The Walking Dead - Days Gone Bye

[TheStarWarsTrek]

You know, we've all (including me), been poking holes at the common problems (either scientific or social) that would get in the way of a zombie apocalypse reaching world ending proportions. But I gotta say . . . are we having a double standard here? I'm a big super hero fan, I don't get hung up on how Superman or the Hulk violate the laws of physics, and if someone else did I'd say they were nitpicking, to just relax and enjoy the show. Are we doing the same thing, but with zombies?

[Beastro]

I think what some people are missing about how ''unrealistic'' the walker plague is is that EVERYONE is infected. It is airborne.

151,000 people die worldwide each day, which comes to 55.3 million per year. That is 151,000 brand new soldiers coming at you every single time you wake up. But worse than that? In a world without 21st century medical care then that figure will be even higher. And yes, that figure will change the less people there are, but it will remain a per capita figure.

Factor in the surprise factor and these are impossible odds.

It would spike near the beginning simply because so many Moderns wouldn't live long enough to know how to survive, but afterwards the only zombies being produced would be those dying when out on their own.

Watching the season season I pondered how society would change, especially how ceremony and ritual would. The days of just burying the dead, building cairns over them or even leaving them out in the open to rot would be done; people would either go full cremation or all corpses would be decapitated before burial and the discovery of any dead body would be treated with the utmost alarm and caution until one or the other was done.

Everything else dealing with the risk of death would be treated with similar caution. There'd be a new occupation added to clinics and hospitals: someone standing off holding a weapon ready to rekill someone injured that was at risk of mortal death; at the very least doctors would administer something like a stiletto to the brain instead of signing and saying "call it". The sick and elderly would be treated with more caution and it could be the point where people think it's best to kill grandma NOW rather than risk her dying in her sleep and hurting anyone else. Health defects and similar potentially lethal health problems would be looked on less with pity and more with fear. You've got some heart trouble in your family? Suddenly you're looked on as a ticking time bomb.

Even going out for a walk by yourself in the wild would become social faux pas: you might die while out alone which would leave one more walker around to potentially kill someone else.

I don't think many zombie fiction writers realize just how cautious, careful and conservative people would become in ways that even tribal society isn't like.

You know, we've all (including me), been poking holes at the common problems (either scientific or social) that would get in the way of a zombie apocalypse reaching world ending proportions. But I gotta say . . . are we having a double standard here? I'm a big super hero fan, I don't get hung up on how Superman or the Hulk violate the laws of physics, and if someone else did I'd say they were nitpicking, to just relax and enjoy the show. Are we doing the same thing, but with zombies?

The zombie genre has at least begun a drift more into the speculative fiction territory to be nitpicked. You could blame it on WWZ, but even the Romero films had an eye to nuance with things that began the ball rolling.

The closest thing I can think of in the comic book world to that is Alan Moore's work, like Miracleman and the Watchmen, but even that isn't nuts and bolts nitpicking.

[BunBun299]

You know, we've all (including me), been poking holes at the common problems (either scientific or social) that would get in the way of a zombie apocalypse reaching world ending proportions. But I gotta say . . . are we having a double standard here? I'm a big super hero fan, I don't get hung up on how Superman or the Hulk violate the laws of physics, and if someone else did I'd say they were nitpicking, to just relax and enjoy the show. Are we doing the same thing, but with zombies?

I don't think so. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm perfectly willing to make the leap that some unknown force can cause the dead to reanimate and crave the flesh of the living. It's the same thing I do for faster than light travel and matter transporters, boxes bigger on the inside, lands of candy colored talking equines, or a guy able to fly because he gets some funky high on a yellow sun. I will accept all of this within the context of their own stories.

The problem I have with the idea of the zombie apocalypse is, the story just does not make sense to me, by it's own internal logic. Zombies simply are not a threat. To allow them to grow in numbers to a point where they could be requires me to assume that 99.999% of the Earth's human population has lost about 50 IQ points, and will never apply any sort of common sense to the situation, or ever use our incredibly powerful global communication systems to spread basic knowledge that could save lives.

[JL_Stinger]

"The zombie apocalypse kicks off when a man wakes up from a coma. Is he in for a hell of a surprise."

I liked this premise better when it was called 28 Days Later.

[ran76]

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

Didn't the CDC publish a comic on what to do during a ZA?

[ran76]

If the zombies wipe out humanity, pollution will almost cease overnight, the planet's temperature stops rising, hundreds of species no longer going extinct on a daily basis. but brexit will still be ongoing somehow.

I take it you never watched Life after Humans. *Eventually* the global environment will improve, overnight? hardly

[Fianna]

Question: on this show, is it just the recently dead who come back to life, or are there zombies clawing their way out of graves, too?

[Darth Wedgius]

You know, we've all (including me), been poking holes at the common problems (either scientific or social) that would get in the way of a zombie apocalypse reaching world ending proportions. But I gotta say . . . are we having a double standard here? I'm a big super hero fan, I don't get hung up on how Superman or the Hulk violate the laws of physics, and if someone else did I'd say they were nitpicking, to just relax and enjoy the show. Are we doing the same thing, but with zombies?

Maybe... For me, when a drama is based on a problem and there is a focus to try to solve the problem, it's hard for me to get involved when the problem seems silly to me. Get people out in motorcycle leathers and axes or machetes and the problem is going to go away in months.

From what I gather, the real focus of the show is more on the characters, how they interact, etc. I don't want to watch a show about, you know... people being people. There are too many of those in the real world.

So yes, because I can't suspend disbelief while trying to empathize with the characters' struggles. With Superman or the Hulk, the powers are the setting and not the problem. Lex Luthor trying to off the guy who saves the world on a semi-regular basis bothers me more, but he's supposed to be insanely egotistical.

Zombie comedies I can enjoy, though.

[CrypticMirror]

Question: on this show, is it just the recently dead who come back to life, or are there zombies clawing their way out of graves, too?

They are explicitly using the disease angle, rather than the hell is full so everybody dead is coming back angle, so it is only people who died after being infected who come back. If you died before then, then you are safe in the grave. Since reanimation seems to occur pretty quickly, it is doubtful they could get anyone buried before the zombrage kicks in.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I stopped watching the show after a season or two. I can enjoy the occasional zombie movie, and its well-suited for certain types of video games, but overall I'm just not a big fan of the genre. The implausibility of zombies themselves bother me more than the likelihood of every world government being unable to handle an outbreak, but neither is the biggest issue for me.

The big problem for me is the contrivance of the writing. Zombies by definition lack any kind of goals or motives, even insanity. Once you get the creepiness/horror/blood-and-guts factor, there's nothing else there. All conflict and drama will necessarily be driven by the survivors, and the zombies amount to little more than a tool to drive home whatever point the writers want to make about society, culture, or people in general.

That worked for Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, etc., but for it to work for hours upon hours of television? The writing has to really be on point. And ultimately, the best writers probably aren't writing about zombies in the first place.

With The Walking Dead, the hand of the writers was just too visible. It felt too obvious that the stupid things people did, the needless conflicts, were only occurring the way they did in order to preserve drama and keep the common sense solutions to problems from ever lessening the survivors' misery. If survivors get too comfortable, then they introduce some ridiculous supervillain-esque character to blow it all up. And as I see this thing dragging on to double digit seasons and multiple spinoffs, I feel like I made a good decision in not giving the show a second chance.