S02.E01: Konsekans

[raven]

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Hope’s commitment to the future is tested; Iris and Felix meet a new group.

NOTE:  AMC+ will stream each episode a week before airing on AMC.  Enter this topic at your own risk if you haven't watched yet.

AMC+ airdate: 2021.09.26    AMC airdate: 2021.10.03

Be mindful if you participate in the Live Posting Topic - that topic will follow the show as it airs on AMC, so AMC+ viewers will be one episode ahead.  DO NOT SPOIL those who are watching on AMC.

[Mr. Sparkle]

I'm gonna watch tonight. 10 episodes and we're done, right? RIGHT?? 

[Smad]

So CRM destroyed Omaha before the Campus Colony. 100k people snuffed out and yet Elizabeth still keeps babbling about future and people and civilization. Honey, put down the communist cool-aid. There is no justifying it and you know it. Then she sends off Hope alone into the walker infested city to test her own daughter. It wasn't even about changing Hope's thinking because no one changes over night barring extreme tragedy.

So after Iris was the most despised character in S1 they've decided to change her out of the blue. The time skip between the end of last Season and Iris' part of the story is 6 weeks. In those 6 weeks she somehow managed to become Daryl Dixon (crossbow), find the nerve to kill humans and go into hand to hand combat with a trained soldier and win and then stab him to death. That's not Iris, that's her twin sister Eris. Writers here is a hint, you do character development not replacement.

Will was exposition man this episode. Felix was...there. Huck apparently keeps doing things the CRM doesn't like (like caring about others) and yet she still doesn't even question if she's on the right side or not. She knows some of the shit CRM does, talks about them having killed people for the smallest things but her instincts don't tell her this is all evil? Whatever cool-aid she's having is even stronger than her mother's.

[BasilSeal]

They're making a big thing about the CRM's secret plan to attack their allies, and we assume that there must be some overarching conspiracy in play here that provides the reasoning for these actions, because on the face of it if you were an organisation dedicated to rebuilding human civilisation, then going round destroying functioning communities of tens of thousands of people who pose no actual threat to you seems like a funny way to go about this.

Then again, there was supposed to be a good reason why they wanted Hope as a new recruit, and went about recruiting her in such a bizarre and prosaic way, so far the explanations for the CRM's actions WRT Hope have been completely unsatisfactory, what's the betting that the explanations for them being really killy with their allies are similarly fudged and nonsensical?

Only they've systematically murdered 10's of thousands of innocent people, so there really needs to be a damn good reason for them doing that, and even if it's a really fucked up reason, it needs to be logical and plausible, because if the writers just go for the traditional TWD bad guy motivation of crazy bad people who do crazy bad shit for no reason other than because they're the bad guys and it's what they do, that would really suck.

[Mr. Sparkle]

1 hour ago, BasilSeal said:

They're making a big thing about the CRM's secret plan to attack their allies, and we assume that there must be some overarching conspiracy in play here that provides the reasoning for these actions, because on the face of it if you were an organisation dedicated to rebuilding human civilisation, then going round destroying functioning communities of tens of thousands of people who pose no actual threat to you seems like a funny way to go about this.

Then again, there was supposed to be a good reason why they wanted Hope as a new recruit, and went about recruiting her in such a bizarre and prosaic way, so far the explanations for the CRM's actions WRT Hope have been completely unsatisfactory, what's the betting that the explanations for them being really killy with their allies are similarly fudged and nonsensical?

Only they've systematically murdered 10's of thousands of innocent people, so there really needs to be a damn good reason for them doing that, and even if it's a really fucked up reason, it needs to be logical and plausible, because if the writers just go for the traditional TWD bad guy motivation of crazy bad people who do crazy bad shit for no reason other than because they're the bad guys and it's what they do, that would really suck.

I'll agree there should be some reason they did this. Whether or not there actually is... 

[BasilSeal]

2 hours ago, Superclam said:

I'll agree there should be some reason they did this. Whether or not there actually is... 

I do find it hard to think of a reason for them doing it. with so few people left in the world it seems unlikely it would be necessary to fight over resources, they could view these other communities as a threat, but the CRM are the ones with the army of fascist goons and the fleet of helicopter gunships.

but i'm sure there'll be some brilliant reveal where the reason is finally made known and we'll all kick ourselves because it is so logical and well thought out, no, really...

[Smad]

17 hours ago, BasilSeal said:

but i'm sure there'll be some brilliant reveal where the reason is finally made known and we'll all kick ourselves because it is so logical and well thought out, no, really...

They will be the Umbrella Company (from the Resident Evil movies) of the Walking Dead Universe. And will make just as much sense...

[BasilSeal]

54 minutes ago, Smad said:

They will be the Umbrella Company (from the Resident Evil movies) of the Walking Dead Universe. And will make just as much sense...

you'd think in a two season limited series they'd have the whole thing planned out from the start, but it wouldn't surprise me if the writers didn't know at the outset why the CRM were doing this and were just winging it, hoping that they'd come up with a good reason as the writing process progressed.

I was thinking the other day about when i was a kid and i used to play with lego bricks. My lego people would be a group of 'good guys' and i'd spend days building an elaborate secret base for them to hole up in, but once the base was finished i'd get bored, and so i'd then invent some bad guys who would attack my heroes in their secret base, i never really considered the details of why the bad guys wanted to attack my heroes, they just did, they were, after all, the baddies. My heroes would eventually prevail, but not before their secret base had been entirely destroyed, thus necessitating the building of a new one, and so the whole process would start again.

so as an eight year old i had worked out the key plot elements of every walking dead season ever. I suppose i only have myself to blame for not adding in a few zombies and pitching it as a major TV drama, but to be fair by the time i was ten i'd realised that this was a really dumb game that made no sense, but here i am aged fifty three and three quarters watching the same dumb game on telly and discussing it in minute detail on here, so more fool me i suppose.

[Mr. Sparkle]

1 hour ago, BasilSeal said:

but here i am aged fifty three and three quarters watching the same dumb game on telly and discussing it in minute detail on here, so more fool me i suppose.

[rmontro]

On 9/27/2021 at 8:25 AM, Smad said:

So CRM destroyed Omaha before the Campus Colony. 100k people snuffed out and yet Elizabeth still keeps babbling about future and people and civilization. Honey, put down the communist cool-aid. There is no justifying it and you know it. Then she sends off Hope alone into the walker infested city to test her own daughter. It wasn't even about changing Hope's thinking because no one changes over night barring extreme tragedy.

None of this makes sense.  I'm SO sick of these ridiculous evil people types TWD seems so fond of.  That episode was painful.  The ONLY reason I'm watching this is because it's telling a finite story, 10 episodes this season and we're done.  If it weren't for that, I'd be out. 

[Nashville]

On 9/27/2021 at 7:25 AM, Smad said:

So CRM destroyed Omaha before the Campus Colony. 100k people snuffed out and yet Elizabeth still keeps babbling about future and people and civilization. Honey, put down the communist cool-aid. There is no justifying it and you know it. Then she sends off Hope alone into the walker infested city to test her own daughter. It wasn't even about changing Hope's thinking because no one changes over night barring extreme tragedy.

Kublek’s vocal spew is rationalizing, not rational - i.e. it’s a cover story to rationalize the CRM’s actions, not a true explanation to justify them.  More below.

 

On 10/2/2021 at 1:24 PM, BasilSeal said:

They're making a big thing about the CRM's secret plan to attack their allies, and we assume that there must be some overarching conspiracy in play here that provides the reasoning for these actions, because on the face of it if you were an organisation dedicated to rebuilding human civilisation, then going round destroying functioning communities of tens of thousands of people who pose no actual threat to you seems like a funny way to go about this.

There’s no super-secret grassy knoll conspiracy going on here - IMHO the CRM’s actions are relatively straightforward and transparent:

1. The CRM constantly scouts around on the lookout for communities which have attained sufficient size/development to be of possible worth.
2. Once located, the CRM helicopters fly in a delegation which descends upon a targeted community with offers of inclusion in a confederacy of independent communities - which (given their method of arrival) already indicates a significant technical benefit to the targeted community, which gladly accepts.
3. Having established a relationship, the CRM goes into information gathering mode - spying out and identifying assets both physical (resources) and intellectual (scientists and/or technicians).
4. Intellectual assets are strongly “encouraged” (pressured) into joining the already-operational brain trusts established by the CR; many may be initially recalcitrant to leave their families and community, but are eventually persuaded with blandishments of how their work will be of immeasurable benefit to both their home community and the confederacy as a whole.  Once convinced, agreeable intellectual assets are secured in a location under CRM control.
5. Afterwards - CRM helicopters draw a massive walker horde to the targeted community, the CRM negates the community’s defenses (blowing up barrier walls, etc.), and the horde scrubs the community off the face of the planet.
6. After everybody is dead and the horde has departed/been drawn off to the next target, CRM salvage teams come in and collect those physical assets which survived the horde attack relatively intact.

This business model keeps the CR on an increasingly positive side of the survival balance sheet - receiving a relatively steady influx of new resources and talent, and destroying the donor communities prior to the necessity for any significant reciprocity.

[rmontro]

1 hour ago, Nashville said:

This business model keeps the CR on an increasingly positive side of the survival balance sheet - receiving a relatively steady influx of new resources and talent, and destroying the donor communities prior to the necessity for any significant reciprocity.

Just sounds like a more high tech version of the Saviors.  I realize this is a big cash cow for them, but wow is this "Walking Dead Universe" getting repetitive and boring.  As Smad said above, they're even turning Iris into Daryl Dixon.

[BasilSeal]

5 hours ago, Nashville said:

This business model keeps the CR on an increasingly positive side of the survival balance sheet - receiving a relatively steady influx of new resources and talent, and destroying the donor communities prior to the necessity for any significant reciprocity.

If you're wanting to rebuild civilisation then the most valuable resource of all is people. destroying people in this scenario makes no sense and is counter productive. They've killed a 100K of people in functioning communities that posed no apparent threat to them. Their stated aim appear to be to remove the walkers from large areas and repopulate and rebuild civilisation, bit hard when you've killed everyone living as well.

Now this being the walking dead, your theory may well be correct, but i don't think it's a logical theory,  they are killing people to get stuff, in a world where there are hardly any people, but loads of stuff because everyone is dead but their stuff is still there for the taking, and any group with the resources that the CRM has at it's disposal could harvest materials and equipment from the old world easily.

Edited October 6, 2021 by BasilSeal

[rmontro]

At least Iris' crossbow looks to be more useful than that ridiculous dinosaur horn she carried around last season, if less original.

[Smad]

10 hours ago, Nashville said:

Kublek’s vocal spew is rationalizing, not rational - i.e. it’s a cover story to rationalize the CRM’s actions, not a true explanation to justify them.  More below.

Actually she is trying to justify them when you consider her tear fest last Season over the Omaha invasion battle plan. She knows it's wrong (just like soldier Barka) but she believes what the CRM is doing is the best way to achieve the best possible future. She has to justify this evil to herself in order to keep doing it. That's what her flexing (turning on all the appliances) to Barka and then herself was all about.

10 hours ago, Nashville said:

This business model keeps the CR on an increasingly positive side of the survival balance sheet - receiving a relatively steady influx of new resources and talent, and destroying the donor communities prior to the necessity for any significant reciprocity.

The only problem is that we don't know anything about the CR so far. Until now we have only dealt with the CR's military. If the CR was run by the military I wouldn't have a problem. But we know they have a civilian government. Leo Bennett himself said last Season the CR is doing great work but he has serious doubts about their military. It's very possible that CR doesn't have any idea what their military is doing to these communities (hence them using walker herds as cover up). We also know that Elizabeth's orders come from Major General Beale (whoever that is). It's very possible that this person might pretend his orders come from the government but he actually has his own plan.

[Nashville]

14 hours ago, rmontro said:

Just sounds like a more high tech version of the Saviors. 

Not an unreasonable appraisal, that 😉:

• The Saviors would dominate by force, wring every drop of resources they could out of a community, and eliminate only if/when a community presented potential or active organized opposition.
• The CRM seems more focused on dominating by enticement, siphoning off the community’s intellectual resources, eliminating by blitzkrieg attack potential future competition for domination and/or resources, and scavenging what’s salvageable after elimination.

Purely MHO but I’d think the Savior approach is more effective when dealing with multiple and geographically disparate small groups, while the CRM approach is more effective with densely populated (and better armed?) sizable communities.

 

11 hours ago, BasilSeal said:

If you're wanting to rebuild civilisation then the most valuable resource of all is people. destroying people in this scenario makes no sense and is counter productive. They've killed a 100K of people in functioning communities that posed no apparent threat to them.

Depends upon your rebuild vision, doesn’t it? 😁  
We have no real clue as to the CR’s current population; they could number in the millions, so relatively speaking it’s entirely possible 100K is a drop in the bucket . 
It’s also entirely possible the CR is a elitist survival group consisting of a small controlling brain trust with a supporting army with numbers only in the thousands, and the Omaha community outnumbered them 10-to-1 in terms of total population - which (in the CRM’s view) might justify wiping out Omaha before they wised up.

No clue yet, one way or the other.

 

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Their stated aim appear to be to remove the walkers from large areas and repopulate and rebuild civilisation, bit hard when you've killed everyone living as well.

While this may be the CRM’s stated aim in their PR campaign to targeted communities, I’d disagree it’s the CRM’s true aim.  As was so ably demonstrated in this episode the CRM has succeeded in weaponizing walkers, which transforms them from a liability to a strategic asset - and you don’t liquidate strategic assets while there’s potential for their use.  
Eliminating targeted communities by having  your walker hordes consume them actually grows that strategic asset to a degree with each strike, so (from the CRM’s viewpoint) it’s a win/win.

 

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Now this being the walking dead, your theory may well be correct, but i don't think it's a logical theory,  they are killing people to get stuff, in a world where there are hardly any people, but loads of stuff because everyone is dead but their stuff is still there for the taking, and any group with the resources that the CRM has at it's disposal could harvest materials and equipment from the old world easily.

Is it, though?  That was true in the early days/weeks/months/years even of the mothership series, definitely.  When CDB first arrived in Alexandria, Deanna made a point of telling Rick about how Alexandria’s defensive wall had been constructed with supplies scavenged from a local home supply (Home Depot?) warehouse. 
TWD:WB’s timeline starts off with their ten-year anniversary Remembrance Day observation of the Z outbreak’s start, though, and a lot has almost certainly changed in a decade: lumber rots, metal rusts, foodstuffs (even the canned variety) expire, and electronic components fail.  At a decade in, it’s probably safe to assume that most still-usable and readily accessible remnants of pre-ZA society have already been scavenged - rendering those ever-dwindling workable pre-ZA components all that much more valuable.

Now - is walking a zombie horde through a community the best way to preserve such surviving treasures?  Almost certainly not, but that assessment depends upon what represents the most value to the CRM: purging the targeted community, or retrieving functional pre-ZA artifacts.

 

5 hours ago, Smad said:

Actually [Elizabeth] is trying to justify them when you consider her tear fest last Season over the Omaha invasion battle plan. She knows it's wrong (just like soldier Barka) but she believes what the CRM is doing is the best way to achieve the best possible future. She has to justify this evil to herself in order to keep doing it. That's what her flexing (turning on all the appliances) to Barka and then herself was all about.

Elizabeth is certainly trying to rationalize the CRM’s actions to others, but I don’t think she’s trying to justify those actions to herself; these actions directly benefit her own group (the CR) in one way or another, and to Elizabeth that’s all the justification needed.  Regret may be felt, but it is immediately pigeonholed and pushed off to the side.  In fact the only times we’ve seen Elizabeth display anything approaching actual regret hasn’t been when her actions have endangered or killed thousands of strangers, it’s been when her actions have endangered personally significant relationships such as her relationship with her daughter - and that regret still doesn’t stop Elizabeth from doing that which engenders conflict, although I do think she gets frustrated with having to deal with the fallout afterwards.  In that respect Elizabeth is a shitty human being, but a perfect military officer for the CRM’s purposes.

 

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The only problem is that we don't know anything about the CR so far. Until now we have only dealt with the CR's military. If the CR was run by the military I wouldn't have a problem. But we know they have a civilian government. Leo Bennett himself said last Season the CR is doing great work but he has serious doubts about their military. It's very possible that CR doesn't have any idea what their military is doing to these communities (hence them using walker herds as cover up).

That’s definitely a possibility - but given how those community-farmed scientists who joined the CR but question the system seem to have an annoying tendency to become subjects of their own A/B experiments, I have my own doubts about whether the CR civilian government’s hands could necessarily be considered all that clean.

 

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We also know that Elizabeth's orders come from Major General Beale (whoever that is). It's very possible that this person might pretend his orders come from the government but he actually has his own plan.

Again, you’re correct; we haven’t yet seen near enough exposition of the CR/CRM relationship(s) to know who’s the true shot-caller on the atrocities.  Personally I just assume EVERYBODY is a piece of shit, and hope to be pleasantly surprised - which doesn’t happen often.  😆

[BasilSeal]

1 hour ago, Nashville said:

Depends upon your rebuild vision, doesn’t it?

whatever your vision, you still need people

 

2 hours ago, Nashville said:

While this may be the CRM’s stated aim in their PR campaign to targeted communities, I’d disagree it’s the CRM’s true aim.  As was so ably demonstrated in this episode the CRM has succeeded in weaponizing walkers, which transforms them from a liability to a strategic asset - and you don’t liquidate strategic assets while there’s potential for their use.  
Eliminating targeted communities by having  your walker hordes consume them actually grows that strategic asset to a degree with each strike, so (from the CRM’s viewpoint) it’s a win/win.

Yeah but that's just bad people doing crazy shit for some reason. This may very well be what they're doing because the walking dead is just chock full of crazy people doing bad shit for no good reason but that in itself doesn't mean doing it would make any sense what so ever.

 

2 hours ago, Nashville said:

Is it, though?  That was true in the early days/weeks/months/years even of the mothership series, definitely.  When CDB first arrived in Alexandria, Deanna made a point of telling Rick about how Alexandria’s defensive wall had been constructed with supplies scavenged from a local home supply (Home Depot?) warehouse. 
TWD:WB’s timeline starts off with their ten-year anniversary Remembrance Day observation of the Z outbreak’s start, though, and a lot has almost certainly changed in a decade: lumber rots, metal rusts, foodstuffs (even the canned variety) expire, and electronic components fail.  At a decade in, it’s probably safe to assume that most still-usable and readily accessible remnants of pre-ZA society have already been scavenged - rendering those ever-dwindling workable pre-ZA components all that much more valuable.

in the immediate aftermath of an apocalyptic event, people would be looting stuff that was of use for their short term survival, food, fuel, medicines, one would assume that after ten years, the CRM have these needs sorted out. come the zombie apocalypse people will be in costco looting bog roll and dried pasta, i doubt anyone will be dragging a CNC lathe out of their local engineering shop.

Once you've got a secure area and people to do the work, growing food isn't that hard, but to maintain a modern civilisation you need manufacturing, they need the spare parts to service and maintain those hummers and helicopters, but even after ten year there will be factories and industrial units all over the country full of raw materials, machine tools and components that are still serviceable. the CRM appears to be made up from remnants of the US military, and the military  have vast stockpiles of spares and equipment, much of it in long term secure storage as a contingency against war or catastrophic events.

The current population of the US is what? 330 million people, in TWD it's apparently down to fewer than 1 million, but most of the infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and military hardware to service a population of 330 million will still be there sitting in steel framed industrial spec buildings that won't have deteriorated significantly in ten years even without maintenance. In short there is loads of useful stuff and very few people competing for it, consumer goods and retail outlet will have been stripped bare long ago, but an organisation as large and sophisticated as the CR could go to the next level and make the stuff they need themselves and the equipment and raw materials they need to do this will still be out there because they won't have been of use to individuals trying to survive the immediate aftermath of The Fall.

for those reasons i don't think it would be necessary for the CR to run a Nazi style plunder economy where their economic growth was predicated on them invading their neighbors and taking their stuff, but that said the CR do have a bit of a Nazi vibe about them, militarised society, black uniforms, bit fascist etc, so maybe they are doing what you suggest, personally i don't think it makes sense, but since when has that ever stopped the walking dead writers?

[ctlady]

On 9/27/2021 at 8:25 AM, Smad said:

So after Iris was the most despised character in S1 they've decided to change her out of the blue. The time skip between the end of last Season and Iris' part of the story is 6 weeks. In those 6 weeks she somehow managed to become Daryl Dixon (crossbow), find the nerve to kill humans and go into hand to hand combat with a trained soldier and win and then stab him to death

Yeah - no way is Iris in any kind of fighting shape to have been able to win that battle.  Just....no.way.

Julie Ormond's mumbling of her lines got on my nerves.  Fortunately, we watch this On Demand so we could rewind and turn up the volume.

On 10/3/2021 at 2:12 PM, Superclam said:

On 10/3/2021 at 12:25 PM, BasilSeal said:

but here i am aged fifty three and three quarters watching the same dumb game on telly and discussing it in minute detail on here, so more fool me i suppose.

OMG - this movie was on TCM last week.  This part comes in a close second in creeping me out to the scene with all of them stalking and crawling through the mud in the rain going after Cleo

Calling the hoard 'columns'?  Huh?  Ranks up there with 'empties'

What are the chances of getting a glimpse of Rick in the finale?