Be Excellent To Each Other

I thought it was a dream too but there were zombies that seemed to all have been hit by falling trees or lightning or something. It really didn't explain things very well at all.

May I just add that it was apparently 100 miles to Washington and they'd travelled 40 miles by the time of this episode and the last which is, like, pretty far to walk and occassionally drive so their provisions might be low.

It was a bit of a cheapy deus ex machina really.

It was a tornado, people! Geesh.

Well yes but they've seemed to be pretty damn good at living off the land up to now, to all of a sudden be damn near dying of thirst.

I think it's nice that the ladies are still finding time to get their make-up done every day though, and the baby certainly looks very bouncy and well fed and well sorted for clean nappies.

It's not a dreadful hour of telly, don't get me wrong, but for my money they've sort of done about everything there is to do with the setup as a whole. They've actually managed to make zombies a bit dull, which is quite an achievement.

It is very heavy on religious themes All the time. recently it has been the parable of the lost sheep.

Disagree. They've created this glorious fiction about a post apocalyptic world that's almost tangible. I could care less whether it has TV drama in every episode: I switch off my brain, turn out the lights and wonder how I'd survive in this new world amongst the horrors. It has, so far, nailed the experience for me.

Yes. This

I'm tired of the same boring forests and bland looking towns. Seriously, Georgia must be the most dull place in the world.

Yeah

Supposed I'd better spoiler this just in case:



Malc

Yep. It is absolutely believable in almost every sense (perhaps more so now than in the earlier series as it has time to develop itself rather than the helter skelter run to the finish that was series 1).

Piffle! What the fuck are the zombies running on this far into the outbreak? How are they 'surviving' freezing winters and blazing hot summers? What is their fuel?

This does not make sense and has never been explained.

Seriously, in a real zombie outbreak (I can't quite believe I'm writing that ) I'd fuck off to Iceland or somewhere like that, as zombies wouldn't fare too well in sub-zero temperatures I reckon.

28 Days Later asked this question, it was only a month after the outbreak, and clever Christopher Ecclestone had worked out that they were only going to have a finite sort of lifespan.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7- ... ickly.html

Who gives a fuck? It's also not been explained how they're coming back from the fucking dead but, weirdly, that doesn't seem to bother you. And it misses the point anyway. If you're going to enjoy a 'trad' zombie story of any kind you need to suspend a lot of disbelief about the set up to be able to buy into the drama that stems from it. If you can't do that then it's not for you, but to look past the most obvious stuff (i.e. that whole pesky 'undead' thing) just to froth over something relatively inconsequential as if that was somehow derailing the bloody impossible fiction of it all's just the bizarre viewpoint.

Zombie stuff isn't (generally) about the zombies and how they function, it's about how the people left alive react to the pressure of the situation.

Prediction: Hearthly now ignores everything I've said and delivers a lecture about the mechanics of zombification, probably by comparing it to 28 Days Later even though he's admitted himself already that they're not the same.

It's very unrealistic that they don't have sex more often. Why doesn't Rick and Michonne go at it, or Daryl and Carol?

Really, it's one of the few pleasures that they could still have, and prisons just show us what happens when you're "deprived" of sex.

By believable, I of course mean that to a degree you have to suspend disbelief, but that they have created a world in S1Ep1 that is entirely consistent with that in S5Ep10 (or whatever). The tendancy would have been to have come across a new type of infected by now with some sort of magic killing power, but we haven't. The infected are the same infected, with the same traits as they were at the outset.

Your complaint about the series appears to be that at no point has a feature of a real life universe been injected into an artificial universe, when introducing that real life feature would quite clearly destroy the entire premise.

Also, they infected didn't die off a month after 28 days later. 28 weeks later they'd only secured Canary Wharf, and even then there were loads of the fuckers running around Westferry Road.

The coming back from the dead bit I'm fine with, that's the traditional part of the set up, we all buy into that when we watch a zombie film. (Which incidentally, is one of my favourite genres, as my DVD/film collection and watch history on Netflix will bear testament too, it's also why I've, y'know, watched every single minute of all five seasons of The Walking Dead.)

I think they're missing a trick on The Walking Dead, they've got all this time to play with and yet the zombies themselves don't seem to have deteriorated or changed in any sort of way, no one's suggested that there might be an environment or location where humans can survive but the zombies can't, or where they can at least stack the odds in their favour a bit. I mean, they're doing some serious travelling, why do they keep walking along roads from one town to the next, where there will inevitably be zombies in surprisingly good shape wanting to eat them?

I take your point about zombie films not being 'about the zombies', and therein lies the other problem of course, the characters themselves, in the main, aren't massively interesting.

All that said I don't dislike the programme, I'm finding time every week to watch each new episode of Season 5 ASAP, and I binged on the first four seasons on Netflix - but for me it's just started to lose its way somewhat, I just don't really know where it's going, for want of a better way to put it.

The zombies have gotten more rotten as the series has gone on.

Also, I think we are now on to The Good SamaritaN parable.

I dunno, the pack attacking the barn looked to be in fairly frisky shape, and some of them were properly rotten right out of the gates in the first episode.

In fact, remember the first zombie that Rick came across after getting out of the hospital, that one out in the park, that looked in pretty bad shape just a couple of weeks after the outbreak.

Here it is. And yet we have zombies 540+ days down the line that look exactly the same, or in many cases far healthier, than that one does.

We don't know the rate of decay, I don't think that has been said.

Do they need to eat, as they are dead? I am guessing the body does not work anymore in blood pumping and breathing sort of way

That, of course, requires very little suspension of disbelief at all, if you've ever visited the Wharf at the weekend.

But they still need some source of energy to move around, undead/dead/whatever. Plus to survive extremes of heat or cold requires some sort of ability to combat those situations, otherwise they'd literally just freeze in the winter, or turn into dust in the summer.

I notice that the series has completely avoided winters, because that's when zombies would start to look a bit stupid.

Why do they need energy, they are dead....

You can't apply biology and physics to Zombies. Because the dead don't move in real life do they?

They're reanimated, not dead.

If they're properly dead then they're just meat, in which case they'd freeze in winter and dessicate in summer, and simply rot the rest of the time.

Oh yes and they'd get absolutely eaten to shit by everything from flies and maggots upwards.

What do you think a dead human body would look like after 540 days out in the open?

Yo momma!

So reanimated means dead that gets up?

You really are worrying about this

It just bugs me, I appreciate it doesn't seem to have that effect on anyone else, but for a zombie series that's pushing out towards two years down the line after the outbreak, I'd want to see the question of what keeps the bastard things going be addressed.

I mean, they have to do that eventually, don't they? Or is it going to turn into the zombie version of Eastenders, and they're all just zombie-ing around twenty years later?

ZOMBIE 1 - 'What you been up to the last twenty years Fred?'

ZOMBIE 2 - 'Ahh you know Bob, just proving to all these dumb humans that perpetual motion was solvable all along, they were just missing a zombie apocalypse.'

I take it as, we don't know why the dead rise. Thus we don't know what keeps them moving etc.

No, they really don't. Any more than they ever have to explain how they're coming back from the dead in the first place. It's part of the setup you just need to accept.

Or give yourself an aneurysm over it for no reason; y'know, whatever works for you.

I think the best thing to do is to assume whatever "woke them up" is also "keeping them going"

Malc

I do accept it insofar as it looks like I have to, and it's not completely ruining the programme and/or giving me an aneurysm, it just diminishes the whole thing somewhat IMO.

For an hour's investment per week (less, with the season breaks and halfway breaks), I'll probably stick with it through ten seasons. But the more time goes on the more daft these zombies wandering around are going to be at a fundamental level IMO.

Also they'd better not kill off Maggie or Tara (formerly known as 'the lesbian one', I've learned her name now, and I suspect she might not actually be a lesbian but is just acting like she is), because they are pretty.

I wonder if they'll ever do a scene like in the film Battery (an ultra low budget zombie flick from 2012, recommended!) where one of the sex-starved survivors clamps eyes on a fresh female zombie that's still arguably quite attractive, and cracks one out.

Yes, it's definitely possible that a network TV show in the US will have a scene where one of the characters masturbates over a zombie. It would be entirely in-keeping with the tone of the show so far.

"Acting like a lesbian"? The fuck?

All that licking of wimmin, and stuffs.

Alive, dead, or other?

Abraham caught her ogling Rosita's boobs in Season 4, so if Tara is not really a lesbian then I guess that's acting like one.

Although if she is a lesbian then it's not proper acting I suppose, which would make it easier for her to do. Or something.

Either way she's well fit.

I ain't judging.

ewwwww

One of the super-zombies in the Ex-heroes series got turned even though his lizard-skin stopped the zombies from biting him because he found zombie Halle Berry and she bit his cock off when he tried to get a blow job off her.

In other news, the most unrealistic thing in this show is how good at pistol-shooting everyone is.

Second episode of this year was rather dull. Can't be arsed to put more of an effort into a review, because they couldn't be arsed to put more of an effort into writing the flipping thing.

Careful, that sort of talk doesn't go down well around here.

I'd say not liking a show about zombies because you don't believe in zombies is more of a problem than just saying you didn't like an episode.

Yes I don't like it, and never said this about it earlier in this thread - 'Finished Season 2 last night, truly awesome stuff. It's not Breaking Bad good, but it's not a million miles off either.'

viewtopic.php?p=840038#p840038

I'm not a masochist, if I don't like something I won't watch it, and I certainly won't watch five seasons of something I don't like.

It's just ended up nowhere as good as it could have been, and where it looked like it was going, I guess is how I feel about it.

Interesting article about how Daryl killed Tyreese: http://uproxx.com/tv/2015/02/the-walkin ... n-problem/

That is quite interesting, though I think that the storylines have worked quite well in of themselves. I've got the comics and really had trouble reading them as the dialogue is kinda ropey (at least for the first few that I read) and the character of Rick is an annoying fuckwit. I don't think that the changes are always necessarily bad though. I mean, Shane was only in the comics for a few pages, but he had a good character arc over a couple of seasons in the show.

S05E11 - Much better, strongest episode in a while IMO, albeit not completely without its problems.

Genuinely interested to see what happens in the next episode.

Not much Tara in it though, so a point off for that.

I was going to watch that tonight but got sucked into Sherlock series 2.

I really liked it. The group is in open revolt against Rick and there's a new false dawn. Super. I hope this is as good as The Governor and Rowdy Burns.

'Open revolt' is pushing it a bit, 'civilised disagreement' would be more like it.