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The Walking Dead - Season Two (1 Viewer)

Lucia Duran

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I enjoyed last nights episode, but there were definitely things that bothered me.
* Andrea splattering blood all over her face while killing that zombie in the rv
* The fact that the zombies went by them and didn't "smell" them hiding under the cars (sorry I don't buy Kirkmans explanation)
* That Dale couldn't spot that Horde of zombies from on top of the RV before it got as close as it did
* Letting Carl go off to search for Sophie (it's the mom in me that hated that part)
* The fact that the group went to search for Sophie to cover more ground, yet never really split up to do so.
I also hated the fact that they kept advertising this as a 90 minute episode when infact it was more commercials than actual episode! Personally I hate commercials ( I understand why they have them, but I still hate them) and wish they would have done a commercial free premiere. All in all I really did enjoy this episode. I love Daryl saving T-dog the way he did. As gross as it was, I even liked the gutting of the zombie. The makeup is amazing and looks so creepy and scares the crap out of me.
 

TravisR

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That was easily the best episode of this show to date. I love the scene between Andrea and Dale and the group looking for Sofia was well done.
Since there were two directors and two separately credited writers (I know Aredth Bay is Darabont but he and Kirkman have separate credits), I'm guessing this was basically episode 1 and the first chunk of episode 2 combined into one episode. It was probably a good idea because making a cliffhanger out of Carl's shooting works better than having it be the first act break next episode.
And I think you could 'fix' the smelling continuity error by saying that the stench of the dead bodies that had been baking in the cars for a month or so overpowered the smell of the living people and that's why the zombies couldn't smell them.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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Lucia Duran said:
I enjoyed last nights episode, but there were definitely things that bothered me.
* Andrea splattering blood all over her face while killing that zombie in the rv
This bothered me too. I would like them to borrow a page from the Left 4 Dead games and establish that some of the survivors have an immunity to the virus. Otherwise, even if it's only a body fluids-to-body fluids virus like AIDS, more than one of our band of survivors should have been infected by now.
* Letting Carl go off to search for Sophie (it's the mom in me that hated that part)
I can understand that one. It's a sort of selfish parental instinct; when someone close to you loses their child, even temporarily, you want to keep your own children close to you. The smart call would have definitely been to leave Carl with Dale.
* The fact that the group went to search for Sophie to cover more ground, yet never really split up to do so.
This bugged me too. They should have all been in a line across, with about twenty paces or so spread between each of them; close enough to stay in shouting range but spread out enough to make a bigger sweep. I can understand why, psychologically, they wanted to circle the wagons, though.
I also hated the fact that they kept advertising this as a 90 minute episode when infact it was more commercials than actual episode! Personally I hate commercials ( I understand why they have them, but I still hate them) and wish they would have done a commercial free premiere. All in all I really did enjoy this episode. I love Daryl saving T-dog the way he did. As gross as it was, I even liked the gutting of the zombie. The makeup is amazing and looks so creepy and scares the crap out of me.
I always DVR any and all AMC programming I want to watch so I can skip through all of the ads.
TravisR said:
That was easily the best episode of this show to date. I love the scene between Andrea and Dale and the group looking for Sofia was well done.
Since there were two directors and two separately credited writers (I know Aredth Bay is Darabont but he and Kirkman have separate credits), I'm guessing this was basically episode 1 and the first chunk of episode 2 combined into one episode. It was probably a good idea because making a cliffhanger out of Carl's shooting works better than having it be the first act break next episode.
The rumor is that a lot of the footage from what was to be episode 1 came back as nearly unusable, and the footage that Darabont was able to salvage became the first third or so of tonight's premiere. The speculation is that the problems associated with that mess contributed to the falling out between Darabont and AMC. I don't have any idea whether the rumor is true, nor whether it contributed to the situation. But that's the scuttlebutt.
Either way, I think it worked for the premiere, since it told very much one story. The pacing was much more aggressive than last year, for better or worse. Really, there's two cliffhangers, since Sophia wasn't found. I'm guessing she'll turn up at the spoilery place they take Carl to.
 

Joe_H

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Lucia Duran said:
* The fact that the group went to search for Sophie to cover more ground, yet never really split up to do so.
This is the one that bugged me as well. They wanted more people, and walked in a straight line one after the other the whole time.
As for the commercials, I guess the actual length of the episode ended up being a little over an hour, which is about right for a 90 minute episode. It felt to me like the commercials were heavily back-ended though, with fewer / shorter ones the first hour, and then a lot in that last half hour, maybe to influence the numbers or something. I could just be making that up, because I didn't actually count, but that's how it felt to me.
The ending was pretty awesome, I didn't see it coming at all, and expected it to end happily, with Rick smiling at his 'sign from God'. I'm glad I was wrong.
 

Patrick Sun

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A more general criticism aimed toward, I guess, the show:
I don't think there's any middle ground, you either love it (the show) immensely, or don't care for it at all. I have watched all the episodes including last nights, and it's a frustrating viewing experience, so I'm probably going to relegate it to lower priority viewing for now. Now, it feels like the producers are just going for the goriest ways to kill the zombies, it just feels like cheap exploitative tricks to appeal to its fanbase.
I think it's because I just feel bored watching the show, and can't quite stomach how stupidly the characters are being written. Plus, everyone has already dredged all of the blood splatter that doesn't seem to infect the people until the writers decide they are going to die or become zombies. Maybe I just don't like this type of writing, when all the tension is bound in the "will he/she die" question, along with how he/she will be turned or be killed.
 

EricSchulz

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I loved it. I am reading the graphic novels, but the story lines seem to follow faithfully/diverge wildly from the original source that I don't feel it will destroy my viewing pleasure.
 

Sean Bryan

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I don't think the walkers were ever meant to be depicted as having a "bloodhound like" sense of smell that would help them find living people that they couldn't otherwise see. When has this been demonstrated to be the case? It hasn't.
Based on the episode GUTS, even before hearing the recent explanation that was given to the "question of smell" I took it that if they SEE someone and are close enough to smell them, then scent would be the deciding factor in whether or not they attacked. If you are "acting like a zombie" and immitating their gait, one that sees you from 30 yards away probably isn't going to charge you. It might move closer out of instinct, and if you have your scent masked then it wil ignore you. But that "scent" is only a factor in it distinguishing between living or dead in something that it can SEE and is right up on. It's not going to "sniff someone out" that it doesn't even know is there in the first place.
I think the varying speed of the zombies is very interesting. They tend to be slow and shambling, but once they begin to pursue prey they can start to move at a pretty good clip. It's like it takes their dead bodies a little while to "amp up" to faster movement. It seems that they can also basically go into a catatonic state at times when there is no real stimulus around. Then once they notice or hear something they slowly start to move about.
As far as the dead bodies, I'm not sure I understand the confusion or question? While they don't understand exactly what the infectious agent is (viral, bacterial, prion, etc...) it's still pretty clear that is a infectious agent. If you die and you weren't infected, then of course you're not going to re-animate. Why would you? And if you are infected, then you get sick and die, and then you reanimate. You're not going "just be infected" (like from the air) and remain healthy and then only when you die from an injury (or starve or something) would you reanimate. People can still die naturally in this world and stay dead. It's only if you die from this infection that you would reanimate.
The infection clearly is transmitted through bites. Now, is that something in the saliva directly breaking your skin that causes transmission, or is it the blood itself, or all "bodily fluids"? I don't that they/we know for sure. So of course they would want to be careful with being exposed to the blood of walkers they are fighting/killing. And they have been shown being careful about that when they have a choice and can plan for it. But when they simply find themselves fighting for thier lives, they don't always have that luxury, and they do get splattered. Seeing as how we have now seen this happen to several people several times and they haven't gotten sick (at least yet), then that is simply more observation/information about how infectious it is. There's no inconsistancey here. They have been worried about being infected by getting blood on them just like I would be worried about it in the same situation. But after seeing that happen several times without causing infection I think they could (and I would ) start to understand that just contacting the skin isn't enough. It would have to go through a break in the skin, and that could happen if you got some on you. But chances are if you just get splattered that you won't get infected. Thank God for that!
 

Greg_S_H

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Sean Bryan said:
As far as the dead bodies, I'm not sure I understand the confusion or question? While they don't understand exactly what the infectious agent is (viral, bacterial, prion, etc...) it's still pretty clear that is a infectious agent. If you die and you weren't infected, then of course you're not going to re-animate. Why would you? And if you are infected, then you get sick and die, and then you reanimate. You're not going "just be infected" (like from the air) and remain healthy and then only when you die from an injury (or starve or something) would you reanimate. People can still die naturally in this world and stay dead. It's only if you die from this infection that you would reanimate.
Why would all those people die in their cars if they weren't infected? I've been in some pretty bad traffic jams, but they weren't long enough that half the commuters were dead. :D I'm not sure the bodies in the cars would be in that state of decomposition after just a month, but maybe with the hot sun.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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^ My thought, kind of horrifying, is that everybody was fleeing Atlanta amidst the horror of the emerging apocalypse when the tractor trailer overturned in the chaos. Traffic backed up, and then the dead swarmed the highway. People couldn't leave their cars because they were surrounded by zombies, and decided dying of dehydration was better than getting bit and turning into that.
 

Tony J Case

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Joe_H said:
The ending was pretty awesome, I didn't see it coming at all, and expected it to end happily, with Rick smiling at his 'sign from God'. I'm glad I was wrong.
God answers all prayers. Sometimes the answer is "no".
 

Sean Bryan

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Why would all those people die in their cars if they weren't infected?
??? Well, if they were infected they'd be undead, and they'd start moving around when disturbed (like when Rick got into the tank and that soldier that appeared dead at first started moving). But they didn't so it didn't seem like they weren't undead to me. So why would I think they were infected? As for why they died? I don't know. Like Adam said, they probably had no choice but to stay in the vehicles and die from dehydration. And some were probably injured already. And some probably took their own lives.
And yes, the heat in the cars would greatly speed up the decomposition. So, yes, MAYBE it's posible that some died from infection, reanimated, couldn't figure out how to open the car doors, and decomposed so much from baking in the car/ovens that they were too far gone to be "undead" anymore and were simply dead again. But the zombies have been shown to have retained basic skills like opening door handles, etc... So I think most would have left the cars if they re-animated. I'd certainly be VERY cautious around any of those bodies in the cars for fear that they would start moving when disturbed. But these just seemed dead even after they were disturbed, so I'm guessing they were just plain dead.
I'm not sure how this all works in this zombie universe, but I always thought that if you could survive the initial outbreak and find a safe place with food and water that you could hide out in for a while, a zombie outbreak would eventually "burn itself out". If these things are decomposing, then they will eventually get to a point where the flesh is basically gone. So that's it, they'd be done. Movement isn't going to happen unless there is muscle to pull bone.
However, an interesting concept that was used in The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z was that the infectious agent that causes this is so toxic that is it toxic to the microorganisms that cause decomposition. So decomposition would be VERY, VERY slow and unfortunately it means that these things would be viable for much longer than one would expect based on our knowledge of normal decomposition. I don't know if they are going with this type of concept or not in this universe.
Also, I don't belive the zombies feed for nurishment. They are dead after all. They don't need air, water, or food. They feed out of a basic animal instinct somewhere deep in the part of the brain that is still driving the body. Plus, it's the way the virus (or whatever it is) spreads itself. There are numerous examples in nature of how certain infections can change the way the host behaves inorder to spread the infection to a new host. Pretty wild stuff, but real.
So I don't think they'd "starve". Something that wasn't undead would starve, like the "infected" in 28 days later. But these things are already dead.
 

JonZ

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I thought the herd/car wreck scene was pretty great.

Reading the graphic novels now as well. On number 6.
 

Greg_S_H

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I just find it hard to believe that they would be trapped in the cars so long that they died, strapped in with their seat belts and everything. The herd usually moves on pretty quickly. That's why it raises the question "why are some of the dead not reanimated." Adam's explanation is doable if we must, but I think it's more the fact that it looks cool to have corpses in cars. I was going to make a Half-Life 2 mod with a highway clogged with cars (before I realized I didn't really have the skills), and I would have put dead people in the cars just for the cool factor.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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^ I'd also like to think that relatively few cars had people in them, and the show just chose to highlight ones that did.
Side note: I love the look that shooting on 16mm film gives this show, but it's hell on the video compression. When I watched the premiere on AMC HD via FiOS, I thought they might have switched to digital, because everything looked pretty smooth. It was only when I saw video online that I noticed the grain; I guess with 1080i MPEG-2, it just got blasted away by the compression. I don't have Season 1 on Blu-Ray, but I've seen bits on BD and was blown away by the sharpness and grain. One of the more startling upgrades between broadcast and BD of any show I've seen.
 

Inspector Hammer!

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As a zombie fan the season two premiere blew me away! Zombies are one of only two things that still scare me in horror, the other being ghosts and demons and that scene when the survivors were hiding under the cars as the "herd" passed by had me almost biting my nails with fear because something like that is straight out of a nightmare for me, if they hear you or see you you're done.
I could put myself there and I would be petrified with pure unadulterated fear of being discovered. :(
As for the issue of why were there so many corpses inside the cars I like to think that those people got their hands on guns after the outbreak started, were set upon by zombies on the highway and took their own lives rather than become a zombie. Maybe not but that's one theory.
While I like the idea that they would eventually 'starve to death" I just don't buy it, they're corpses, dead tissue thus whether they feed or not doesn't matter, as Dr. Frankenstein said in Day of the Dead they can take no nourishment from what they eat thus they will continue to rot regardless until their legs give out and they could no longer support their own weight.
The fact that Andrea got a face full o' zombie blood yet isn't infected doesn't bother me, I just figure the virus that causes post-mortem reanimation resides in the zombies saliva and not the blood, it has to in order for that to make any sense at all.
Rick leaving Sophie was a stupid move, she would have been perfectly safe with him and he only had to leave her to propel the story forward, if the script didn't call for her to go missing there is no way he would have left her. But ah well, it made for one hell of a tense episode and Carl getting blown away at the end actually made me jump, I didn't expect that at all, I thought maybe a zombie would jump out but then BLAM, a gunshot rang out!
I just want to take a minute to admire the make-up work done by the great Greg Nicotero and KNB Effects on this show! It features the best looking zombies I've ever seen and some of his make-ups almost defy physics as in some cases it doesn't look like it's physically possible to make the actors look that skinny or that their faces are so rotted that you can see the jawbone and teeth.
The gore...hell yeah. When Rick and the redneck archer tore open that zombie I was in zombie nerd heaven lol. I half expected them to pull a licence plate out of him via Jaws lol.
Lastly I recommend you guys check out the six part webisodes on AMC.com called Torn Apart: A New Day, it tells the back story of Hannah, aka the female half-zombie Rick kills in the park in the pilot, it shows what happened to her and how she ended up that way.
 

Dennis Castro

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I can buy the explanation of the smell issue. It makes sense to me. If they hear or see and know you are there then they might smell you out. It's not their chief sense.
On the limited special edition it is explained they decided on a rule that a Zombie cannot move faster the first Zombie in Romero's "Night of The Living Dead"
As far as the characters acting stupidly. Quite often extreme or terrifying and stressful situations when people are faced with life or death people act irrational and make stupid decisions. That is part of what makes the show. If the characters were written in a way were they always made the right or smart decision we would have a pretty boring story. Having the characters make irrational and ill advised choices and facing the consequences sets the stage for conflict, drama and action. It also makes it more believable. These characters are human and fallible just like you and I. We can identify with them.
 

Greg_S_H

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One thing that was kind of weird was the church bell. It was a recording. So, how was it powered? Genny? Somebody has to gas it up eventually. Not a big deal, but my first thing when I found out it was a recording would be to head down to the basement to see what the deal was. And then I'd probably have my face bitten off.
 

Josh Dial

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Originally Posted by Greg_S_H /t/315396/the-walking-dead-season-two/30#post_3861986
One thing that was kind of weird was the church bell. It was a recording. So, how was it powered? Genny? Somebody has to gas it up eventually. Not a big deal, but my first thing when I found out it was a recording would be to head down to the basement to see what the deal was. And then I'd probably have my face bitten off.
It looked like a couple of C-cell batteries in a panel Glen ripped off the wall.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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It helps to remember that not all that much time has passed in real world terms. Rick was in the coma for approximately 28 days. Of that time, the zombie apocalypse probably only really got out of control in the last week or so. Otherwise Rick would have died of dehydration once his IV ran out long before he came out of the coma. The remainder of season 1 took place over the course of a relatively short amount of time. We don't know how long the survivors were on the road between Rick's rooftop monologue and hitting the traffic jam on the interstate, but it's probably a week or two at the most. So that means that at the point we reached the church, we're probably only a few months out from the end of the world. Since it's at a rural location, it's possible the congregation held out longer than Atlanta did. It's not outside the realm of possibility that those batteries are only a few weeks old.
 

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