rab01

I thought it was kind of interesting that Hatch defended the trainer to the rest of the group during their big sit-down. I think he said something like: "It's weird because you've won this show several times so you clearly know what you're doing." People focus on Hatch being manipulative (and a tax cheat) but they forget that his skills come with a large side of emotional intelligence. From a human standpoint, it's good to support someone who is clearly working hard to try to help you transform yourself. From a selfish standpoint, it's good to keep your trainer on this show motivated and liking you personally.

I'm going to miss this show when it's gone. I prefer the ones where they do sciency stuff to just blowing things up but there's nothing wrong with some carnage. I was really surprised, however, that after 14 years of this show that they failed to set up pressure gauges farther out on their control test of the mail truck explosion. One question -- do those psi numbers mean that you would not be hurt by a hovercraft going right over you?

How long before this episode is submitted for the Canon and enshrined by unanimous acclamation?

It's weird to me that some people upthread say that the show is on Morgan's side when I see it as completely the opposite -- that the show assumes that there are some viewers who would naturally be on Morgan's side so they stack the deck against it and for the "Rick" side of the argument. To air Morgan's point of view juxtaposed an antagonist like the wolves who are clearly unworthy of sympathy or second chances is not to give it an even playing field. All that said, I disagree that Morgan needs to be a killer before being allowed into the community. He's already more useful than any five ASZhats put together (other than maybe Aaron). There are even other CDB people who haven't killed others -- i.e. Glenn -- to equally destructive effect (without Dickolas, more of them might have made it home). Morgan's problem isn't pacifism, it's mutiny. Morgan wasn't empowered to make any decisions for the community. He shouldn't get to put people inside a prison within the walls and he doesn't get to ask the doctor for resources to be expended on that prisoner. That decision needed to be run by Deanna or Rick or Michonne - one of the people that's been chosen to make those decisions or put to a community vote (like they were doing with Rick's expulsion last season). So, Morgan taking the decision by himself to secretly harbor a fugitive inside the walls was flat out mutiny.

Some random googling got me various textbooks that claim that the population density varied from over a person per square kilometer (3 people per square mile) to a tenth that in places like the Kalahari desert. So, I think the cite you found was too pessimistic --- “According to historical and ethnographic studies, the density of hunter-gatherer populations has ranged from an estimated 1.15 inhabitants per square kilometer for the Amerinds of pre-conquest western North America, to 0.15 inhabitants per square kilometer registered in the 1960s among the Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert of Botswana in southern Africa.” The difference must be due to habitat. [Lee 1968, quoted in Our People, Our Resources web page]" "On average, population density is less than 1 person per square kilometer (fewer than 3 people per square mile). Variations in population density among hunter–gatherer societies are determined in part by net primary production. In productive tropical rain forests the population density of hunter–gatherers can exceed 1 person/km2. Population densities often are less than 0.1 people/km2 (0.3 people/mi2) in less productive ecosystems, such as boreal forests." Google tells me that Georgia has over 59k square miles so should be able to comfortably support way more than the scattered remnants of humanity that we've seen. I get that life in the ZA would suck (and that I'd be dead within a week) but for people who are comfortable hunting and fishing, there shouldn't be a food shortage.

The shelf life of canned goods is a lot longer than we think it is. The expiration date is for when the food starts to lose some of its flavor and appearance but there have been studies showing that it is still safe to eat for a looong time after that. Whether and for how long a group could survive on looting depends on how many people survived the onset of the ZA after the end of manufacturing. If less than 1% of the population survived the first week, then why couldn't a town of under 100 people (like Alexandria) survive the first five years just on what they can raid from homes, stores and warehouses? Also, if people return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the amount of work required is much lower than we've been discussing on this thread -- it's a pretty prevalent theory that hunter-gatherers worked less than 20 hours per week. That leaves plenty of time left over for other activities (like clearing rock quarries of zombies in more permanent ways than parades).

Not to defend Andrea or the show (oh, who am I kidding, I'm totally defending Andrea because I felt bad for her for the entire run) but it made sense for her to call herself a "card carrying liberal." It was a thing back then because of George Bush's '88 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Bush's entire campaign was based on Dukakis being a card carrying liberal (because he was an ACLU member) plus a lot of related mudslinging.

Whenever they actually shot this episode, it was legitimately cold because you can see Nicole's breath during one of her talking heads. I'm glad they didn't try to re-edit the show to create suspense when it wasn't actually there. Lauren did the best work this week and won and they didn't try t hide it as it was happening. The most interesting part of the judging discussion to me was that before the showstopper round, the judges clearly say that Tim was a significant third to Lauren and Nicole who were close to each other. For that to be the case, they really must not have liked his pie that much and his technical must not have been as close to Lauren as just having his icing too thin.

txhorns - totally right. Jim should have gotten fired (not just as trustee but from the firm) and sued for that conversation. The beneficiary owes no duties whatsoever to the Trust. The Trustee, however, does owe those duties and as soon as Jim started even thinking that way, he should have resigned as Trustee. That said, nothing can ever make me Team Brenda. She was such a drama queening entitled brat.

Hey, I get that they all have to have hardship stories for the producers but how did Steve "give up performing for baking"? Dancers don't get to dance forever and they all have to plan for a second career so isn't he just making an incredibly typical career transition? (I'm not saying that he didn't trade dancing for baking but I don't see any sign that he quit dancing early to focus on baking.) As for the winner, Maev always seemed to be in the top echelon and, if the judges tell the truth, her flavors were often the most creative. Based on looks alone, her final cake was head and shoulders better than the other two (Steve's was way too simple and Adalberto's looked clunky) so I have no problem with her being named the winner. Adalberto seems like a very nice guy and a very skilled baker but he must have agreed with the judges comments about his frosting or else he wouldn't have backfilled a talking head about why he added extra butter to his buttercream.

CleoCaesar, I completely agree with almost everything you said. Nerdy and geeky labels are put on everything these days even the very most mainstream of big budget mass entertainment properties. It's also definitely true that Star Wars was never niche entertainment and was always the very most mainstream popular movie. I don't agree, however, that there is nothing left that is outside the mainstream. I couldn't say what most of it is since I'm no longer quite the nerd I was in high school. (As for what qualified as nerdy back then ... I got into fights in summer camp because I brought books with me to read, not because of what types of books they were.)

At one time, there really was something of a divide between some particularly vocal Star Trek and Star Wars fans. It was real enough that it wasn't totally out of left field when they tossed in a fight between them in the movie Fanboys. Personally, I liked both so I was surprised when I first encountered it. The Big Bang Theory is always hamstrung by claiming to be about 4 very nerdy guys but only wanting to show those parts of nerd interests that are immediately recognizable to the mainstream so they like to call things like Star Wars "nerdy." I was a little kid when the original Star Wars trilogy came out and everyone saw it. That said, only the nerds read the follow-up books and comic books. As for the gender divide, back then the girls saw the movies too but us boys saw it more often and acted out scenes more often on the playground. Also, the original trilogy can be incredibly off-putting for some women because other than Leia, there is a grand total of less than minute of other women in 3 movies. Now that I have kids, I'd say the gender divide is similar but flipped with Disney princesses - my sons see all the Disney movies but their friends who are girls are way more into Frozen than they were.

I thought Ainsley had to go as soon as Tim did well and Nicole's showstopper wasn't a disaster. Ainsley's showstoppers have all been really ugly. (I think her only pretty decorated item was her yule log.) I'm sure the finale will again require decorating skills so it made sense that she would be the one to leave this week. I was personally rooting for Ainsley to stay instead of Nicole because I find Nicole tiring to watch but it made sense.

That panel is great and so was Negan's better parenting of Carl than Rick's parenting but the rest of it was so stupid that I really hope they ditch it. It bothered me so much that Negan had Rick's son as a perfect hostage and just gave him back, rather than training him up for a few years to be his lieutenant while Rick can do nothing. (I wasn't looking for that as a storyline in the comics but it's such the obvious play that I had to retcon Negan into being an idiot.)

Well, you have a chance once you get more than 20 miles away from any city. Just ask Rick ;) The most densely populated state in the Union is New Jersey and even that has huge swaths that just have semi-isolated horse farms. Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire - all have places where I'd consider holing up but yeah I don't think there is any safety within 60 miles of New York City or similar distances from Boston or Philadelphia. This country is really, really big. The population is relatively small so there are scattered places in pretty much every state that might be made livable but there are some places (like NYC) that would become hell on Earth.

Yup, I'm dead so my zombie "survival" plan is to drink whatever whisky I have on hand and probably just stroll outside while still drunk ;) Empire State and Chrysler are instant death traps (no resources and totally unlivable once the power stops). Most of the office towers are worse than you even think because they have no resources and you couldn't even construct walkways between buildings because the windows don't open (bullet-resistant tempered glass - you can maybe break it but then that part of the floor becomes unlivable in the winter) and because there aren't the building materials around to use for suspension bridges. The only habitable places would be a few scattered locations - Columbia University (a discrete set of buildings, surrounding grassy space suitable for farming and surrounded in turn by walls, with usable equipment in the science labs), some of the hospitals (fortresses full of the most valuable ounce-for-ounce supplies in the ZA and powered by their own back-up generators), the main branch of the Library (has Bryant Park attached to it), etc. Each city block can possibly be fortified as one unit so you might have webs of buildings connecting by rooftop. Each block a kingdom and ten-square blocks a mighty empire. ... Running for the water would be really hard given that every street would be full of traffic jam and every sidewalk full of zombies. Once you got there, the East River just leads to Brooklyn (you're still dead) and the Hudson leads to NJ (which probably makes Georgia look like a picnic). Yup, screwed.

Not even if you added in Bruce Li & Chuck Norris and gave us Snake Pliskin as the group leader. Each midtown office tower has more potential walkers than the horde surrounding Alexandria. The fewer than a dozen land exits would have been destroyed by the same army that firebombed Atlanta and the few boats would be immediately taken away by refugees. Our only chance would be to make like Morgan and clear it one building at a time.

I don't own a gun and only know a few friends who do (I live in NYC) but I do know what stores sell guns and ammo so if I survived even a few weeks I would be armed by then - as would most people. I'd be instantly dead in the ZA anyway because I live in Manhattan and even Rambo wouldn't make it off this island alive. And, yes ammo makes perfect sense as a currency.

Every female companion in New-Who other than Martha is the specialest snowflake that ever fell from the sky. Rose absorbed the time vortex and became a God. Donna became a time lord. Clara gets her own Tardis. Amy had similar stuff -- it's just the way it goes on this show so getting angry and claiming that Clara is somehow even more Mary Sue-ish seems to me to be misplaced. (By the way, this is one of the reasons that Martha was my favorite companion.) I liked that Clara was bad for the doctor, which is really different from prior companions. The Doctor almost always picks companions that allow him to feel more fallible, empathetic and normal. Clara is the first in the new run who abetted the Doctor's worst impulses. Instead of being a brake on him, she exacerbated all of his feelings of omnipotence. I like that the Show went into what happens if a companion turns out to be (or becomes) a bad influence on the Doctor. This version of the Doctor was MUCH more dangerous than the Doctor at the end of Waters of Mars. Seriously, any doctor that could pick up a gun and shoot another person, let alone another time lord, and just laugh it off as no worse than a cold, has gone deeply off the rails while losing all memory of how he felt in his earlier incarnations when facing death and regeneration. I think that relationship was toxic to the doctor without her being the love of his life. It's just that an adrenaline junkie is not going to be the one to say "you can't win 'em all so maybe we need to do what we can and live to fight another day."

I think Pivot meant Creedence Clearwater Revival as shorthand for southern rock. I like Jordan's Christmas song, maybe because I hadn't heard it before. I don't really see star power in Jordan but he's got a powerful instrument and in a cheesefest like the Voice, he's a worthy last person standing.

I'd like to add a new ethical question to the hopper -- given that every armed stranger is a potentially deadly threat and given that almost everyone left is armed, how do you decide when it's OK to shoot a stranger? What is it that they do, say or look like before you pull the trigger?

Oh yeah, that cast stuck on a yacht together with nothing but sniping at each other in between pirates would be deadly dull. But, if the boat lets them move to an area different from the industrialized world, then maybe you get different stories. Like, if it's a poor fishing village, would it's transition to the ZA play very differently from the suburbs of Atlanta and DC ....

But, it can't be downtown LA. They didn't have LA past the first episode because they're filming in like Canada or something. Given the constraints and what we saw in the first season, staying in "LA" would have been either a disaster or just a pale copy of the mother ship. I've got a "show me" attitude but boarding the SS Minnow but at least it forces different story lines on FtWD .... (By the way "Gilligan's Zombie Island" would be an awesome show)

Other than movies and TV, all I know of cannibalism is from studying Cannibalism and the Common Law in college (and more briefly in law school), reports of the aboriginal tribes Nashville mentioned and the ritual cannibalism of the Eucharist. But, of the stories from Western Europe and America of it happening in the past few hundred years, the people who were forced into it by extreme circumstances like shipwrecks or airplane disasters never went back to it. They managed to lead normal lives afterwards. I would guess that even if you might develop a taste for "long pig", you don't become a depraved murderer willing to act on it. Here's how I think they became cannibals at Terminus (and why I never wanted to see more of the backstory than we were shown): A few weeks after they've been captured and are still being abused daily (say the time of the flashback), the lumps of charred meat that they've been getting to eat stop being possums, squirrels and raccoons (but the food is not identified to them before or after the change). A few days later, Gareth asks about someone who was removed from the cell and the guard is all too happy to tell them that "Fred" is who/what they've been eating for the past few meals. Everyone stops eating. Fast forward a couple days and people are starting to weaken and the frailer or more abused prisoners are becoming dangerously ill. Gareth forces one of them (maybe his mom) to eat some of the food that is still being left for them. Within another couple days, Gareth still hasn't eaten any of it but one of the people he wants to eat won't do it unless Gareth does it too (to keep his strength up) ... which he does. After this, the fight goes out (or appears to go out) of the prisoners. They stop even screaming when called out to be raped. The captors start using them more and more often to do work around Terminus. All the while, Gareth is secretly organizing the prisoners to kill their captors. One night, they rise up. They don't have much supplies so they eat their former captors while making plans to start foraging and planting. But, the next day or within a couple days, someone comes up to the gate seeking sanctuary but is shot by a scared guard. Gareth is upset about it but realizes that he never would have let the guy in and never would have let an armed leave alive either so ... After that, the candle room is made and everyone pledges to the "new way it has to be." Now for the reason I never want to see that backstory -- first, show me where in that chain of events Rick or Carol anyone in CDB would have behaved differently and second, I'm sure the show would have just turned it into the Governor episodes redux.

Ahhhhh, this is a thread right that could keep going through the entire hiatus and beyond. A couple throat clearing-ish things before getting to cannibalism. The hospital storyline was potentially FASCINATING to me as the first time we saw a legitimately gray from top-to-bottom society being created post-ZA. Woodbury was just a bunch of ASZhats with a stronger (albeit evil) leader and some soldiers. Grady was a story with potential to explore about the trade-offs people are willing to make for security in the post-ZA (the residents/serfs) or the prices people would extract for taking on extra risks (the cops). Unfortunately, they derailed the story into Beth, Beth and more Beth and focused on some murky power struggle between the cops, rather than the serfs -- who were given pretty much NO dialogue. Terminus was also potentially fascinating. Neither of those societies was in the comics and I think that's kind of telling. Kirkman doesn't really do world-building. He sets up scenes and dilemmas and hard choices and sometimes really sad results but his world building is very murky. So, it makes sense to me that two interesting set-ups had no real peg to the comics and were then burned off quickly to get back to the main arc of the show. On to cannibalism and whether Terminus' adoption of it was at all believable. I don't want to bury the lead so I'll start with what would normally have been my last point -- cannibalism hasn't always been considered a particularly uncrossable line in modern society. We all talk about the Donner Party but in the 1700s and 1800s there was a minor rash of shipwreck cases where the crew ate each other (or some of each other) in order to survive until rescue. There's some speculation that ship construction of the time played a part in it because there were more mid-sea wrecks that were survivable for months but without the ability to count on being able to make it to shore. In one famous case that ended up being tried before the British Courts and explored in a book called Cannibalism and the Common Law, a British Navy Captain was shipwrecked in a lifeboat with a few members of his crew. After many days at sea, the cabin boy fell ill from having drunk sea water and they decided to kill and eat him. The Captain's defense was that they were following the "Law of the Sea" and some of the argument at the time was whether it would have been better if they had held a lottery instead. How does that apply to the discussion in the post-ZA world? There are times and circumstances where some very respectable and, in their lights, moral people will decide that cannibalism is the correct course of action. There are also some choices that people may make in those circumstances that can be immoral even if you grant the possibility that eating people may not be automatically immoral. As for how it started at Terminus, I bet those guys were fed people while they were captured by their oppressors who weren't willing to waste any other resources on them other than their own selves. Once they broke free, I'm sure they first killed all of the oppressors that they could find. At that point, they probably thought of it as either fitting or simply wasteful to not eat the corpses. What was really immoral to me about their set-up afterwards was leaving up all the old signs and then robbing and killing everyone who came in. What they did with the dead bodies afterwards was way less evil, just icky.