rab01

Heh, that would be entertaining bosawks. But, I think the title refers to Travis and he's going to have kill something or someone in the episode.

KirkB, natyxg - Agreed that none of this makes sense given what we've been shown but I'm guessing that the writers did not intend that Cobalt to be part of a master plan from the beginning but a last ditch response to other plans failing. If the production budget had allowed for it and the directors paid attention to the details and they hadn't claimed that there was a safe perimeter and the streets weren't empty whenever Maddie strolled outside the fence (ok, a lot of "ifs" but bear with me), it could almost make sense as part of the army constantly falling back while trying to contain the spread of the plague - setting up roadblocks, checkpoints and safe zones, only to be pushed back by masses of PEOPLE (not walkers) trying to escape the walkers behind them. Eventually, the army starts gunning down everyone to try to maintain its barricades but even that falls to the masses when some of the soldiers turn into walkers and take out their comrades (or turn against orders to take out unarmed civilians), etc. If they had the budget to show the futility of trying to "clear" a city as huge as LA and the vision to show it as a city on fire with riots and walkers and gunfire from homeowners and criminals and soldiers .. then you could see a situation where the army would have to bug out. (I still say they'd just leave, rather than try to kill everyone first but ...*shrug*) I don't think the writers knew how awful the follow-through on the sets was going to be ...

I really didn't expect it but this show is making me less interested in the return of TWD. I'll still end up watching it all but I may wait a few extra weeks and let them accumulate on my DVR. After watching several weeks of episodes inside the LA safe zone, I'm not ready to go back to the Alexandria Safe Zone.

I thought I saw a looted flat screen on that truck. ... Why would anyone take it? What TV show do they plan to watch?

I really wanted to like this character at the start of the series and people on the boards (and some reviewers) said great things about the actress' prior work but I just can't with this performance. Whether she's botoxed too hell and back or the director has asked her to play it as a person keeping a lid on her emotions,* I can't stand watching someone whose expressive range goes from: "Oh darn, they're out of pumpkin spice lattes" to "how dare you mess up my pumpkin spice latte." * By the way, I think it actually is botox because her three most emotive and effective bits of work all had to do with body acting, not facial expressions - the breakdown at home after killing her principal was done with her back to the camera, slapping Nick was also largely with her back to the camera, and the shaking coffee cup of booze was focused on her hand. On the flip side, she is really is extraordinarily youthful looking for her age. She is older than I am but looks younger while Norman Reedus is my age but looks older.

yuggapuka, that is a GREAT fanwank. That Cobalt was ordered in the time between the soldier's capture and his torture almost makes most of the plotholes go away. Thank you! (That Cobalt is still a stupidly more dangerous, difficult, useless and evil plan than simply bugging out is well ... *shrug*) I also liked the actor playing crispy shirt but I laughed at his opening speech. It was such a bullshit piece of dialogue that a hack writer thinks will pass for deep. That actor was brilliant to make it almost work; also, the guy playing the neighbor is actually very good to be believably that broken for that long on camera. As for trading cufflinks for Nick's life, why not? Diamonds are worthless now so why not fob them off onto an idiot soldier in return for a henchman. As viewers, we've generally felt that that Nick seems like a survivor so it wouldn't be surprising for someone who's been in a cell with him for a day to get a similar idea.

I can withstand occasional stupidity from my heroes but not from my villains. Everything the military did in today's show is completely illogical. A lowly corporal knows that they are bugging out in the morning, right? So, it's not a secret inside the army, right? Why then is the LT giving Travis a ride-along? Why do they let the corporal out of their sight for even a minute? Why would the other squad have gone inside a building to get pinned down? How do armed soldiers manage to get wasted by walkers? Why bother keeping the peace in the "safe zones" instead of just abandoning them? Why have project cobalt in the first place - rather than just bugging out? (Humane, schmumane - it's dangerous to try kill tens of thousands of people; it's way safer to just leave.) I could go on listing things that make no sense for hours. And again, like I've said before if the show were giving me good performances, good visuals or a fully realized vision of something, I could look past the huge plot holes or that they prefer to show the dull parts instead of the exciting bits They don't need to be world war z and they don't need to tell the story I want them to tell ----- but thy really need to tell their chosen story well. *sigh*

I'd wait until the season is done and then watch it. Watching it week-by-week is sooooo frustrating for the all the things they don't do. But it if you watch 2-3 episodes at a time, you can pay attention whenever anything interesting is happening and answer email during the other parts. (That's how I watched Season 2 of the mother ship so I liked it a LOT more than most people.) I'm only watching this week-by-week because I enjoy reading the discussion on the boards.

If you'd seen any of the show that made her "famous," you would be even more shocked at her existence. I was surprised by Dean Cain's early elimination because he is the most successful of these "celebrities" (his fame may be for the past but he's still a reliably employed working actor) but I checked his IMDB and he's really busy so it might have been a scheduling conflict.

That show was AMAZING! Amazingly bad? Amazingly good? Amazingly large trainwreck? I don't know. Show gimmicks ranked from least surprising to most surprising (surprising that is, if we were watching an actual competition show): 1) D-list actors are belivably cast as terribly incompetent cooks 2) Barry Williams does not seem to be entirely ... present ... during the taping 3) The best part of a contestant's dish was the fix suggested by the judges 4) The contestant with bland food was ditched rather than more entertainingly bad cooks. 5) One of the contestants is secretly a decent cook. 6) That another one called them out on a being a ringer. 7) They praised a burnt grilled cheese sandwich 8) Anne Burrell was required to pretend that she was physically interested in a male contestant 9) JWow came off as the most normal and endearing of the contestants

I think they're past that point now; one of the "benefits" of the 9 day time jump. That said, the most natural form of communication would be for the inmates of the SZ to ask the guards what's happening to their (the soldiers') families. It would serve the show by humanizing some of the faceless soldiers while giving us exposition by the bucket load all for the cost of zero dollars. C'mon show, meet us halfway. *sigh*

Last night, the Walking Dead pilot happened to be showing on a local channel and, even though I've seen it several times, I was sucked in again and watched it all the way through. Yeah, there's no news there but it really highlighted 3 differences between the two shows that are killing FTWD for me: 1) The original has amazing visuals. The camera lingers on open vistas that give you enough time to realize the one thing that's out of place or the huge thing that's now messed up (not just riding a horse past a now permanent traffic jam on the other side but also the peaceful grass field where Rick tracks down and mercy kills the half zombie). The new show sets most of it scenes in visually uninteresting locations where nothing is out of place; it's just boring to look at. Empty streets can't convey menace when all the streets they've shown were empty for budget reasons - there's no contrast. 2) Rick and Morgan and the others were very expressive characters; their faces move all the time and very few emotions are kept in check. On the current show, no one is emoting fear, despair or shock about anything that is happening except when it happens directly to them. On an individual actor-by-actor basis, that's not a bad choice but it is much less operatic and therefore everything about the new show is muted. That's particularly a problem when all of us watching have accepted and enjoyed the acting style of the old show. 3) The new show is not paying any attention to the details of set dressing, which compounds all the other problems. Other than post-its near the clock and the stupid mistake of showing a fridge full of miscellaneous stuff when there are power outages, I can't think of anything distinctive about the Clark's house. By comparison, everything about Morgan's place was thought through (blankets covering the windows, mattresses on the ground floor, not upstairs, the lighting ... everything). If we saw laundry lines to save energy, a stack of containers for carrying govt issue food, a posted set of military regs, a hiss of static from TVs and radios as the power comes on ... just something that tells about the new normal. Basically, the new show is sloppy, cheap, and uninterested in how it looks so we are left with only the characters and the plot to focus on. That makes Kim Dickens' immobile face and the plot-holes even harder to take.

I have two really mean thoughts about Jordan's audition (or I should say about the judges). They're kind of sticking in my head so I'm posting to see if y'all think I'm crazy: 1) Is it just me or were none of the judges actually all that interested in having Jordan on their team once they saw him? They spent a lot of time praising him but I don't remember any of them saying why they would be good mentors for him, which is a huge part of their normal push ... 2) Are Adam and Gwen going to be surprised to find out he's not gay? From the way they kept talking about "courage", I didn't think it was just about the sound of his voice or that he was a bit heavy.

White Truck knows it's the star of the show and there is nowhere to drive but would still rather not have been part of a three-way with Madison and Travis; next time will get rider put in its contract.

In the screengrab on the site from right before Madison beats him up, it looks like Nick is wearing a clean white shirt under his coat. If that's right, we can stop imagining him smelling like a mixture of sweat, death, old man and puke.

what portion of the net, if any, would still be working with at best intermittent power around the country and at worst many of the servers and other hardware destroyed? In any event, the show said there aren't even landlines working into their community (and presumably no cable providers) so ... no internet for them.

1) God, yes there are some hateable characters here. And the ones that aren't awful are given nothing to do. 2) I think the ex-wife did tell everyone in the house what she was doing. Maddie just wanted her to do dishes or repaint the living room again (which by the way is something the junkie should be doing rather than sleeping in the pool) or some other housework bullshit to confirm that Maddie was in the dominant position over her. 3) Travis isn't Rick and he isn't anything like a mayor. I bet the army guy just finds it useful to talk that way to civilians he needs to work for him. Also, I know the show wants me to think he's evil but I actually liked everything the army guy said and the tone he said it in. The army has created a safe perimeter for them and is bringing in food, water and medical attention. Army guy isn't answering to them; he has to answer to his bosses. His "I don't give a shit" tone is refreshing. 4) Oh god yes -- the show's budget is clearly much smaller than the budget for TWD ... and I'm mystified as to why that is. Jesus, why set your story in LA (the most boring and overused city in America) and then don't film there and don't show crowd scenes reasonable to the density of the population? There is also no chance in freaking hell that the army could have created a safe zone so easily in LA while DC fell to the walkers. There should be millions of walkers sloshing around that city or millions of rioting citizens seeking protection, or millions of people barricading their homes and scurrying out briefly for supplies. If LA could be turned into an arid ghost town empty of walkers in 9 days, then the Feds would have managed to save the core of the government in DC. The show had better have a really damn good explanation or a really good CGI'd visual of hordes of walkers ... I'm hoping for at least a concrete wall created by bulldozing a line of buildings ... something, anything to explain why we don't see any herds or tons of survivors.

I don't like the implication of Alicia's note at the end - that she's going down the "this all God's plan" route, which usually leads to death by idiocy on these shows. Killing her off would also fit in with how her Mom has been ignoring her throughout the show ... so she can feel more guilty after Alicia dies. Unfortunately, the actress can't move her face so we won't be able to tell at the funeral whether she's sad, guilty, stoic, or just bored. I'm impressed that they showed us Nick being a total asshole and Maddie beating him up but it's not enough. I think the Army would be totally justified in shooting him. There are only so many resources to go around and he's worse than dead weight. The set designers are constantly undercutting the rest of this show -- empty streets, no radios on, intricate memorials outside the wall but nothing inside, etc. ETA - Never mind the part about Alicia going religiously squirelly. I hadn't really been watching the screen by the end so I didn't realize that she was reading someone else's note. I still think, however, that the show is likely to kill her off before her Mom or brother so as to make other characters *sad*

I agree completely. And to go back to my original thought on this, we have no idea how people are going to die on this show. Anyone the characters meet could be a zombie by the next morning. It would be a while before that stops happening ... and that's probably what brought civilization down. I don't mind some of the *atypical* reactions we see on this show ... but I want some of the characters to do really smart things and others to scream in terror and others to have weeping hysterics. In other words, I want to see a gamut of emotions. All of these people are reacting in similarly muted ways. Also, I want to spend less time on close ups of stone-face while she tries to suggest a human emotion through her immobile skin.

I swear that line was so dumb as delivered that the writer must have meant for it to be said with sarcasm - as a guidance counselor's attempt to bond with the teenager while also minimizing his fears ...

Yup, you're totally right. That said, how do you think the neighbor in this show got it? Coughing one minute and zombie the next doesn't seem quite like the bite followed by enervating fever that we've seen so often ...

Heh, nothing is ever gonna stop the writers from being repetitive. I have to add - this is the first time I've watched any part of this series in real time. I binge watched seasons 1-3 on DVD and then watched on DVR usually 4-6 episodes at a time over a few days. It really works better that way. A lot of episodes that would be hugely frustrating if they were all you had for a week become pleasant interludes if you watch a few at a time. When you see them once a week, we usually have more time to process what happened than the characters do. Repeating the same dumb mistake 3 times in two days is less crazy than doing it regularly over the course of a month, which is what it feels like to the viewer.

Y'know, this show may never leave LA. We know that around DC and Georgia nothing of the pre-ZA world survived but we don't know that for other parts of the country. This show may not be about traveling to find a safe haven but living in a community that gets worse and worse while trying to deal with the ZA. By the current time period of the mothership, LA could have various communities of many thousands trying to survive walker herds in the millions. If they hit the road, they'll just be replaying the main show or using plots that could be used in the main show but if they stay put, you have totally different types of plots available ... Another thing we don't really know is how people become zombies in this show. At this point in the plague, you can become a zombie by (1) being bitten; (2) dying; or (3) just breathing it in. Remember in the first season one of the cast members came down with the bug without prior injury and we've seen it happening here. Everyone left in TWD is relatively immune (they didn't even become zombified when suffering from the flu outbreak in the prison until they died) but in FtWD some people will still turn into zombies totally at random. In that world, some people may also get it from being sprayed with zombie blood. ,,, That's a long way of saying that quarantining Susan's husband was pretty much necessary. ETA - *oops, I misremembered how Jim died in Season 1; thanks Raven.

I've decided to just blame the set designers, rather than the characters for them not having the TV on and radio on for updates. I imagine a screen we can't quite see in the corner of the room tuned to a news channel that just has a "temporarily off air" notice from the cable box (or snow for an old TV). I figure with the rolling power outages and phone failures, the cable is down. (same for radio) ... I find it a more relaxing way to watch.

There's a difference between the characters being ignorant of what mess they're in and them acting stupidly. It's stupid to leave your door open (no matter how fast you want to move) and stupid of Maddie to not keep Alicia in her sight at all times, especially since you haven't told her the truth, But, it's not stupid for Travis to look at the neighbor and see a dangerous sick person rather than a corpse. It's also not automatically stupid to hole up for the remainder of the night and travel during the day. If you knew the military blockade was coming down, then sure you decide whether you prefer tanks to desert air - but if you don't know what's coming, driving at night during a blackout and riot sounds like a recipe for disaster. So long as they keep stupid to a minimum, I can live with plots hinging on ignorance. As for the army noticing Griselda's injury, I doubt they care much. If they found it or were told of it, they might deal with it but mainly they need a headcount, mark out houses that need to be decontaminated, clear out active walkers and establish a perimeter -- that's already a HUGE job. I doubt they want to interfere with people other than to keep them indoors any more than they have to. The second stage - getting all "respect my authoritah" and turning into that hospital from the mothership can happen in week two or month two, rather than day one.