Walking Dead on AMC

It seems I’m pretty much alone in that I will continue to watch. I’ve read and am up-to-date in the comics and most definitely hate the Negan character who caused me to lose a great deal respect for Kirkman’s writing, and very nearly made me stop reading. I do not want to see his storyline played out, but will watch the bloody-car-crash with morbid curiosity anyway to see how the show moves through it. I also did not like the season’s first episode, but have to admit that it had me riveted, especially all of the handling, placement, cleaning and sterilizing of the axe! Ever since reading that scene, I’ve dreaded it ever being reproduced in the show, and hoped they would decide against it like they did with an earlier Governor/Michonne interaction. So, overall I’d say I’m disappointed, but still hopeful.

I don’t recall seeing people saying they’ll stop watching, just expressing disappointment to varying degrees. I mean, this hasn’t yet gone off the rails like FTWD did.

Spoilers below, obviously. But if you’re reading this thread, you should know that this is a spoiler-riffic discussion anyway.

Finally watched the episode last night. We like to DVR commercial-machines like TWD and anything on ABC (4 commercial breaks for a 28 minute show? Come on!).

I don’t think I’m as disappointed in the episode as everyone else here seems to be. The road-trip was silly, I agree there, but I at least get the point of what they were trying to accomplish. Ham-fisted, as everything else on TWD is, but not unforgivable.

I think the second death was necessary, but how they handled it was nothing but Hostel-level torture porn. The first beating was what I was expecting; violent but not excessive. The second? That seemed to be a giant “oh, this is our most popular character? Well then we need to make this to most graphic death scene we’ve ever had on the show” kind of F-U to the audience. Suddenness is its own impact. When the first swing happened, my wife gasped and gave me the “holy shit” look. That’s all you needed, Walking Dead producers. Then they dialed it up to 11. Went from impactful to unnecessarily excessive in the span of 15 seconds.

They seem to do that with this show though. Now, based on past seasons, we’ll settle down in to the low hum of standard tension and violence, spiked by the mid-season finale being excessive again.

Look how cute:

And:

And:

-Tom

That tiger better fuck up some zombies.

-Tom

My first thought as well.

So, what happens when pigs eat zombies and then you eat them? Cause it seems like they were doing that on purpose to screw with Negan’s guys?

Yeah, pretty sure that was the intent. I can’t imagine they won’t figure that out in quite a hurry though.

I’m glad King Ezekiel turned out to just be a ‘normal’ guy, and not another Guvner/Terminus thing. Would have been a bit much after last week (and those two storylines).

I’m guessing it’s CGI so probably would be to expensive to put into action shots.

Do you automatically get the zombie virus from consuming dead zombie flesh. Surely at some point they must have eaten pork or some other animal that had chowed down on dead zombies?

It’s my understanding that in the Walking Dead, everyone is already infected with the Zombie virus, which is why when anyone dies from anything, they become a zombie.

Ya that’s my understanding also. So I’m wondering if giving the pigs a last dinner of zombie meat has any practical effect or is more like the waiter spitting in the asshole dinners soup?

It’s probably also a cheaper way to feed them.

So The Walking Dead is what happens if they had put a zombie apocalypse into Soylent Green?

While I don’t get the impression eating pigs which fed on Zombies would turn anyone, it certainly seems like it would raise the chance of passing along a nasty pathogen.

Wasn’t there some sort of brouhaha about a group of cannibals who captured some dude and ate his leg and something about whether he was infected? Which makes no sense, since everyone’s infected. Or am I misremembering? I can’t keep straight all of Walking Dead’s scattershot zombie rules.

-Tom

At some point after s2, they made a big deal that there were the “enlightened ones”, who knew everybody was a zombie in waiting, and the oldschoolers who thought the myth of the bite was still applying. Maybe the dudes gnawing on the leg were the latter - I wonder if the guy who parted his leg didn’t tell them about that, actually.

Maybe while you’re still alive the infection is “dormant”. I mean, it obviously is in some way, because people aren’t just spontaneously zombifying. But since he was bitten, the infection was active in the leg they ate.

Also i don’t care because this show is stupid. But maybe!

I think the show logic will be that since pigs are close to humans in biological makeup, feeding them zombie flesh would allow them to absorb the zombie pathogens into their system, thereby passing them on to whomever then eats the pigs. Zombie bites infect those receiving them with a fatal pathogen, even if the wound itself is not otherwise serious or fatal. So eating one of the zombie-fed pigs would be like eating directly off a zombie, you’d be infected with the pathogen pretty much immediately, maybe even resulting in a quicker progression of symptoms since you were introducing the pathogen internally instead of through an external wound.

In the end, if it works, it’s pretty clever. The Saviors would end up with a large number of people infected in a short amount of time, and those people would sicken and die within the walls of the Saviors compound(s), turning and attacking the remaining Saviors, which as we’ve already seen is usually pretty catastrophic for any settlement. Any Saviors who survive would then likely be outnumbered by The Kingdom.

I agree there is no longer a plot. It is just simple survival.

I hope the writers return to the cure story arc. They began this arc when they met the man in the white labcoat at the CDC. He whispered something into Rick’s ear. The next attempt at a cure story arc was when Ginger (RIP) was escorting his idiot savant to Western USA.

The series would improve if the heroes returned to the Cure story arc and made it a central storyline.a