The Walking Dead - Days Gone Bye

[clearspira]

Ah, the Walking Dead. Massive fan for the first four seasons and a sizeable fan for the fifth, but after that, the many cracks that I had been ignoring began to show until I frankly could not stand the show any more.

For me, what killed this show was the fact that with every season the show got less realistic. And you can see that in season 1: Rick fires a revolver inside a tank and nearly perforates his eardrums. It shows that these people are human, that they are not supermen. And in season 2, there is no supervillain, there is only the very human drama of two friends growing slowly apart in the horror of the zombie apocalypse. And in fact, one thing I loved about season 4 was that the greatest enemy they faced for the first half of the season was the flu and the realisation that, hey, we now live in a world without antibiotics and doctors.

But apparently I was alone in this for because season 2 (which I really enjoyed) was ''not like the comic'' enough, the writers thus sought to rectify this by turning the show into a comic. Out were the realistic characters, in comes the One Man Army and three seasons of a guy who wanks over his baseball bat.

I also have to say that the majority of the female characters in this show were just terribly written. Most episodes had the men doing the badass things and the women just getting in the way. It got better as it went on slightly, but Lori, Andrea and Beth in particular contributed nothing and in all honesty I find myself fast forwarding through any scene they are in on rewatches.

[aceina]

i lost interest in the show quickly it is just to slow paced for me

[CrypticMirror]

i lost interest in the show quickly it is just to slow paced for me

Ditto. Plus it rapidly became obvious that it would have been better for the entire WD World if Rick had been left to die in that tank. TWD could almost be subtitled "Rick Grimes Gets Everybody Else Killed". He was a massive asshole, and a total hypocrite too with his later insistence that they don't stop to help others; despite him only being alive because Glen stopped to help him and the group took him in. That was the worst decision they ever made. Plus it was the most boring post apocalyptic group ever on tv, and I've seen the original BBC Survivors show where they once got a whole episode out of trying to preserve cabbage.

[SpacePaladin]

"After all, do you know anyone in the government that is prepared for an army of zombies marching into America?"

Meanwhile in Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueBZuZAoglE

PS: Can someone tell me how links to youtube are supposed to work?

[rickgriffin]

I honestly can't get into any show that can't bring itself to even pay lip service to having a resolution. If there's no ultimate destination, then what's the point of going there? Yes yes, I know, "the journey", but I'd much rather have a journey that didn't drag itself out until it just gets stupid and boring.

[Tonesthegeek]

I'm surprised given that Chuck reviewed the World War Z novel that he forgot that in the Novel Greenland was the most overrun location on the planet that even 10 years later is still heavily infested because when everyone went there thinking it would be safe, it just created more potential for things to go wrong.

[SFDebris]

I'm surprised given that Chuck reviewed the World War Z novel that he forgot that in the Novel Greenland was the most overrun location on the loaner that even 10 years later is still heavily infested because when everyone went there thinking it would be safe, it just created more potential for things to go wrong.

That was Iceland.

[SuccubusYuri]

Adding my two cents on the contrivance of the apocalypse, the show does a slightly-better job at portraying how society could collapse than the Comics do, mainly because their zombies are a lot scarier. In the comics, small groups of zombies, even to the untrained, are ridiculously weak and easy to outpace with a brisk walk. Lori, for instance, is quite easily able to overpower any individual zombie. That's not a dig, just, she's not a very physical person. Throw weapons into the equation, give them to trained forces or even just, "athletic groups of humans" and the absurdly short time frame that everything seems to have gone to shit, a span of about three weeks, and just how few people are still around, and the math just does not support the conclusion. If the timespan was longer, the zombies stronger, or there were more pockets of society, or at least the mortality rate below 99% in the first couple episodes, I think it would help the suspension of disbelief. Which, again, the show at least mitigated by making an individual zombie dangerous....sometimes comically so but let's not get ahead of ourselves xD

Of course that doesn't go into the LENGTH of the apocalypse either. Corpses in the Georgia summer heat with enough tissue mass to move after years and years? Nuh uh. And the show doesn't really move THAT far north to mitigate that, either. Which I guess brings us back to aliens.

[FaxModem1]

The Hurricane Katrina argument is rather fascinating, as it does show how being ill prepared can lead to a disaster making things even worse. I'm going to point out a disaster that was just as large, if not larger, and had to be solved by big government. The Dust Bowl.

The Dust Bowl was due to limited knowledge at best, total ignorance at worst of ecology. Due to individual actions and the belief that plowing the fields was good for the soil, even during drought conditions, and you have a bunch of dirt waiting to be swept up by the winds. People's homes were destroyed, Their entire livelihoods destroyed, people died, and waves of people fled their homes, looking for greener pastures. This would only compound the disaster, as this left even more plowed land to be swept up by the wind, taking up even more dust, making the storms bigger.

How was this solved? Government action, from the top down. As opposed to the inaction of Hoover, FDR and a more decisive Congress acted. First off, millions of pigs were bought and slaughtered by the US government to feed the poor and hungry. As part of the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps went about planting over 200 million trees to keep in the soil. This helped settle in the dirt, and helped make the land habitable again.

A zombie apocalypse could be like Katrina, in which inept leadership leads to it destroying civilization because of apathy, or ot could be like the Dust Bowl, and millions are saved because everyone works together to fix the problem. It cost money, time, and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but they got things done. Similarly, the humans in The Walking Dead face similar challenges, and only get through by working together.

The Walking Dead's biggest problem for it's first half of its run is that it very much wants to take that glass half empty approach, and has the characters act like idiots to get there. A running theory of the show was that whatever made the zombies also infected the humans and made them all lose about 20 IQ points. Sometimes it became nihilistic in its bleakness, and it felt like Rick was the angel of death, bringing death to whatever functional community he found along the way. The whole plotline of the Governor and his settlement seemed to be that trying to reestablish civilization was a very bad thing. and you were better off not trying, as it brought all the bad parts of civilization with what little of the good they could manage.

Thankfully, they slowly got rid of this later on, and started to embrace the fact that you can rebuild civilization if you work together and try hard enough. I'll let one of my favorite characters, King Ezekiel, say some words for me to help illustrate that:


youtu.be/DowiO8YbUns

[ProfessorDetective]

Fun fact, as mention in that video of the Canadian Parliament: the CDC actually has an action plan for zombies, if it should ever come up. Admittedly, it was mostly done as a public awareness builder (using zombies as a metaphor for more likely scenarios), but they put proper thought into it. They even did a free comic that Linkara reviewed a while back...


youtu.be/IhCKatKocD0