I have to say I watch this show because “everyone” is watching it but I have to note that it is worst written show on TV. Yeah its from a comic, yeah its not Shakespeare, but damn, infuse some common sense with these characters. Airborne virus fine, bite infection fine, but with blood contact you’re gonna be O.K.? No Pig Zombie? No Rat zombies? How many head stabs are we going to see? Are the zombies a metaphor for the people who watch this show?
Could not stand the lighting in the cell blocks. How can you explain the light inside them, to then have it disappear when someone is outside looking in? Does the budget not hold enough money for candles as a reasonable explanation? Why am I wasting my time writing this? I blame the coffee.
The Walking Dead is sorely testing my suspension of disbelief, by having the characters act exceptionally stupidly at all times. Cases in point, from this episode alone
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Walkers pushing down the fence. One person can safely kill 120 walkers in an hour (rate of 2 a minute). As they aren’t going with the “walkers as additional security fence” technique, there is NO reason why they would have more than a handful of walkers outside at one time.
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Everybody KNOWS that people turn into walkers when they die for any reason. Also, they are SLEEPING IN JAIL CELLS. Everybody should be sleeping one to a cell and locking themselves in every night. Don’t want to post guards? Tie strings with bells everywhere as an early warning device.
And don’t even get my started at how stupidly everybody cleared the cell blocks last season.
Coming from Breaking Bad… true… worst written show. Zombie splatter pr0n won´t do anymore. Give us some real plot with real characters and real drama. And please… no redshirts, that scream “I´ll be dead in 10 minutes” from the top of their role.
I’ve read the graphic novels, and ironically the characters act much SMARTER (and more believably) on the printed page.
Re: Point No. 2, funny you should mention that. At the end of this season’s first episode I mentioned to my wife and brother who were watching with me that in the YA zombie novel Rot & Ruin in survivors sleep alone in bedrooms with their doors locked for exactly this reason.
Also, what was up with those two girls with Carol? Presumably, they’ve been living in a zombie apocalypse for a couple of years now and yet still need Carol to explain how things work? I question how they would have survived even long enough to make it to the prison.
They were from Woodbury, which was safer than the main cast for a longer period of time. They’ve probably seen plenty of stuff, but been protected enough that they’ve never actually had to DO it.
The camera in the episode isn’t a Polaroid camera. It’s a Lomography “Diana” camera that shoots medium format film, which needs to be developed. Ooops!
A few thoughts…this episode had me thinking about perimeter defense re: the dead.
Fire. Why not use fire more? Douse those cannibalistic chumps and lightemup burnemup FlameOn…until the Walking Dead are GONE. But, upon further reflection, a big hunk o burnin burnin zombies would eventually weaken the chain link…so that wont do.
However! Back through the mists of history to Roman times: protect the fortress from hordes of whoever with…Ditches, Bitches! And spikes…lots of spikes. With all these new members (AKA zombie food) why not give each a shovel and dig a deep, steep perimeter trough with wooden/metal spikes throughout, especially at the apex of the defended side? Then after the hordes fall in, one could with assurance and comfort burn the adversary to ashes…
PPE stands for Personal Protective Equipment. All this head stabbing and jugular jabbing and not one of our heros wears so much as a pair of gloves? To say nothing of a surgical mask? “Ask not for who the infected zombie groans…”
Finally…seeing Glen and Maggie in their redoubt, I gotta ask: can zombies climb? I have to believe the answer is…no, not really. Maybe a few limber yoga-practicing zombies could, but most of these lurching lunkheads couldn’t climb a playground slide if there was a tender loin of succulent flesh placed on the top of one. So…Ditch the prison and BUILD ON STILTS! EYRIES IN THE HIGHLANDS! FLY YOU FOOLS…IT’S GOING TO GET SO MUCH WORSE! AAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHH!
ahem. Perhaps by next episode a cure can be found, truce made with the biters and everyone can live in peace and happiness forever…
You all realize that you are discussing the logic within a tv-show about zombies, right… What’s next, analyzing the complex emotional depths of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner?
It’s been done. Here’s one from a couple years ago.
http://highbrowmagazine.com/american-dream-and-ideology-road-runner-cartoon 
The chain link fences might work a little bit better if they put the fence on the right side (the outside) of the fence posts too
That mention of TWD’s “consistent downward spiral” at the start of the article reminded me a lot of the short-lived alien-invasion show Threshold from 2005. Every episode had the team solve one problem but discover that they’d failed to avert a much bigger crisis, meaning the whole effort felt kind of futile. At the time I found it quite frustrating, but in hindsight I can’t help but wonder what the long-term plan for the show was - would it have turned into a resistance movement against an invader that had already won?
In American colonial days, the first thing settlers built were impregnable block houses as temporary refuges that were safe from attack with anything except cannons. Settlers with hand tools were able to create log palisades using nothing but hand tools. And they could do it with remarkable speed because they had to…
In Europe, the fortified keep would be expanded into an enclosed area overlooked by 3 to 5 fortified towers with interlocking zones of fire.
On TWD they should have access to chainsaws and backhoes, and entire warehouses of building materials. They could be building a fort out of shipping containers.
And as I always say, the kings would be the people with Ruger 10/22 semiautomatic .22 caliber rifles, perhaps the most common gun in the world. Some would say “I got this” and head shot 30 zombies. Improvised silencers would be enough to make them extremely quit.
Also, notice that because this is being filmed at a prison that IRL is being torn down, the fences lack razor wire. A functioning prison would have 3 rows of razor wire on the inside of each fence. The people taking refuge in the prison would take all those coils of razor wire and make make a 25 wide entanglement zone outside. A field of wire like that can stop any vehicle by wrapping up the axels and it can actually stop a tank by gumming up the drive wheels and supsnesion.
And fire. And big rocks. And horses + ropes. And a dude with a stick and 5 minutes on his hands. And… Yeah, you get the idea. Those structures were rough log houses, that’s all. Their security depended upon people defending them, not the other way around. People depending on a structure to defend them are screwed from the get-go, regardless of whether it’s a log built stockade or a granite built castle. If the walls aren’t defended, it’s over.
LOL! I stand corrected.
In a postmodernist world, every ridiculous idea seem to have merit…
The other thing would be to create traps, pits, and snares. They’d be marked with signs so living people wouldn’t wander into them. They could be caught in large numbers then released into a slaughterhouse style chute for disposal.
Carol kept saying things like “you know how this goes” so I think it was more the shock of it happening to their dad that was causing the disconnect with reality.
Similarly, I think the older girl’s obsession with Nick (the walker on the fence) was her way of displacing and thus avoiding the grief of losing her dad.
Me too! Me too! I thought (during last season) that locking yourself into your own cell was a great form of protection from who knows what. Wouldn’t it even make it hard for human attackers to get to you (sans guns, I guess). But still, you can die in your sleep for all kinds of reasons, so locking the cell doors, depressing though it may be, just makes sense. And if lots of people not in the middle of a zombie apocalypse thought of it, the characters should have too.
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