RageReview: The Walking Dead

So the new season 6 started a while ago, and I tuned in to see what's going on.
I have no issues with dispending my disbelief in most sci-fi stories,
and TWD falls into this category as a comic book adaptation.
Or at least it should.

Since the events do not take place in a wildly alternative universe,
every viewer gets to ask themself "what would I do?".
There's no magic or mojo, just a virus turning dead into undead.

Things should move on in a logical manner, but they don't,
and that's exactly why TWD is making me yell at the screen every 10 minutes something like
"Why the fuck [insert illogical bullshit here]?!"


Here are some things that annoy me the most...

A) Gear

Wrong:
It's been almost two years since the outbreak (season 5 ended at 500+ days #google)
but everyone is still in some kinda styled look fitting their characters personality,
especially women. They appear in button shirts, skinny jeans, fashion boots, and other wear that would be very impractical given the circumstances.

Right:
They should have gone to a abandoned outdoor store or military base and stack up on practical wear,
hiking/military, loose, durable, lots of pockets and utility.
They should be in survival camping mode,
not this "hey we're just on a hangover trip, look how dirty we are, tehee"...


B) Encounters

Wrong:
The walking dead, zombies, still manage to take everyone by surprise and evoke fear and panic,
even though it's been long established that they are slow and retarded.
As a horror show TWD has to deliver a certain amount of scares and gore, but knowing how little a threat these walkers would pose in reality, it makes it really hard not to yawn when some zombie killing is about to go down.

Right:
Every viewer knows by now, that it takes only a healthy sporty kid with a aluminum baseball bat, who could take out a fucking LEGION of these walkers in a few hours. Just lightly stepping around them in a semi open area, smacking their slow ass skulls open with smooth wrist swing *boink boink* here, and a *boink boink* there, dead zombies everywhere...

500 days in action. Let's cut the estimate super low: as a survivor you would kill *only* 2 walkers every 10 days. That still gives you a kill count of 100. Mostly melee. That amount of practice should make anyone pretty damn good, allowing them to at least enter a comfort zone, if not zen state of mind. Anyone should be able to take out walkers with their eyes closed and hands tied.
But no. Every time a walker gets close people start to stumble, lose their cool, fuck shit up, panic and flail...


"WAA WAAH HELP ZOMBIES HELP ME I CAN'T EVEN.....!!"


Never moving out of the way even though there is lots of room in every direction,
waits till walker gets closer and let's it bite them...
Also, everyone in the cast is deaf and suffers from tunnelvision.
Ninja zombies just keep appearing out of literally nowhere, without anyone noticing a thing, especially in the first seasons.

And last but not least, a specific example...

C) Sustainability





Please do add all and any illogicalities that piss you off about this show.
Love to hear them...

The OP explains why I no longer bother with this show, though I am still reading the comics (when they come out in collected volumes). Here are some simple, obvious things the survivors ought to be doing, by now:

*Wearing heavy fabric/leather/duct-tape reinforced cloth/screen mesh garments to protect anything they wouldn't want to have to amputate.

*Riding bicycles or walking (gasoline goes "stale" after a relatively short time, and vehicle batteries lose their charge; there's no way anybody's getting around in combustion-engine vehicles at this point).

*Relying on a buddy system (go NOWHERE alone, and always watch each other's back).

*Fortifying intelligently (as Morgan did, back when he was in his "psycho" phase), rather than relying on crappy chain-link fences to keep zombies and raiders out.

As it is, what killed TWD for me was the incredibly lazy writing, especially where inevitable, predictable, and needless character deaths ("drama") were concerned. I bailed after Tyreese left Noah from the hospital (whose freedom cost them Beth's life, stupidly and needlessly squandered) alone in an unsecured area, going off to woolgather rather than remaining alert for the trouble which ultimately found and killed him. Had Tyreese worn anything sturdier than the crap he had been wearing, he would not have been bitten. Had he not wandered off alone, likely the same result. But the writers needed a dramatic and artsy-fartsy episode to liven up their season, so...

Stupid kills.

I understand that Noah died not all that long after, as the result of more stupid.

Then there's the current, cheaply-crafted conundrum of Glenn's fate. And all the rest of what can be expected if the writers remain consistently crappy.

Nah, I only care in a vague, amused sort of way, whenever I hear about the latest travails of our dwindling band of heroes. ='[.]'=

the walking dead - watched it up to season 3 i think


the writers can't make the people level up (aka gear), as this would lead to power creeping with the zombies in mind (i'm looking at you Resident Evil). if after 2 seasons, the characters were in full padded armour, then there would only be zombie slaughter, and no drama. this would give the show a clear timeline for the end. like only 2 seasons long.



make drama with zombies, then milk it.


-edit: words

My problem with the writing stems from the fact that the walkers decay pretty rapidly and to kill them requires a brain shot. The brain is one of the first things to decay after death so WTF. xD

I browsed several seasons ahead by looking at the comic books,
and if they are...

Ever fought in riot gear? Its why riot cops always die by being trampled.

That shits restrictive to say the least. It makes your visibility basically zero, your mobility is limited by how quickly you can mace a motherfucker who grabs your shit. And its basically just crap.

It makes far more sense to not encumber yourself with seemingly good ideas than to pretend you have any fucking clue how to use it.

Id far rather fight some idiot in full riot gear than a naked motherfucker who actually knows how to fight.

You claim you want reality, but you have no idea how to fight against multiple dickfaces who dont care if they die.

Even well trained soldiers would rather not use riot gear, its a fucking death sentence if you get outnumbered. Go on, ask em.

Tanks only work with backup, mantanks even moreso.

"

Shovelcut wrote:

My problem with the writing stems from the fact that the walkers decay pretty rapidly and to kill them requires a brain shot. The brain is one of the first things to decay after death so WTF. xD

I have real issues with TWD and its ongoing decay of the walkers. Aside the issue of how, exactly, zombies work (and I could provide some faux-scientific theories, but I'm gonna save them for something I might publish), which will never be revealed, a la Romero, because it's not the point... I don't like how easy it is to get that brain shot. The skull is armor for the brain. You don't plunge a knife into it like it's an overripe melon, or slice it through with a katana 'cause you "took fencing classes" and are a sassy black woman. Much too easy, except when it's dramatically necessary to make it difficult.

And if the zeds are rotting so quickly, the show can't last more'n a coupla more seasons, anyway, because rotting muscles won't move a rotting body toward fresh meat.

@tramshed: Who said anything about riot gear? I'm just talking about garments thicker than old, worn-out tee-shirts. Denim reinforced with duct tape would stop human teeth flat (though you might get a nasty bruise underneath), or porch-screen wrappings wired together and worn over clothes. And the whole idea isn't to make it so you can wade into a herd of zekes (because, yes, they'd still eventually tear you to shreds), but to make that close encounter with one biter less hazardous.

Sheesh. =0[.]o=

How the zombies manage to move is almost impossible to explain with science.
I'm no doctor, but hey...

Without taking in water and other nutrition, the blood should dry out.
100 days later in TWD and killing a walker results in a messy blood bath?
That should not be the case whatsoever.

Almost all walkers are mangled, not by pulling their face across rough roads, but due to decay.
Another reason why they should be dried out, blood escaping everywhere.
Especially in the wild, every walker should be filled with maggots and other flesh eating creatures, but maybe the virus has chemical properties that keep them away, so let's ignore this for now.

So the first big problem is how the blood stays in their body,
instead of a) drying out or b) escaping through wounds and other holes or injuries.

Muscles...
For all I know, you need some kinda electrical impulse sent from the brain through nerves into the muscles. And this requires certain (let's get technical) stuff(!) to exist in your tissue and blood stream.

Rigor mortis...
When someone dies, the heart stops beating and so blood stops circulating, and muscle cells stop receiving the chemicals that they get energy from. Calcium is in the muscle fibers but they have no energy to get rid of it with, so the muscles can't relax and all the joints in the body just stay rigid. So walkers shouldn't be able to really move much, just twerk on the ground like fish on dry land.

But, after a while the stiffness goes away. This is due to decomposition; the actual molecular structures in the muscle fibers that are maintaining the contracted state start to break down.
So the stiffness is gone, but so is the muscle tissue, and even if they have enough to move their bare bones around, you could just prod them to the ground or leg sweep them, and game over for the walker.


The only explanation I'm ready to accept on how zombies work, would be something like this:

The virus changes our inner biological essence, blood and tissue so much that it makes everything regarding zombie behavior possible. But you need to be a real good biologist to come up with some science jargon that would convince me.

I should google "could zombies really exist and how would they function?", but naah, too high expectations. I rather wait for the day some show takes me by a happy surprise and does it right.

I wish I stopped watching TWD after the first season. I made it to right about when Ricks wife gets eaten before I stopped watching. I cant stand characters that make the same stupid mistakes over and over again. Its insulting as a viewer that writers want to present the same story over and over maybe changing the location and the name of they "Bad Guy" but in reality its the same rehashed crap youve watched for 3 seasons already.