So wow, crazy revelation (that I think everyone probably saw coming) last night. Not the best time to admit to everyone that you’re a fraud, but it was kind of interesting how they slowly built up the trust level between Duane and the rest of the group until he finally felt like he could come clean to avoid getting anyone else killed. With no “mission”, what will Abraham and company do now? Even if they go back to Rick, what will they all do? I think Rick was pretty sold on the D.C. thing by the end of the Terminus plotline, so now nobody has a plan or a purpose.
Abraham’s backstory was sad and a little confusing. He apparently beat a group of guys to death in a grocery store where he and his family were hiding because they had come in and threatened the family and tried to take the food (or were they already walkers, it was hard to tell)? Then his wife and kids left him because he was too violent so they were scared of him? It’s the apocalypse, and you leave because your husband/father is somehow scarier than ZOMBIES?! Seemed like a stretch.
jg93
4442
You get to drink from the… FIREHOSE.
JFrazer
4443
That struck me as the early days of the ZA, when some “soft” people were still alive. The wife and kids weren’t hardened to the “do everything you need to do to survive” mentality yet. You see your husband beat a group of men to death with a can of beans, it might be time to sneak out while he’s asleep. If it was 2 years later, I have no doubt she would give him a hug and an atta-boy and go back to cooking dinner.
I thought we were going to see Abraham whip out his gun and shoot himself in the mouth. Glad that didn’t happen. Also thought Eugene might be dead and we’d have a tortured Abraham getting gunshy, but The Talking Dead accidentally spoiled some upcoming events.
I haven’t read the comic so everything that happens is a revelation to me. I suspected Eugene was lying, but I also thought he might be telling the truth and that the “cure” may be the way they eventually end the show a few years from now. So much for that :)
tgb123
4444
They could have made Eugene not a liar, but batshit crazy/delusional. Spend the rest of the season getting him to Washington, perhaps having a couple of people get killed along the way. When they get there in the season finale, his “lab” is in the basement of his parents house, and his “cure” could be something he cobbled together from empty Cheeto bags, wads of gum stuck to the bottom of his bed, a little bit of string, and a couple of action figures.
How great would that have been?
On a scale of 1 to awesome, that would have been “pretty sweet”.
As a guy who read a fair number of the comics, I thought they handled Eugene better in the show. In the comics it was obvious from the start that he was a fraud, and it stretched credibility that this group of hardened paranoids would believe him for more than 20 minutes. In the show, his story still beggars belief but the lines about counter-virii and defensive diseases actually sounded pretty good, and I started to think that maybe they had something cool planned.
I think a longer sequence where he slowly loses it as they get closer to DC and a delusional Eugene is forced to believe/question his own bullshit would have been a far better story than making him a clumsy con-man.
corsair
4446
“I’m smarter than you.”
>wallop< THUD
But not as smart as you think. Loved the full face floor-plant.
It looked like Abraham killed him right there.
Agreed. Full face first fall onto the asphalt, and there was an audible crunch/splat sound on impact too, I thought for sure he’d be dead. If he’s not, there is no way between Abraham’s hits and the road impact that he’s not concussed so badly that his brain is swelling dangerously. Maybe if he’d fallen backwards his mullet might have softened the impact…
Desslock
4450
It was actually way darker than that. After the zombie outbreak, Abraham rescued his family and hooked up with another group of survivors and they were doing o.k. for a while. Then, one day when Abraham was out foraging for supplies, a group of the guys in his group of survivors gang-raped his wife. Abraham came back and killed them all, some with his bare hands, as depicted in the show. It was all so shocking and alarming that his wife couldn’t take it and ran away with the kids in the morning - he caught up with them only a couple of hours later, but they’d already been torn to pieces and partly devoured.
For sure it doesn’t seem sensible that his wife would leave and take the kids out into a world of cannibalistic ghouls, so that decision may require a stretch of your creative sensibilities, but I just assume that she was in actual physical shock from what happened to her, and the horror of all the violence, that she wasn’t thinking rationally and just had her “flight instinct” triggered and needed to run.
Did anyone here buy Eugene’s story for even a single episode? I think I would have had trouble with it even if he hadn’t led with the bullshit “classified” non-answer to early questions.
Eugene was clearly intended to be the cliche “autistic genius,” but he never came across as terribly intelligent to me. When he claimed to be “smarter than you are” in this episode, my immediate reaction was “I haven’t seen any evidence of that.”
It’s possible that Eugene was not intended as the autistic genius, but has simply been playing that angle up a bit since in reality he’s simply chubby, slow, and terrible with guns… and knows it.
That said, there was that episode last season where he unerringly led Abraham & Co. through backroads to the train-tracks to meet up with Glenn. That struck me as “autistic savant” at the time. But that’s about the only evidence we’ve seen of him being smarter than the average bear.
Wow. That is nasty. The TV show should have done a way better job of conveying some of that. They wouldn’t have even needed to go that dark, they could have just shown some guys busting into the hideout and violently threatening Abraham’s wife and kids, then he shows up and goes all nuts-with-a-can-o-beans, scaring the shit out of his wife and kids. Maybe an extra 90 seconds of backstory exposition, and viewers who aren’t also readers would have understood what was going on a lot better.
Anyone else watching Walking Dead via DirecTV? AMC is having a spat with the carrier over an upcoming contract renewal, and their brilliant idea to get the support of the viewers is to block out half the screen with low-tech bars at the top and bottom, then scroll their little contract dispute spiel across the bars and threaten that if you don’t call a phone number or visit a website you could lose Walking Dead. “Oh noes, I might not be able to watch Walking Dead come January!”, well shit AMC, I can’t watch it NOW because you are obscuring half the screen and blowing my immersion with your stupid scroll bars. It’s annoying enough that I’m hoping DirecTV actually wins the pissing contest at this point.
hepcat
4454
Are you sure that’s AMC doing that? Are they even able to target a provider in that manner?
I accidentally spoiled the whole episode 30 seconds in for my wife by saying, “I’m not sure how anyone with half a brain could believe Eugene’s story for half a second. I get that people are desperate for hope but it doesn’t really make sense that someone like Abraham would be so gung-ho in trying to get him to Washington unless he really needed a mission to give meaning to his life.”
Granted, that was kind of my impression from the moment those two characters were introduced so, yeah, nothing too shocking.
corsair
4456
I’ve complained about this before…wait, no, not on this thread, on Facebook. Anyway, the Directv war with AMC seems to be heating up - there’s even a channel on Directv dedicated to counter-propaganda. Which would all be amusing except for AMC 's rather obnoxious during the show advertising that just fucks over the mood. I think we should give both sides running the advertising bats, katanas, and crossbows, lock them in a basement, and the winner is the side that emerges alive.
That was certainly my impression almost from the beginning. The only smart thing he did was hook up with tough soldier guy and convince he could save the world and I guess the hoses was pretty smart. Although given how short water is not even sure that was so smart.
So that was one of the least surprising things of the show, even less of surprise than finding out Terminus was not a sea of tranquility.
I don’t remember that scene, but I 'll take your word for it.
I was thinking the same thing. Eugene seemed like a fraud from the moment he was introduced. I assumed Rick’s gang was at the very least suspicious about him, but this episode made it look like Eugene had everyone completely fooled, including Glenn and Maggie. I know our group of adventurers aren’t the smartest sacks of zombie chow, but this episode made them look pretty dumb.
rowe33
4459
Hating the ridiculous AMC vs. DirecTV crap too…at least it isn’t being spammed the entire show I guess. Then of course as soon as the commercial breaks hit, DirecTV is there in your face to tell you their side of the story.
I never read the comic so I a small part of me thought Eugene could be telling the truth. It felt like an incredibly slow episode to me overall though. Looking forward to whatever happens at the hospital next week.
It didn’t feel too slow to me. Mainly because I found that learning Abraham’s backstory was interesting. Particularly since, despite him being ready to kill Eugene, he clearly needed Eugene to give him a sense of purpose when they met.
