rab01
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Posts posted by rab01
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... Over and over again, Show has demonstrated that "killing is the only option," as you say, and anything else is just irresponsible. ... I really want to see a workable alternative to that, not pie-in-the-sky BS like Morgan's espousing (and in the middle of the Wolf fight too -- really Show? That still pisses me off because you just hammered another nail in Morgan's coffin). ... I don't know if I'm making any sense but I am just disappointed in Morgan's development; it smacks of character assassination somehow.
So much THIS.
It's not Morgan and it's not even his philosophy. It's that the show had him espousing it in the middle of the least plausible circumstances and scenario. The middle of a surprise attack is not a moment for a philosophical debate and Morgan could not know that it was possible to repel the attack without further deaths -- and the Show was very clearly telling us that he was completely wrong. The Show was just stacking the deck in a really stupid way. If the Show wants me to hate Morgan, just have him eat babies or make him FPP's best friend and spiritual twin; it would be a lot faster. (Oh yeah, and then FPP could die in the process).
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Yeah, it's weird how rarely we see groups of people who seem like they can survive without being totally psycho. I think it relates a bit to another problem with the show -- what the hell supposedly happened to all the animal life. If this were the Northeast where I live, there would be deer everywhere and food would not be an issue for any group with Daryl's crossbow. Since it's Georgia, is the equivalent wild hogs? In any event, wildlife should be flourishing with so few people around so humans should not have to essentially prey on each other for food.
In the Governor's backstory, we saw two examples of not awful survivor groups (the camp he eventually took over and the camp they scouted but did not attack). In both cases, evil people wiped out what seemed to be workable groups. I think Thomas Hobbes would say that the show's version of the effects of "might makes right" is believable but I say it does get depressing sometimes.
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Huh, I guess I'm the only person who liked Priya. The way they broke up made her look bad but other than that my only issue with the relationship was that she seemed a bit too good for him. I don't blame her for distrusting his interactions with Penny because she was right about his feelings. Also, her pwning Sheldon and his roommate agreement was one of my favorite episodes (except for the ending - the coerced contract was not binding and she should have told Leonard that at some point).
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I've thought about this too. Not just in terms of how long the walkers should be able to walk, but the quantity of them.
Forgive me for being a nerd, but I love math. As of 2008, there were 528.7 million people in North America. (I'm just going to go with all of North America, because the Canadian and Mexican borders probably don't matter much to walkers.) If we assume that 1% of the population survived the initial apocalypse, that is roughly 5,300,000 people. If you take 530 million and subtract 5.3 million, and divide the answer by 5.3 million, that comes to each surviving person being responsible for killing 99 walkers each, which I think could probably be done within a month for CDB when they were out on the road. Of course the living come back as we know, but compared to the massive amount of walkers, that really doesn't amount to much.
It's an interesting question (you might like the zombie guts thread where that and similar questions have been kicked around) but what if the number of initial survivors is much lower than 1%? If you only had somewhere under a few hundred thousand humans who survived the first 3 months of the ZA, What would your numbers look like?
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Sure, but I don't think people who brushed with twigs were renowned for their oral health ;) Tooth decay actually has more to do with your diet than your brushing habits (but please try brushing with a twig for a couple years and I'm sure it won't help either), and that is another thing they are clearly lacking is proper diet.
But I think their diet is generally better than our diet in terms of tooth decay - high in scavenged roots and mushrooms and whatever squirrel or possum Daryl manages to shoot and low in twinkies. From what I've read, hunter-gatherers had better teeth than we do so ...
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But yeah I was always annoyed that someone didn't go through the library (other than the "Self-Help" section, YUUU-JEEEN!) looking for books on how to ID wild foods. That hobby has became pretty popular over the last decade or two. We saw CDB foraging for mushrooms in S1E2, they should always be doing that, ALWAYS. It would get kind of boring though (but not to me, I think I'd rather enjoy them looking for arrowroot in the swamps there). I like a bit of "reality" in my zombie sci-fi postapocalyptic fantasy fiction, I guess.
Seriously, they need one of the Alexandria supply runs to be raiding a library. A walker fight among the stacks would be a pretty decent set-piece too.
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Morgan is like the back-up quarterback on a mediocre football team. He's everybody's favorite player until he starts.
Morgan was never going to be able to go up from his moment last season when he took out two wolves, knocked them unconscious and then honked the car horn to draw walkers to them. From the moment it was revealed on TD that he was actually checking to see if the coast was clear for them to survive, his character has been going downhill. That said, I still like him and I like him tons more than comic book Morgan. I'd much rather see him change, grow and survive than get killed off but, at this rate, I don't see how he survives into next season.
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Such a good discussion. I keep going back to the idea of what is "moral" and what is alive or dead? (in Morgan's world, that is) Is it any more moral for Morgan to hurt a Wolf enough but not kill him and let the person go, who MIGHT die of his wounds a week later and then becomes a Walker that STILL kills everyone and makes more Walkers? How is that helping? Which is more moral? Killing a Wolf or killing a Walker? If he doesn't kill the Wolf that ultimately becomes the Walker, is that the same person? Does Morgan see them as different or are they the same? Does Morgan construe the act of taking down a "Walker" as "killing"? Can you only kill something that is alive? If they are "dead", are you killing them? If so, how does he justify that? What does Morgan then call it, if not alive? If he can see shades of gray here, why only here?
I think that Morgan has latched onto a dogma that, on the surface, is very simple statement, but in reality is a complex theoretical cognitive concept. This is like when we tell a three year-old the magical story of Santa Claus. They accept it at face value because that is the extent of their reasoning abilities at that time. Right now, Morgan is very traumatized and this is the extent of his cognitive abilities. If he just holds on to this one thing, this one statement, perhaps he will make it out to the other side as he heals. I think that we have seen shades of this type of thinking in Carol and Rick at times because the world is too overwhelming with threats coming from everywhere. When one is under extensive cognitive load and emotional reactivity, it is easier to have one rule, and you just follow that without thinking about all the "what ifs". Like telling kids, "Thou shall not steal". So simple, yet so complex. Pondering all the "what ifs" can leave you arguing and talking forever and being stuck in procrastination and get you chomped by a Walker. I don;t think that Morgan can deal with all the "what ifs" right now. He just needs a simple message as a touchstone for his life. It is like a defense mechanism in some way. It is exactly the same thing as having the JSS mantra. Enough pondering, back to work! ;)
Yeah, I think the show is making it very clear that Morgan is adopting this philosophy from a point of extreme damage. I think he has recovered a bit more in the "current" time than in the time of this episode but, no, he's not sane yet. (To be honest though, I'm not sure which of the current characters are sane or how that would be defined in the ZA.) I don't think, however, that Morgan is pursuing it to some of the extremes you posit. He clearly has no issue with putting down walkers and we have no reason yet to think that he is or isn't a vegetarian. Based on his experiences, he believes that there were times in his past when he killed people that he did not have to kill and that he should have been put down himself. He's now been faced with a person he did not kill coming back to try to kill him and others. His thinking will probably change (but, knowing this show, it will be too late). The weirdest thing about all of this is why the show had him arguing with Carol in the middle of a war. How could he have possibly thought they could beat back THAT assault without death?
His current position still leaves him a whole lot more useful to a group than 90% of the ASZhats who are useless against the living and the dead. At least Morgan can be useful in guarding against walkers (and he subdued 2 wolves during the attack). As for letting the 5 wolves go, he couldn't stop them so it's not like he just decided to let them run away with a gun.
There are plenty of shades of gray to be had. I can't tell yet whether Morgan is supposed to be able to spot those differences yet or not. I guess we'll see in how he dies. That said, it's pretty clear that some of the characters are too far the other way. Nicholas was going to kill Glenn just to keep his standing (like the Grady doctor did) and Rick killed porchdick for no need other than Deanna's say-so. The town has a jail (Morgan was in it and he now seems to be using it for his pet wolf) and they could've put Pete in it.
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Basically I was waiting at the stage door after a play he was in. He rushed through the line of people waiting for autographs as fast as possible. While he signed my playbill, I paid him a compliment, and he said "Oh, thank you," but then he was on to the next person before I could ask to take a picture with him. I tried to catch his attention, and it's possible he didn't see me, but it felt like he was ignoring me (and I'm sure others, I swear I wasn't creepy) so he could get out of there.
Many years ago, a friend of a friend was the third lead in a Broadway play so a group of us went to see it and then went backstage to congratulate her. The friend (who was not in the play) then insisted we say hello to and congratulate the two leads. I still remember how exhausted and dead in the eyes Philip Seymour Hoffman was in that moment. He had absolutely nothing left to spare for anyone he didn't already know. We expressed our thanks and appreciation for his work and got out of there as quickly as we could. I think we were in a more intrusive setting than you were (backstage, rather than the stage door where actors expect to sign autographs) but I think live acting for 90 minutes to two hours must be an immensely draining experience and that every smile they put on costs them an extra bit of energy.
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Or least eaten it himself. He forces the kids to give up their meager food and then just leaves it there, but won't kill the wolf who threatens to murder children. Nice.
I read that scene as Morgan trying to keep himself from "clearing" the area by killing them and while he has that internal struggle, they leave him the can and then thank him. He never had an interest in their food and never asked for it. Their "thank you" is what jolted him back to temporary humanity.
I don't read Morgan as thinking he's morally superior and while avoiding killing may be partly gratitude/imprinting on Eastman, I think it's more self-defense. If he starts killing people again, he may never come back from it and he's afraid that other people are the same way. This thing about whether some acts take a person "too far" to come back seems kinda trite to me but it's clearly something that the show feels the need to regularly explore (e.g., Rick's lapse into insanity, the Governor's final confrontation with Rick, the cannibals at Terminus, etc.). Morgan is the latest character being used to voice the concern that some things shouldn't be easy to do. It's also clear that his point of view is going to get someone killed at some point (as did Glenn's helping out the weak ASZhats last week) -- but the other point of view gets people killed too. The governor destroyed the prison because he couldn't accept a victory handed to him; Beth got herself killed because she couldn't walk away; Rick would have killed everyone in the hospital at Grady in a doomed attempt to free Beth if he hadn't been talked out of it. Every philosophy leads to death on this show because everything leads to death on this show. That's the crappy circumstance they are in.
Somewhat off-topic but that's my beef with people who are always saying that Rick's plans are the worst. They seem terrible because other people go with them and then the bad consequences happen and we see them. I guarantee that on this show any plan chosen would have led to bad results. Like the Walker parade - if they had tried Carter's plan (which Abraham, who has construction experience, rolled his eyes at as soon as it was mentioned) and shored up the quarry defenses, I guarantee that some people would have been killed by walker attacks from the woods while they were building the walls and then the truck would have slipped into the quarry just as they thought they were finishing the last support structures -- because that's what happens in the world of the show.
In light of all the death and horror that they live in, the show always comes back to four questions (1) how do you maintain hope in the ZA world, (2) how far are you willing to go to protect your own, (3) Was that the morally right thing to do; and (4) what happens to people who make the hard choices? The show likes to use the people who have lost their families to explore the last of those themes (Rick, Michonne, Carol, Abraham, maybe Sasha, now Morgan). Each of them have had moments when they were barely human and certainly not functioning "rationally." I'm honestly interested in how many different ways the show can tell that story. (Maybe Carol also doesn't quite fit that mold but I don't think her killing the two at the prison was actually rational and I don't think her accepting exile was rational either. I think she was still shell shocked. Also, the show doesn't treat women the same way as it treats men.)
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Someone want to explain to me the deal with the gigantic 'A's Morgan was putting on trees that weren't part of the word 'clear'. And there was one marked on a house in Alexandria after the wolves attacked, and I presume done by Morgan, a couple episodes back.
I thought the 'A' in that episode was just for the train car they were put in at Terminus. Is there supposed to be a Terminus, Wolves, and Morgan link/past history?
The "A" on the Alexandria house was stamped there by Jessie's son. I thought Morgan's "A" on the tree spelled out a word when combined with other trees but I wasn't watching closely enough.
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I hope everyone who hates this show so bitterly and vociferously stops watching and trash posting, so others could get a word in edgewise. And I hope stupid Tobias is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. :-)
I liked it more than some around here but promise to stop posting about FTWD when it comes back unless I end up liking the new season. Leaving aside people's complaints about it being a bait-and-switch, I still didn't think it succeeded on its own terms but I know what it is now and if I watch again, that's on me, not them ;)
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I do remember the clips from week-to-week and nothing has happened yet. In this one, the big event is one of the passengers going to the bathroom to throw up.
As one minute clips once a week, the dread builds up pretty well. I suspect that if I watched them back-to-back, I'd notice more that I won't mind if all the passengers they've shown so far get bit. The FTWD casting agency really is not doing well at finding "likable" actors.
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You just can't fit 8 primary characters into an 18-minute story. They really have to start writing more episodes that leave some people out entirely.
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The jump cuts will probably slow down a bit next week because Rick will have reunited with Michonne's group at Alexandria but we will still have some cutting with Daryl/Sasha/Abraham. What's really kind of cool about the way they've laid all of it out is that the entire month's episodes have all happened (except for flashbacks) within the time it takes to make a casserole.
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I thought it was obvious those guys saw Morgan as potentially an easy mark, they were going to attack him and take whatever they found. They were survivors, just like Morgan. Morgan was not at war with them, they were not at war with Morgan. Morgan flat out murdered them (insanity defense might work for him though).
The two situations are not at all the same or even similar. Rick has murdered many people (the two assholes in Herschel's bar, the running handcuffed guy, termites, porchdick) but all these situations could rightly be viewed through the prism of war. Morgan's actions, at least what we saw last night, can not be viewed that way.
I agree that the two people he killed seemed to be chasing Morgan as an easy mark. To me, that meant Morgan's situation was pretty similar to Rick's situation at the bar near Herschel's farm. There might have been a way for everyone to leave alive but it was certainly hard to see it.
Thankfully for me, I got over being angry about this being a 90-minute flashback episode when I called it last week from the previews and realized that it would probably make me hate an episode I was otherwise looking forward to. The Walking Dead is a MUCH more enjoyable show as a season-long binge watch than watching it in real time because the writers like to delay gratification in ways that just become very frustrating after a while. (pure speculation but
I wouldn't put it past them to find Glenn alive only to have him killed on that very same episode.
).
I liked this episode for what it was - a "My Dinner with Andre During the Zombie Apocalypse." If that actors are selling it, the dialogue is well written and the cinematography is up to its usual standards, I'm pretty happy. Yeah, Eastman died stupidly but he had to die from the moment we saw him so "how" he died was less important than "why" he died and how he reacted to it.
To defend Eastman's statement about having only met one evil man -- Eastman didn't say that he would have let out many of those other inmates he interviewed or that they weren't psychopaths; he just said that he only met one truly evil man. That statement may or may not have been true but it was in keeping with Eastman's history that he would consider the guy who escaped solely to kill his family to have been on a completely different plain of vileness than everyone else.
Also, Eastman wasn't an Aikido expert. He just took some weekly classes. Good enough for taking out walkers is all (courtesy of the TD)
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I do the same thing but mistimed my start last week so that when I turned on the TV, Talking Dead was on ...
Possibly the worst self-spoiler ever :(
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I caught a bit of this the other night and are the coaches always in the kitchen for the entire finale? Because I think that even I could prepare a decent meal with a trained cook giving me minute-by-minute instructions.
Also, it was nice to have Madison back on my TV screen but frustrating to have the eejit in the middle act like he was the star of the show and the head judge.
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I've had a problem with this bite force thing for a while. I can't believe the rotted teeth of these walkers can get through denim or layers of cotton as easily as they do. I think the bites would hurt but I'm calling shenanigans on the walkers getting their teeth through clothing like David's multiple layers. Walkers are human, not dogs.
*Shrug* they're not humans either. Whatever they are can't be killed except by destroying the brain; which means that all of the internal organs are optional so they don't actually need lungs (or breathing I guess) or a stomach (or digestion I guess) or a heart (or nutrient flow I guess). Why shouldn't the changes that make internal organs optional also make some muscles stronger or strengthen zombie teeth? Yeah, they started as human but whatever they are is radically different from human at this point.
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Nashville - I think it would have to be something like that; it's the only thing that meshes with everyone already being infected. I don't think it fits well with some stuff from the comic book but I wouldn't try to fanwank that part unless they try to incorporate it into the show.
Possibly unpopular theory alert - zombies are stronger and more resilient than regular people, not weaker. ** I know, I know, we've seen their heads explode like melons and our main characters plow threw them like paper dolls but hear me out ... ** Have you ever watched a lumberjack competition where they they are chopping wood with an axe? All of them can get through a solid piece of oak faster than I can split a thin branch. Similarly, the people from CDB that we follow are VERY experienced at killing walkers. None of them would have lived unless they were unusually talented at killing them. I'm sure Michonne sharpens her katana every day and that her life has depended on her being very good at slicing through heads with it. In other words, we're watching the equivalent of olympic-caliber walker killers so everything looks easier than it is. And yes, we've seen zombies leave bits of themselves behind (e.g. when they squeezed through the trucks at the quarry or bounced off the wall) but we haven't seen how much force they used in those impacts. The walkers may not move quickly but that doesn't mean they are weak. Actually, everything we've seen on the show requires Walkers to be stronger than normal people. (Whenever Mythbusters tests zombie myths, normal people can't push hard enough to do what walkers do.) So what that means is that walkers are slow, uncoordinated, strong, persistent, impervious to pain, chomping machines that could easily tear open a human body if they got a good grip first.
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Carl was willing to eat dog food way back in the season 3 premiere, but those Alexandrians are spoiled.
Speaking of food, I thought the strained carrots were just supposed to remind Rick of Judith, not make him think the Wolves took Judith.
But Rick isn't willing to eat dog food so he's just a spoiled Alexandrian at heart ;)
I took the jar of baby food as cluing Rick into why the horn was honking and why he heard gunshots from back home. I doubt he took it as a sign of something Judith specific - other than the form of the clue hits particularly hard on what he left behind there.
On Schrodinger's Glenn, I like him so I hope he lived and I won't think his survival is cheap or shark-jumping so long as they pick up the action from exactly where they left it and show us how he made it. If there is another jump-cut like they did last season, I will be furious.
On Michonne's group being "stupid" in how they went about it - it seemed to me more like a disaster born of small decisions that all went wrong, rather than full-on stupidity. After the girl twists her ankle, it's just a twisted ankle, we can help her and still move faster than walkers. After the other guy is shot, well let's see if any of these cars work. After they waste time checking the cars, lets wrap up his wound before moving on. After they get to the pet store, hey let's do a distraction to lure the walkers and then go. When that distraction doesn't happen, let's hightail it out of here before it's too late. At that point, the injured people had home-made crutches and I guess those two should have chosen to stay behind but I can understand why they wanted to come and their presence didn't kill anyone else ... so it was just each decision led to things getting worse but wasn't crazy in the moment.
ETA - tl,dr - What HalcyonDays said.
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They could also just be chumming the waters for us comics readers ...
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I can't believe I'm still in this thread. Like a drug; I should've never tried it.
Is Carl going to lose an eye?
The eye thing is from the comics but it is one of those things that might/should be skipped like Rick losing his hand upon first meeting the Governor. Rick losing the hand would have been a really annoying bit of costumery for the run of the series and Carl surviving the loss of any eye would be hard to make even remotely believable outside of a comic book.
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This is a very good point, and I think it actually makes the most sense out of all the spec I've heard/read. So now I'm back on Glenn being dead, and it's been kept a bit vague so we can go on the journey with CDB as they try to find out what happened to him. Sigh....
Hey, he could still be alive too - it's just that I don't think the show is being needlessly dickish about the way they shot the scene. (Boy, this episode is really testing my recent resolution to stop posting in the episode threads. sigh)
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Zombie Talk: Gruesome, Gory and Grabby
in The Walking Dead Franchise Shows
· Edited by rab01
JBody - is that fair? Most of the groups they've met haven't been totally evil - Woodbury wasn't evil; the governor was evil (and most of the citizens didn't know it); the same for the second group he conned. Grady was not totally evil (messed up, yes but no more off the rails than a feudal manor might have been). The only Eeeeevil communities have been Terminus, whoever brutalized Terminus, and the Wolves.
I honestly thought that one of the nice parts of the first half of the Woodbury storyline is that is was so easy to see CDB as a violent army if you were a Woodbury resident. If no large group had intersected with Woodbury, maybe the governor would never have been driven completely insane and society would have been reborn from that community (while all the while the governor and a few cronies secretly looted and killed whoever posed any hint of danger to the community -- hey, does that sound like recent Rick? Yeah, I know the Rick/Governor comparisons are really tired but the Governor before his zombie daughter was put down was plausible as both villain and hero.).
Slightly off-topic musing -- I think everyone notices that the show likes to bend all of its characters to repeating the same choices repeatedly and that positions previously taken by villains like Shane and the Governor are later seemingly put in the mouths of heroes. So, is the difference between villains and heroes a questions of who we happen to have been following? Or, how quickly someone adapted/devolved in the ZA? I think there is still one thing that separates the villains from the heroes on this show and in this world --- do you risk your life for others? Are you willing to lay your life down to help someone who needs it?
1) Shane was always about not risking anything to help others - villain.
2) The Governor never risked anything to save anybody except maybe when he was in the building with Tara's family - villain who was given a chance by fate to redeem himself and blew it
3) Rick is always risking himself to save others, from Merle to Sofia and onward - hero
4) Glen was literally risking his life to save Rick before we even saw him onscreen - hero
5) Morgan - saved Daryl and Aaron - hero
6) Carol - saved CDB and all of Alexandria - hero
7) Eugene - comedic villain until the end of last season
8) Abraham saving the woman at the construction site showed that he was a hero and most of the ASZhats were villains.
You can be ruthless, you can do or say awful things (e.g., Carol talking to Sam last season) but if you are willing to risk your life for others, you're a hero in this world.