The Walking Dead Season 4

[Mark_Nguyen]

I'm late on the season three rewatch on the way to the current episode, but in "I Ain't a Judas" it's Carol who suggests Andrea head back to sleep with the Guv and then kill him. This is a long time coming.

Mark

 

[beneldon]

As far as the zombie plague hitting, it seems logical to me that if you die and then become a zombie without being bitten every mortuary and every old age home and every hospital worldwide would have patient zero walkers in them (that is to say if there was some sort of trigger virus which activated the zombie, uh virus, or such) biting and creating more biting walkers and in a short time, the world is overtaken before anyone knows what is going on.

I agree that on the oceans we could have floating islands of civilization and there could be pockets of isolated military units here and there who would have had more time to prepare themselves but the military relies on a chain of command and when that's broken... you got to do something. The "unit" taken out by the Governor probably had more troops beforehand and maybe had no way to communicate with others in their situation. I don't know.

With respect to the apocalypse timeline, the webisode featuring the couple that run across the nurse in the hospital mercy killing people who wanna make that choice could have been keeping Rick alive for weeks up to that point having awakened a few days after she had the last IV bottle hooked up.

I don't know; I just enjoy watching the show.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

That's a great observation and one of the flaws of TWD in terms of a suspension of disbelief that the world was overtaken by slow moving zombies.

I suppose they solve this problem to a greater or lesser degree by making everyone infected and upon death you turn into a zombie. I'd imagine in such a scenario hospitals would become zombie breeding grounds.

Another valid point; one of the reasons the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead changed the zombies from slow (1979) to fast, was the greater threat to the living, which would advance the fall of society. In fact, in film aside from one--only one--helicopter flyby, there was no indication that the military or a larger government structure survived.

In the main title sequence, we see a montage of the zombie outbreak's rapid effect on societies around the world, without question helped by fast moving zombies. TWD's zombies shuffle around, so if one has room to move, he can put distance between himself and danger. On that note in season three's "Prey," the Governor was in tight, close quarters with zombies, and still managed to escape unharmed, which should paint a picture about how the rest of the world could have handled groups of walkers--particularly against defense units.

One thing to remember is the producers of the Walking Dead are working on a spin-off series. Presuambly this series will be about other communities or ideally perhaps the greater world at large and how the plague effected the government.

Good point--and the producers have any sense at all, they will not show the same backwood locations and rural towns....that is, if they want to avoid a retread.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

It would surprise me if there weren't settlements thriving on the US Navy's aircraft carriers. The Nimitz class can stay at sea virtually forever and they can make their own freshwater. The only issue would be vegetables, they might be able to grow on the flightdeck though.

Excellent observation about that class of Naval ship, which is removed from the general population of society, so.....

 

[davejames]

Carol going to extremes to protect the group I understand, but I don't get the rationale behind this killing at all.

Why single out the two people she did, when there were so many others who were sick as well? And if they were already locked away in quarantine, what possible damage could they really do? I never got the sense that those two were the original "carriers" or anything, unless I missed it somewhere...

The whole thing is just a giant

 

[Bob Morton]

I've sat in the same place for very long times but I've never had moss growing on me.

 

[wissaboo]

I've sat in the same place for very long times but I've never had moss growing on me.

have you been decomposing at the same time?

actually, I've had people swear that if you stand still in the woods for a bit around here you will have moss grow on you.

 

[Trekker4747]

I've sat in the same place for very long times but I've never had moss growing on me.

Were you a slolwly decomposing corpse who laid there for several months?

 

[bbjeg]

So it's Carol's turn to go crazy? I'm liking the season enough with the flu arch but there's no coming back from being a murderer.

 

[Evil Twin]

That camper took "becoming one with nature" a little too seriously. *ba-dum-CHING!*

I noticed Robert Kirkman wrote this episode and that three elements from the comics showed up here, Rick messing up his hand while going to town on someone (it happened when he was beating up one of the ex-cons in the comic), Rick and Tyreese's throwdown (nowhere near as epic in the show), and the one I've been waiting for all along, Tyreese's defining moment of badassery where he inexplicably survives a horde of zombies with nothing but his Hammer of Justice!

 

[bbjeg]

^I haven't read the comics and thought Tyreese was a goner. I was cool with him raging out on the group earlier after that scene.

 

[Pavonis]

I am familiar with the comics, and still didn't think Tyreese would survive. There's nothing holding the writers to the comic book storylines anymore (if there ever was).

 

[davejames]

If it was their aim to make Tyreese a much more memorable and badass character with this episode, they definitely did it.

 

[PKerr]

^I haven't read the comics and thought Tyreese was a goner. I was cool with him raging out on the group earlier after that scene.

In the comic Tyreese was fending off the walkers in a closed off area ( gym or something) and they got overrun, he hung back so the others could get out and they locked the door behind them,the last thing they saw was a swarm surround him and then he disappeared, a few minutes later he bangs on the door saying let me out with piles and piles behind him, a total badass.

 

[Trekker4747]

I am familiar with the comics, and still didn't think Tyreese would survive. There's nothing holding the writers to the comic book storylines anymore (if there ever was).

Yeah, didn't Andrea survive in the comics? And in the comics Shane didn't survive past the camp outside Atlanta. I don't think the comics are too much to go by other than a "very general outline." Hell, we didn't even get the gang going to the abandoned gated neighborhood.

 

[dansigal]

Why single out the two people she did, when there were so many others who were sick as well? And if they were already locked away in quarantine, what possible damage could they really do? I never got the sense that those two were the original "carriers" or anything, unless I missed it somewhere...

The whole thing is just a giant

That actually wasn't the case. After the initial outbreak, they decided they would isolate everyone who was in that cell block, but those two were the only ones who were actually showing any symptoms of being sick.

 

[PKerr]

I am familiar with the comics, and still didn't think Tyreese would survive. There's nothing holding the writers to the comic book storylines anymore (if there ever was).

Yeah, didn't Andrea survive in the comics? And in the comics Shane didn't survive past the camp outside Atlanta. I don't think the comics are too much to go by other than a "very general outline." Hell, we didn't even get the gang going to the abandoned gated neighborhood.

Yeah Shane dies by book 5 or 6 and then Tyreese comes in around book 7 or 8 and basically becomes Shane til book 46 or so.

Believe it or not Rick and Andrea hook up, I'm not current in the comics but she was still alive 3-4 months ago.

 

[Trekker4747]

I thought Rick and Michonne hook up.

 

[JD]

You know what's occurred to me this season? There's been things that are good & things that are meh... but nothing I hate, or more specifically nobody I hate. It's refreshing

There is one thing sort of nagging at me all this time though. It's been 4 seasons, & almost 2 years in world time & they are still less than 100 miles from Atlanta. If this season has taught us anything, a change of scenery is in order.

They could have been anywhere on the continent in this amount of time, with all their magic petrol & as this episode seems to suggest, there's others out there (One crafty person or more running a radio broadcast)

Two years in, & it's possible something of a rebound is growing somewhere, or not, but we just know nothing outside of this area right here. > Walking Dead Google Map

I find this really funny when compared to Revolution, which has gone from Wisconsin to Chicago, then to Philedelphia, Atlanta, and finally Colorado all in one season. And then between seasons they traveled from Colorada to Texas.

As for TWD, I thought this was a pretty good episode. As for the stuff with Carol, I'm not really sure if I want another character go crazy, we already got that with Shane and Rick, we don't really need it a third time. The rest of the episode I thought was pretty good. I've never read the comics, so I didn't pick up on the simliarties between the scene with Tyrese taking out all of the zombies and the one from the comics, but I still expected him to survive. They made such a big deal out of him joining the show, and becoming a more active member of the group this season, that I doubted they would kill him off this early.

As for the comment up thread about how different the show and comic are, they did say before the season started that they would be bringing in a lot more content from the comics this season.

 

[Trekker4747]

It's worth pointing out it's not been "almost two years." Hell it's barely just past ONE year. All of season 1 happens in a three or four days. We Rick wake up and meet with Morgan and spends the night at Morgans' hold-out. On the second day Rick takes Morgan to the sheriff's office, they load up with weapons, part ways, and Rick runs into the group getting supplies in Atlanta. When they're able to get out of Atlanta rick meets with the camp group and reunites with Lori and we see them through that night. This represents the end of the second day Rick has been awake from his coma. On the third day Rick takes Daryl, T-Dog and Glenn back to Atlanta to get Merle they get back to the camp on the end of third day. At this point one of the camp group survivors has been bitten and the make the decision to go to the CDC which they get to just as the fourth day is ending, after the bitten guy has succumbed to the walker virus.

They spend the night at the CDC and leave sometime the next day as the CDC's generators run out. This is when the season ends, only four days have passed and they're into the fifth day.

When Season 2 starts Rick says that the CDC was a dead-end on the radio to Morgan and mentions that another day has passed. At this point they've consolidated their vehicles and resources and are trying to get to Fort Benning when they lose Sophia off the highway. We then spend the first half of the season at the farm and with them trying to find Sophia. It's hard to believe they'd spend more than a few days, week at best, doing this before accepting that it's been too long for her to survive on her own without food or water with the walkers out there. I'm not sure how much time passes based on day/night scenes but, again, we'll give them a week. We'll also be fair and give the second half of the season another week to when the herd descends on the farm and they evacuate.

So in two seasons at the very most 3 weeks have passed. Lori is now pregnant either by Rick or Shane both of whom she had sex with within a day of one another 3 weeks ago.

Season Three starts with Lori full term and "past due." So eight, almost nine, months have passed between seasons. The time scale in S3 is a bit stepped up where it's possible we accept as long as a month or even two months passing.

So there we are, at the end of Season 3 we're probably just now reaching and now passing one year since Rick woke-up in the hospital (and similarly since the ZA collapsed society.) A few months pass between S3 and S4 going by Julia's growth, plant growth and other factors. So we're maybe 18 months out from when Rick woke from the coma and maybe 19 months since the ZA started and shit hit the fan.

So we're likely just inside two years since this has all happened but we're very much at the point where gasoline is no longer going to be very viable. It may still be useful for some level of combustion but vehicles are not going to run very smoothly on it anymore and not perform well.

This is all kind of why I wonder if Carl isn't long for the world. Inside two years have passed since the series started but Shane (or, rather the actor who plays him) has aged four years. This either skews Carl's age as time goes on to keep him around (making Carl older and older when Rick went into the coma) or at some point he's going to need to be killed as his age no longer becomes something that can be hidden.

They can always get babies to play Judith as she's mostly a "prop" at this point. But Carl's an issue that's going to need addressed. Either by killing Carl or having a much larger time jump at some point, a time jump of years. Which, of course, has numerous problems of its own.