Be Excellent To Each Other

so, it's back!


New episode spoilers:

Not a bad episode, but not exactly an inspiring start to the second half of the season either.

It sure ain't no Breaking Bad.

Take away the zombies and I really wouldn't bother at all, because the characters and script aren't anything to get overly excited about.

How would you like it scripted?

Well I reckon it was one of those episodes where your focus is on the main story but there's a sinister background foreshadowing future episodes (perhaps):



Also: I liked the slow-mo bit.

Also: Also: Nice bit of

So that I feel more invested in the characters and what's happening to them, and not that the whole thing is just an increasingly dull contrivance to string out a successful franchise far past the point at which it really needs to be wound down. If it weren't for them chucking a reasonable chunk of gore into each episode, you'd just be left with a not particularly captivating soap opera.

And seriously, what are these fucking zombies running on years into the outbreak? They move, they see, they process thoughts, they chase humans - this requires energy, how are they making it through freezing winters and blazing hot summers?

Zombie films don't have to deal with this as they're only a short term sort of thing, but 28 Days Later (and yes I know they technically weren't zombies) saw fit to suggest 'Hang on a minute, can't we simply wait until all these brainless fucking zombie motherfuckers just run out of fuel?'

So when you're doing a zombie series/franchise, I want to see these sorts of questions addressed, as best I can recall there was one single mention of the winter back at the start of Season 2, and it was like 'Oh yeah, they seem to have survived OK'.

Five seasons is plenty enough for The Walking Dead I think, arguably one too many in fact. I'll stick with it since it only 'costs' one hour per week, but for me at least, it's entering the realms of the rather dull.

You're prepared to accept that people come back from the dead but unless it's explained how they survive past winter then it's stretching things too far? You're pretty weird sometimes dude.

you have it all wrong. the undead represent the prolatariat workers and Rick's group are the forces of capitalism. It is very clear that the whims and series of the capitalists, like flies to wanton boys, affect the undead through all of their actions. The undead show signs of resistance, forming hordes, which represent the labour union movement, worker's rights being something capitalist abhor And swt out to destroy.Series two, in the farm, refelet's the system of indentured servitude of manual labourers in modern agricultural business, where their only freedom is death, as the finale showed. Time and again cooperatives have been shown to be disfunctional and ultimately overrun by capitalism (the town, the railyard, the hispital). religion is shown to have no place time and again in this world where the only message is to obtain goods and services at the expense of others. All in all, it is horrifying inditment of Reagan era economics, rather than about ethics in games journalism.

Yeah, um - I probably don't think I would either.

You can quite happily say the same thing about Commando without any guns, so I'm not sure what point you're making.

It's alright, fills an hour here and there, definitely nothing I'll ever watch again once it's finished.

That would be a confused pensioner searching for a cat in the grounds of a mansion.

I'd say the earlier seasons were strong enough to be compelling just on the strength of the characters and the script. Yes the zombies were cool but they weren't the only reason to watch, as the story and protagonists were interesting enough in their own right, the zombies were sort of like a backdrop to the actual story.

But now, five seasons down the line, with them killing off established characters for fun, and replacing them with far less nuanced characters, it's hard to maintain interest, previously I cared what happened to the cast, I don't really care any more.

Nuanced? Shane? T-Dog? Lori?

It's a better show for the lost of Shane (who rightly should have died earlier) and bloody Lori (and she's still came back as a fucking ghost). Poor T-Dog though...

It would be better if they got rid of Coral.

Characters needs time to grow to become nuanced. The depth of characters who are in it at present, and the ones who have died in the last series or so, have been extremely high compared to the start of the show.

This was a very good episode, for Walking Dead standards (it's still worst than a bad Mad Men or Game of Thrones episodes). They made zombies menacing again.

Spoilers, jesus.

sorry...can't do it in this browser (long story). I'll do it later.

I quite enjoyed that. Especially the two "wtf?" moments that Sat mentioned In his spoiler tagged comments. Some very good bits in it.

Someone on Reddit made me chuckle with this (please be in the right order this time).

Sucks to be called Matt.

Season 5 Episode 10, a reasonable enough episode, but that's only going by current standards. Still not great overall.

Other than the not securing the door thing, you don't seem to understand or have ever watched the show.

Well, he's totes knocked one out over Maggie and the Lezzah, so he's seen a couple.

I thought the door thing was a dream?

I've watched every single episode of every single season, so clearly I just don't understand it then.

Please feel free to educate my simple brain as to what I'm missing.

I didn't see anything to indicate it was a dream, and all the zombies seemed to be real the next morning.

It's almost like they have a zombie quota to fill every episode so they're like, oh right, we'd better put some zombies in for a bit then.

They just decided to wander off?

No, a trio of irish men turned up and saw to them.


Tree fellers.

Arf!

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.