill in Virginia, but I believe all other scenes from other episodes / series had people just know the camouflage trick.

Its a two-part problem: one, going back to the early days means little if its not focused on the official responses (and not in the way seen in FTWD's 1st season with "Cobalt"), as we have witnessed the personal side at its best during TWD's 1st season. Two, the episodes try to give the main characters a goal to motivate them--and the audience--forward, but their goals are often flimsy (especially E2), or the characters constantly make assbrained mistakes no growing survivalist--in a world plagued by the living dead--would. All combined, this makes for a largely pointless series up to this third episode.

GRADE: C-.

 

Can someone remind me why Dee killed her husband?

 

She thinks he's too weak for the apocalypse.

 

Tales of the Walking Dead -
Season 1, Episode 4: "Amy / Dr. Everett"

In the fourth episode of TOTWD, we're introduced to Dr. Everett (Anthony Edwards), a researcher turned environmental extremist with his theories that the rise of cannibalistic corpses are somehow nature self-correcting after man's destructive misuse of it. Yeah, showrunner messages aside, Everett never explains how a major, unprecedented event such as the aforementioned cannibalistic, reanimated dead occurred and what connection it had to man's misuse or destruction of the environment. Nope, he just moans on and on about nature being reclaimed, even going so far as to use an electronic neck monitor on "Specimen 21," a walker he believes has some sort of social / survivor interaction with other walkers (e.g., leaving a killed animal for others instead of eating it himself, etc.).

Enter Amy (Poppy Liu), a scrambling, breathless survivor with a melee weapon worn over her left forearm; she enters the territory used by Everett for study and is nearly killed--with Everett watching, the latter only "saving" her when she is close to killing "Specimen 21" who wanders off with no means of being tracked. Everett makes it clear she is not welcome, but when she falls ill (from eating unripened Nightshade berries), she is reluctantly taken in and nursed back to health. Separated from her group, Amy is eager to find them, and requests Everett's help, but he's become such an isolationist / extremist, that he only cares about studying the walkers.

Parting ways, Amy is the one who locates "Specimen 21" (in life, a former colleague of Everett's), information she uses in exchange for Everett's help getting back to the zone her people had last settled in. Eventually, the duo see walkers eating some of Amy's friends, save for one, who--with Amy's intervention--escapes...and Everett does not lift a finger to help, always falling back on his idiotic theory concluding with allow "nature" to take its course.

During the fracas, "21" falls to a piece of a marshland, which floats away; panicking, Everett uses a rope to lasso the wrist of "21", begging a pissed-off Amy to help pull the walker in, but at as it seems "21" will be rescued, an alligator--one of the former zoo animals reintroduced to the wild--rises from the water, chomping into "21"--and pulling him underwater.

Everett is--for the first time--upset (but not about humans being killed...), and begs Amy to join his research--to carry on his work whenever he dies, warning her that she will die if she returns to her people (noting the sight of circling buzzards is the sign of a walker herd nearby) . Amy is only interested in her people, and leaves Everett behind.

The following day, Everett starts his day again, heading to Amy's camp, only to find the members all turned into walkers--including Amy. Somewhat disturbed by his prediction for Amy's fate coming true, he readies a belt, presumably to capture her to take the place of "21".

NOTES:

Like the real world, the WD franchise is populated by all manner of personalities, which--quite obviously--is helpful for storytelling sake, but that does not mean every personality is interesting. In "Amy/Dr. Everett", we have Dr. Everett, who is such an environmentalist extremist, constantly arguing against the survival of humankind (which makes his research pointless, since its being recorded for...?) that his past, present--his reason for being only inspires audience rejection, unless someone was hoping he would end up realizing the value of fellow humans..just as he was attacked by a walker.

The episode's writer (Ahmadu Garba) was not clever with the Everett-delivered messaging; the apparent point was to make him distasteful, yet we the audience were supposed to find some nugget of truth amongst the piles of crap. It did not work, and in the end, the Amy character was simply a tool--not to teach Everett the error of his ways--but to justify his self-serving approach to life by ending up as part of his continued experiments.

Once again, TOTWD presented a story with no purpose, focusing on characters no one would possibly find interesting or just entertaining in the survival horror format.

GRADE: D.

 

I was liking this show for the first two episodes, but I NOPE'd out after the boring Alpha episode with the obligatory Walking Dead "Roaming Through the Woods" action. I'm going to give the Negan series a chance just because I love Jeffrey Dean Morgan, but it better knock my socks off.

 

In tryng to see where episode 4 fits...some poeple have theorized that it takes place up to 30 years in the future. WHat the what???? Part of that theory was that supposedly one of the Takes episodes was supposed to happen in the ar future.

I thought i heard in the dialogue that this was maybe 7 years into it. It seems weird that there ae still people wandering around (but i guess that what happened with Magna & Co.).

I was wondering if there would be any possibility that the doctor would run into the Fear crew (as they should be about the same timeline, right), or that he could eventually run into the CRM and their scientists. Or if we are looking long term, maybe somehow follow/go with Darryl to Europe?

That could make this episode a littl emore worth it.


I am going to have to watch EPisode 5, Davon, later this week.So i won't check in until I have done so.


And episode 6 is it???

 

The fourth episode has no indication of where it's supposed to fit in the franchise's timeline. It's definitely not 30 years, in fact I'm pretty sure it's somewhere within the timeframe the other shows cover, so no later than a decade into the apocalypse.

For this season, yes.

 

IMDB hated episode 5, but I thought it was alright... these types of noir episodes are supposed to leave you feeling a bit contemplative, in a dark way. This episode did that for me.

 

30 years? Not even close to being possible. Everett's dialogue strongly suggests that the world's collapse was recent (with animals escaping zoos, having to research walker behavior as if they were a new event, etc.). Moreover, projecting 30 years in the future, there's no way Amy's group--rag-tag as they were--would have serviceable vehicles and gas. They're not the Commonwealth, or even Woodbury's level of maintaining pre-apocalypse infrastructure / lifestyles.

I cannot recall anyone saying the ZA was seven years in, but again, if that amount of time had elapsed, Everett's research should have reached some conclusion based on what we've seen in TWD & FTWD (i.e., that walkers are not organized as he believed they were, etc.), and in a world where there are few boundaries, and innumerable survivors wandering around, just how is Amy the first to come along in nearly a decade?

Eh, that's giving a character an interest lift he did not earn on his own. Further, he's the latest in a line of crackpot "researchers" and weirdos with bizarre philosophies about walkers, such as Milton (New Age-y nonsense used to trigger memories in recently turned people), Lizzie ("they're just different"), and Teddy (with that walker/plant shrine crap). I could not see him being of much use to anyone else--especially since he believes humans sort of deserved the extinction event and the world will reorder itself (similar to Teddy thinking a nuclear holocaust will lead to humanity's rebirth).

I believe "La Doña" is the season finale...and just a hint: it makes as much sense as the Parker Posey time loop episode in how it fits into the WD universe.

 

I thought Everett said that the giant pit was dug on purpose, as something of a reservation for walkers and escaped zoo animals... though I have no idea why that would ever have been done.... I guess I misunderstood, but while watching the episode I was SURE that this is what was happening. The headhunters were trespassing onto some kind of reservation, thats why Everett felt so much disdain.

 

Nobody cares about the finale? Lol
Ratings aren't down too much from the already low premiere so if AMC plus really needs the content, we might get a season 2.

 

I guess I did miss it... was it any good? Will pop in again to wrote a short review. I guess even @TREK_GOD_1 gave up on it.

 

It was a decent Halloween special but nothing at all to do with the walking dead...

 

I was just waiting for some time to post reviews of the penultimate episode and finale.

I wonder if a second season has been greenlit.

 

Wow...again, underwhelming...and not at all feeling like The Walking Dead. ANd a pretty sad whimper of a finale.

But like the whole season, they definitley have the RIGHT actors, who have the ability to perform. Danny Ramirez, for example, is a 180 from his Falcon and Winter Soldier character.

Also,how does an anthology have "guest stars"???

They completely blew the potential. It could have been great.... had they given us some stories that had some depth, or a different angle.

Also, most of the episodes felt very "covid friendly" -- minimal cast , minimal activity.

If they had written anything about the new zombies revealed at the end of World, they could have handed an episode to some Korean filmmakers who had experience in the Korean fast ZOmbie genre and done somethng exciting. Or what would the Apocalypse look like in Central AMerica or Africa?

Instead...just feels like a rushed prodution and fanfiction and leftover ideas that were previously rejected.

If they get a 2nd season, it's because there's nothing else in the pipeline, either for TWD or any new show or franchise.