Headscratchers / The Walking Dead (2010)

Headscratchers for The Walking Dead (2010).

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The TV show 1

• I really want to know why living at Hershel's house is such a big deal. Can't they just find another farmhouse in the area? Daryl can clearly hunt, and defending the farm doesn't seem to be an issue with no Walkers around.
  • Not necessarily one with all the acoutrements Hershel's house has: working water pumps with wells (well, two out of three wells), a road a good distance away from the main drag, and electricity and a generator. To say nothing of the fact that Herschel's a doctor.
  • As Maggie explained most of the other farms have either been burnt to the ground or are infested by walkers.
  • OP here. Maggie's point DOES kinda explain this, but I still feel that finding a nice country house in the sticks, where there seem to be relatively few wandering Walkers, would be preferable to continuing to live as nomads. I imagine the group could get their hands on a working generator. The well water would be the only real issue. My point was that, instead of wearing out their welcome with Herschel, they could just be neighbours. That way they could utilize his medical skills without pissing him off.
    • Not exactly. The farms that haven't been burnt down are infested with walkers, not just at risk to few stray walkers. You would end up exhausting your supplies, ammunition, and yourself just trying to make the place liveable. Then there's the Season 2 finale, where the farm is overrun by the herd of walkers from Atlanta, and the group, inlcuding Herschel and his remaining family, must abandon it. The neighbouring farms are undoubtedly unuseable after that.
    • Hershel's farm is presumably also the only one in the region where the livestock haven't been devoured by walkers, starved to death in their pens, or fled. Those hens and cows are very valuable as sources of eggs and milk.

• Why the zombies in the barn are fed live chicken? Also, where do they get so many chickens anyway?
  • Because keeping them somewhat fed means they're less likely to break out of the barn. They probably have a breeding program for the chickens.
    • It's more likely because Herschel sees the walkers as sick people that just need a cure. So they're feeding them so they don't "die" of starvation
    • As to where they get so many chickens: the average domesticated hen lays about 5-6 eggs per week on average. In our universe, the grand majority of those will be collected, packed and sold or simply discarded before they're fertilized of course, but the point is: getting a great many chickens in a hurry is pretty trivial should one be so inclined. How they *feed* those chicks to adulthood (or why they would even care to - what, the dead won't eat day old chicks ?) might be a better question though
    • Chickens are naturally omnivorious; and, when left to themselves, will eat weeds, seeds, bugs, mice, grains, oyster shell, scraps left over from dinner, whatever may be available in the compost pile, egg shells, and occasionally their own eggs.

• Why are supplies so hard to come by? It's been a couple months since the end, so perishable food could reasonably be gone, but where are the twinkies? Gasoline would be very easy to obtain even without getting it from gas stations. And guns? We're supposed to believe that in the middle of ATLANTA GEORGIA Rick's bag of guns were the most easily obtained firearms in the city? They could probably even have their pick of brand new RV's if they bothered to find a dealership.
  • There wasn't a "vague cataclysmic event." It was a zombie apocalypse, which means that our heroes are not the only people trying to deal with it. The reason supplies are so hard to come by is that other groups of people have came and went through the areas already. Everyone didn't instantly die or disappear, they spent fighting and surviving too, using those same supplies that Rick's group is after.
  • I'm with the OP, though the previous comment certainly brings up valid points. Their truck is stolen, so they WALK back? The guy is short on tools — don't tell me every hardware store was looted. The "Getting a new RV" the actual vehicles may have been taken but by god the parts stores shouldn't be too picked over. Why on earth didn't anyone give the teams going into Atlanta shopping lists? Back in episode 1 they've established the Sheriff's department was protected, well-stocked, had water, some power and gas — why didn't the man and the boy move in there?
  • The city of Atlanta has a population size of more than 420,000 people. How long do you really think it'll take for several thousand weapons to be snatched off the shelves by the populace once riots break out and reports of the dead coming back to life to attack the living start hitting the airwaves? Raiding the gun store is a trope all its own and deserves its own page. Hundreds of thousands of people are all having the exact same thought and know where to head to try and seek supplies they believe they'll need.
    • Besides of the looting that usually comes with public panic. And the fact that some areas are infested with zombies
    • Add to the fact that if even just 10% of the population were infected. You now have to deal with 42,000 zombies. Odds are there are even more. Getting into any city is going to be near impossible.
  • Twinkies are actually not non-perishables. I live in the Atlanta, Georgia Area. These people panic shop at Wal-Mart and such when snow is predicted, let alone whether it actually does snow. The stores would be stripped in a day or two. Even of the guns.
    • I just figured Tallahassee took them.
    • Yes, the stores may be empty — but with the population becoming walkers so quickly all that equipment would be still lying around for the taking. A house smart enough to stock up on guns and barricade itself, but then fell to walkers would stand out like a sore thumb.
    • That's just it. Atlanta was, more or less, infested with walkers, so the group was staying away from the city for their own safety, so looting stockpiles isn't an option. Besides, as shown in "Vatos", there are others still living in Atlanta, trying to survive, and scavenging supplies from stockpiles throughout the city.
  • Perhaps the best way to look at this is, it's not the supplies are so hard to find, they are not. But rather, the *risk* involved in going to get them is considerable. And the risk scales upwards exponentially with the size of the city. Atlanta = lots of supplies, but huge risk. Smaller towns, fewer supplies, but also far less risky. For some example, Glenn and Maggie just ride into the small town near the farm and take what they want. In the episode "Save the Last One", an emergency aid station is the goal. Plenty of supplies, not just medical, but vehicles and weapons, but also 100s of walkers. The group can afford to send, two men. Bad odds and very high risk, as Otis doesn't make it and even Shane barely survives.

• Why haven't they considered circling the wagons in regards to the camp? And who chose a place where the only exit appears to be down into the quarry? The people in the camp seem for the most part smarter than this?
  • Most likely because they just got plain complacent. Because of their remote location, they managed to avoid most of the zombies save for a random wanderer or two. They start catching on to the problem as more zombies show up, but they probably weren't expecting an attack of the magnitude that happened in Episode 4. Typical case of Too Dumb to Live.
  • It must have been complacency — because even in their secluded location, they're in TENTS.
  • In all fairness, there were only so many vehicles in the camp, not nearly enough to encircle the entire encampment.
    • If only the world had ended and there were literally all of the free, unused vehicles you could ever want available. C'est la vie.
    • And if only getting those vehicles didn't always involve the possibility of being swarmed and eaten, and half those vehicles were crashed or otherwise unusable.

• Will Glenn ever explain why they call them "Geeks" instead of "Zombies". Its clearly obvious what they are, they know they are dead, yet why no-one uses that word is a little weird. Or is it just a joke that "only geeks would call them zombies"
  • In the comic, it's something of a running gag that every little group has its own name for them. Morgan from the pilot calls them "Walkers" for instance.
  • Fun trivia: it's a fitting enough nickname, since "geek" originally referred to circus sideshow performers, occasionally of the sort that would bite the heads off a live chicken or similar for the audience.
  • It may be a failure of Genre Savvy. In The Walking Dead universe, they don't seem to have zombie movies or Zombie Apocalypse movies — therefore, to them, a zombie is an obscure movie monster that has something to do with voodoo, not a walking, virus infected corpse. This editor feels that this is common in Zombie Apocalypse fiction — what with, as in The Walking Dead, characters spend a lot of time asking 'what are those things?' and not knowing 'shoot the brain' right off, for example.
    • Confirmed by Word of God. It actually makes a lot of sense as, if this series was set in the real world, anyone who owns a George Romero boxset would have access to a list of Walker hunting techniques longer than your arm. Hell even owning a copy of Shaun of the Dead would be beneficial. Having the characters find this stuff out for themselves increases the drama tenfold.
    • Plus, it is incredibly unlikely that zombies could ever exist in a universe where people have seen zombie movies. Unlike serial killers which also exist in the real world, so someone could be hunted by a serial killer who watches serial killer movies, or vampires/werewolves which have been in legends for hundreds of years, the modern zombie was completely invented by Romero in the 1950s, so to have film-makers create an entirely new type of monster, and then to have it spontaneously appear in the natural world not 100 years later? Unless bio-terrorists were inspired by the movies to replicate the monsters, that simply wouldn't happen.
    • The above reasoning doesn't make any sense since the concept of the Zombie having been invented recently doesn't preclude a similar monster coming into existence for unrelated reasons. There are already countless instances of fiction coincidentally predicting eerily similar events. "The wreck of the Titan" comes to mind. Also the Bible makes reference to "the dead walking the earth" long before Romero.
    • The Bible is referring to corpses possessed by demons, and Kirkman just mentioned zombie movies didn't come to fruition in that universe, which might mean that earlier media that referenced zombies might not have existed so Romero couldnt base it off anything, so that means that no zombies existed before the outbreak in media.. BOOM Fridge Brilliance to the MAX!

• How did Daryl manage to fire a crossbow three times in rapid enough succession to hit a deer each time? Deer tend to run off when hit by an arrow or bullet, even fatally. But that won't necessitate tracking a deer for so long and so far that a zombie gets to gnaw on it first. It seems Daryl is incredibly bad at hitting vital organs that aren't zombie brains, or deer in The Walking Dead have no need for them.
  • He mentions that he'd been tracking it all day. That's why he was so pissed when the zombie ate it.

• Why didn't anyone put Jim out of his misery before they left for the CDC? It looked as if it was going that way. Or that Daryl would quickly snipe him as he left with his crossbow. It was obvious to everyone they were leaving him to die, but it was also clear that he'd reanimate. Sure he could barely stand now, but when he reanimates, he'll be just as agile as the other Zombies! Jim lost his family to Zombies eating them in front of them, imagine the poor dopes who gets the same thing when Zombie!Jim comes crashing through their door and starts eating Auntie Gladys...?!
  • Totally. I mean, what was the outcome they were hoping for, here? Best case, he doesn't die from the infection, recovers...and is now left weak, unarmed, and stranded in the middle of nowhere? Second best case, he dies, but miraculously doesn't rise as a zombie? Worst case, he becomes a zombie, and remembers where the group was going and follows them?
    • Watch the relevant scenes again; Jim specifically asks to be left alive. He wants to let the infection take him because of his survivor's guilt over his family; he feels this is the best way he can be with them. He specifically turns down a gun when they offer to leave one with him. The other characters have an extensive debate over whether or not any of this is the right thing to do and end up deciding to respect his wishes. (Alternately, it's possible Jim is simply too much of a coward to want to die before the infection does the job, but, functionally, it doesn't make much of a difference.) This is certainly not the smart thing to do, but the subject of whether or not it's smart never comes up. The entire first half of the episode deals with the survivors from the attack on the camp figuring out how to cope with the state of the world, and ultimately they decide to let common sense slide on some things because they feel like it's costing them their humanity (to borrow a line from Battlestar Galactica, it's not enough to survive, you have to be worthy of survival.) Whether or not they're right is another debate entirely, I'm sure at least one person reading this had already started thinking "if they're too stupid to do what needs to be done to survive no matter what, they're not worthy of survival," but that's not the issue on making sense of Jim; given the place everyone is in, mentally, whether it's right or wrong, or smart or stupid, the way it plays out makes sense.
    • And, honestly, in a world with (probably) millions of zombies, one more on a road in the middle of nowhere (well, yes, between Atlanta and the CDC) isn't really going to make a difference. They followed Jim's wishes. There was no real danger to them in doing so.

• Now, I may just be an undergraduate biochemistry major, but what sort of CDC scientist (working in a Hazmat suit, no less) spills corrosive chemicals on a sample, and then starts POKING the sample!?
  • A tired and mentally unbalanced one.
  • Seconding exhausted and mentally unbalanced — the latter was made clear in episode 6 that he'd suffered Sanity Slippage after spending 65 days with no one for company but Vi the AI.
    • He's also shown to be trying to brush off the corrosive material, not just poking at it.
  • And if you do decide to stay at your post through the Apocalypse, shouldn't you pass your data on? Sure, it's unlikely that our heroes will meet anyone who can use it but that's better than simply letting it "die" with you.
    • He was completely jaded and convinced resistance was futile, why give Rick anything when it's game over, man?
    • I'm hoping we someday find out that all the computer data was automatically uploaded somewhere before "decontamination".
    • Also, his video logs were sent somewhere else, it's safe to assume that other place made automatic recordings of all he was saying, hence he knew his research had reached out.
    • The communication systems are useless since that building was the only one left that had a CDC scientist in it as far as he knows. France CDC buildings went down after ruining out of power and he said other scientists commited suicide.

• Little continuity glitch. Excuse given for Andrea being all skittish is "she hasn't eaten in days, none of us have" — but weren't they having a fish fry right before they left for the CDC? Or did many days go by after they handled the dead and the dead-again?
  • The fish fry was probably ruined by the attack. I imagine, in the panic, nobody gave much thought to securing the food, and afterward they probably got rid of the exposed fish just in case any of the Walkers had infected them. Aside from that, I'm not sure just how long the trip was.

• Is anyone else a little confused as to why NONE of the women have learned to defend themselves yet? Slow to pick it up, I can understand, but so far all they've managed to do in any stressful situation is cower.
  • It likely hasn't really dawned on them yet that the world as they know it is never coming back, so they're probably still thinking "the men will protect us until this is all over."
  • In the comics, Andrea becomes a badass zombie killer after the death of her sister — this may just be a matter of time.
  • Think of it this way. Its been under three months since the infection happened. The only people we see defending themselves and acting badass are those who would have had experience with that in the pre-zombie world. Rick and Shane are police officers, natural leaders made for situations like this. Daryl and Merle were tough rednecks. Daryl obviously knows how to hunt and how to fight, same with Merle. Besides them, we don't see anyone else fighting. Glenn, Dale, T-Dog, and such, none of them really do any fighting. Why is no one complaining about them? They were normal people before the apocalypse. It takes time for people to adjust to situations such as this. Andrea was obviously a family girl and college educated. Lori was just a house wife. Carol lived with an abusive chauvinistic husband. People have seemed to deluded themselves into believing the moment the zombie apocalypse happens, they'll be tough as nails and badass. This is the reason why I like the show, because of the portrayal of the characters is realistic. Its shows the shock, the yearning for a normal life once more (like Lori constantly treating Carl like a child still. He's the only thing that she feels she's still in control of, being a mom is all she knows.)
  • Perhaps that was the situation intended, but what's happening on-screen is "Stay in the Kitchen and let the menfolk handle things." Even Glen the delivery guy has Hidden Depths, but the women—three healthy, uninjured adults—haven't even considered trying to get some sort of makeshift melee weapon despite several months of scavenging. It's understandable to keep Andrea away from guns in case she tries to eat one, but there's still melee weapons and the other two have no excuse. In fact, Lori and Carol have a really good reason to find some kind of weapon—they need to protect their kids.
  • Mostly turned around in the second season. The women are at least given weapons while searching for things, Andrea wants to learn how to fire a gun and Shane will apparently teach her eventually.
    • I'm sorry but no it hasn't turned around in the slightest. Andrea now has a gun true, but Lori and Carol are still perfectly content to sit around/cry whilst everyone else protects the camp. In fact whilst we're on the subject of Andrea, firing a rifle at an unidentified target whilst three friendlies are in close proximity and knowing full well the sound might bring more Walkers is actually very good evidence of the Stay in the Kitchen theory above. If Daryl died Andrea would now be firmly in the Creator's Pet camp.
    • This illustrates how vastly different Carol from the second season is from Carol from later seasons.
  • You can kind of understand where Carol's coming from, but Lori is married to a cop. Even if she'd never used a gun herself, he should have taught her how (if not, that's Epic Fail on his part). Why she doesn't carry one is a mystery, especially since she's, you know, pregnant.
    • Lori is actually shown to be perfectly capable to defend herself when the situation calls for it at least once, such as in "Nebraska", when she crashes her car while heading into town to look for Rick, Glenn, and Herschel, and has to defend herself from a lone walker that attacks her. She also took a gun with her when she left, and continues to carry it with her afterwards. I'd chaulk that up to Rick actually teachinjg her something about self defense at some point in time, which more or less Josses the Stay in the Kitchen theory. Carol, however, is an abuse victim, and it is implied that because of that abuse, she considers herslf useless for anything other than cooking and cleaning.
  • Another point in the Let the women stay at home question above, why is it apparently only the women that are contemplating killing themselves? now personally I don't think its ever justified no matter what the circumstances but the fact is that Andrea attempted suicide, Beth attempted suicide, Maggie considered suicide, Carol considered suicide, Jacqui actually committed suicide... how many healthy males (in other words Jim asking to be left behind after being infected doesn't count) have actually gone down this route? even the, and please forgive the expression, most feminine guy in the group Glenn never went the suicide route and instead has begun to morph into far stronger personality. Personally; I can only name Dr Jenner.
    • If it helps, we can now add Abraham to the list.
    • Hershel is deep in denial about the walkers. He thinks there is still hope for a cure for them: for dead people that are literally rotting away and likely have eaten other people. That does not seem like a sane reaction. When he realizes he is wrong, the first thing he does is head out for a bar and try to lose himself into his alcoholism.
    • Speaking of which, why is Lori so bad at contraception? She's already had a child, she should know that unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy. Further, after she has decided to abort, she sends Glenn to the pharmacy again for abortion pills and... several morning after pills. No mention of condoms and/or the contraceptive pill. The morning after pill is an emergency strategy with severe side-effects — not something you'd want to take after every time you've had intercourse. Not that it matters since she decides to keep the baby... which is just as stupid considering that she lives in constant danger of mobilized dead people trying to chew her face off, and being pregnant doesn't exactly make you more agile. Not to mention that without access to proper medical facilities/staff, there is always a possibility of complications, and her dying giving birth.
    • No shit she knew. Turns out in a zombie apocalypse, people tend to have lapses in judgment. She wasn't planning to use that stuff as regular contraceptives, she only had him get any of it to specifically terminate the pregnancy she already had.
      
      And congrats, you noticed and are calling her out on the exact same things she noticed and called herself out on. Did you watch the episode where they went into all this, and she gave her reasoning for trying to abort, and how Rick talked her out of it?
  • This bothers me as well. Lori stands around dispensing down-home wisdom about men needing to do whatever they need to do, Carol cries or goes catatonic, Andrea is training with a pistol but is totally incompetent under stress...basically, anything important is done by white males. It's an unsettling theme that wasn't present at all in the comic.
    • Well, honestly, the sad fact of life is that not everyone is going to be a badass. In fact, I'd venture to say that the vast majority of people aren't going to be badass or even effective in a situation like that. And the white males' track record isn't exactly spotless either. Hershel was in denial and that denial is part of the reason for all the conflict in Season 2; Shane is a half step away from losing his shit; Dale is ineffective at the best of times (he didn't spot the horde of walkers that resulted in Sophia getting lost, or the one that killed him); and while Daryl is certainly badass, he hasn't gotten much done either and spent at least one whole episode as walking wounded, losing his arrows and nearly getting killed. And, as has been mentioned here and other places, nearly all Rick's decisions have ended in disaster of one stripe or another.
      
      So, sure, if you measure importance solely in ability to shoot people, surprise surprise, the two cops (trained with firearms and to deal with life-and-death situations) and the redneck hunter are the most "important."
    • Well, to be fair, Andrea's "incompetent under stress" is perfectly justifiable. It's much different to be shooting actual, walking hostile targets than it is to be shooting bottles and "No Trespassing" signs, even among actual police officers who undergo longer training than an afternoon at the range. And once she overcomes that mental block preventing her from concentrating under pressure (entirely on her own, mind you) she's landing headshots with the best of them. Still doesn't excuse Lori or Carol, of course, but at least Carol's passivity is consistent with the character background.
    • Again, though, this is a theme that isn't present in the comic, where the women are as useful as the men — and no, I don't just measure usefulness in terms of shooting ability. Read the comic, then watch the show; the weird Stay in the Kitchen undercurrent in the latter is a distinctly uncomfortable addition.
    • And watch the Season 3 opener—where Maggie and Beth are right there helping to clear out the Walkers, and even Carol is wielding an AK with clear aptitude. The only reason Lori isn't is because she's visibly pregnant at this point. It's not a "theme," it's the characters having to develop.
    • Exactly; the writers had what is known as a no-win scenario on their hands. If they had made Lori and Maggie and all the other women badasses from the beginning they would have got just as many complaints that it was unrealistic that the women could so easily go from farmers and housewives into a team of Sarah Connor's overnight — whatever they did they were going to offend someone. The main males on this team were either ex-law enforcement, had handled guns all of their lives or were physically very strong such as T-Dog so naturally they were overwhelmingly superior to the females in terms of combat ability to begin with. It also should be pointed out that, whilst they may have slipped up occasionally, the writers were trying to make this show as realistic as possible and I imagine it goes without saying that developing as human beings is one crucial part of real life.
    • Speaking of which, Maggie seems pretty badass at the start. She has not learned to shoot that well yet, but she meets with the crises at the farm head-on and takes it upon herself to smooth things over between her father and their guests.

• I don't get why the zombies are such a threat. I understand them managing to swarm an isolated survivor or two put how do they overrun secure well defended installations? Some initial panic in dealing with the zombie infestation I get, surely after a while police and the army would be sweeping infested areas and clearing them out? Even if every dead person turns into a zombie opposed to just those bit, just give orders to put a bullet in every dead corpse. Unless there is some other mechanism at work (e.g. an airborne strain) doesn't really make sense. Series is still awesome though.
  • To save a bunch of reading for future tropers, let me explain something. We know the virus has infected everyone, its airborne. Everyone who dies comes back. Now, approximately 150,000 people die each day everyday. Within the 1st week, the hospitals will be completely overwhelmed by attempts to help and restrain these 'patients' and first responders such and LE Os, Fire Dpt and Ambulance services will be getting hit quite severely. This means going into week 2, most professional medical help is unavailable and as such the death rate skyrockets. Every overdose, heart attack, stroke, car wreck, shooting, etc will no longer receive treatment. These people will instead form packs, and attack any first responders who attempt help, as well as anybody else who attempts assistance. By the end of week 2, Law Enforcement will begin to breakdown and be unable to respond to ordinary things as the riots and looting begin. The criminals and other people will pick up on this quicker than the rest of the populace and the violence will increase. The deathrate is now at least 500k a day and rising. The National Guards and equivalents everywhere will be activated Week 3 will see regular civilians realizing the need to arm themselves and the usual militias activating for self-preservation as everything goes to hell. General anarchy and outright gunfights with LE Os and the Army will break out. The economy has essentially shut down and almost nobody actively obeys that many laws anymore. Especially on the roads, where fewer and fewer people will give a shit about saftey and speed limits. And the highways will get clogged up, and battles will begin. In the middle of week 3, the death rate will easily be 1.5million a day and rising, ten times that of normal. Week four is when everything has completely broken down and there is no more law and order. This is also when Walker herds have grown large and powerful and begin wiping out large segments of humanity. Generally, Walkers will take horrific casualties themselves, but the general mayhem will cause their numbers to grow extremely fast, thus eventually overwhelming many groups and camps. Especially those still trying to save old people and those who need constant medical supervision. Aka ticking timebombs. But even then, most of the world is still "alive". Over the next month, starvation, dehydration, untreated disease and sickness, and anarchic conflict will gradually take more down. Two months after this is when the results of the modern economy collapsing totally show. As in, billions begin starving and fighting. Eventually the recruitment rate peaks, a massive chunk of humanity is already permanently out of commision during the initial fighting, so their is "only" about 3-4 billion Walkers worldwide. That number will decrease over time. But still.
  • My personal theory is that it's both airborne and bite transmitted. The airborne strain is weak, and only managed to infect those with weak immune systems, but the concentrated dose in a bite is enough to overwhelm even the strongest immune system.
  • I personally think that the initial panic is barely over. We know that Rick was in a coma for two months before he woke up to the world as it is, and judging from the scene where Shane brought him flowers in the hospital, the plague didn't start until he'd been out of it for at least a week or two. The military may still be forthcoming.
  • That's the thing with zombie movies/TV series — you gotta accept that these slow, dimwitted corpses can somehow overrun the entire world. So yes, somehow, everyone had a severe attack of incompetence, or some other factors are at work.
    • To further expand on this; the thing about the Zombie Apocalypse as a whole is that, despite outward appearances, it's much more of a vehicle for metaphor and social commentary than most people realize, even people who know in passing that the original Dawn of the Dead was an implicit attack against rampant consumerism. The idea that no military can possibly stand up to it is based heavily on the wish to critique the failure of societies that are ostensibly meritocracies to actually allow people with true merit to advance. This is why you rarely see businessmen or the saccharine middle class Taking a Level in Badass in these stories; it's always down-to-earth people like Rick who may be at least somewhat well-off but are otherwise street-smart and are painted as having a grasp of how the world works. Because the military is the group responsible for defending the populace (and are thus the group that must fail for the zombies to actually become an apocalypse,) they get something of a meta-Butt-Monkey treatment in the genre where the writer assumes that the armed forces are so full of Neidermeyers (remember, overabundance of people who don't deserve to advance who have advanced anyway) that the troops on the ground are too handicapped to adapt to the new threat, so much so that they can gain absolutely no advantage from the new threat's many weaknesses. World War Z is a large offender here, with an entire chapter dedicated to explaining how the military higher-ups screwed up a chance at an easy victory while going into detail about the simple changes to strategy that would've made the battle completely one-sided against the zombies (to be fair, World War Z is also heavy-handed about the belief in the ability of humanity to survive and adapt, so it also goes into detail about how protocols/procedures are changed to reflect the new problems, and has characters like a soccer mom who actually discusses how her suburban "get the kids to school/social functions on time while keeping up with the Joneses" mentality left her unprepared and willfully ignorant of the problem.)
  • One good example, in my opinion, is the CDC building. The building has 50 or more computer terminals in that one room (I counted 49 visible, and several more obscured by lights). That's in zone 5, so there should be at least 250 terminals (more if there are more than 5 zones, or if that room is only part of zone 5). The building is defended by at least two machine guns and it is implied that there are many, many more guns inside. So where are all the bodies? It seems like there would be heaps and heaps of dead before the building was overrun. The people in the film, especially the military, just seem generally incompetent all the time, like when a zombie soldier is found in the tank (what happened to him? He had a loaded gun and was in a tank; couldn't he have closed the hatches or shot the zombies?) or when a soldier in the flashback in episode 6 is attacked by a zombie and starts shooting at the ceiling and lights.
    • The CDC guy left probably got rid of the bodies somehow. As for the guy in the tank, he probably did similar to Rick, went in for refuge, but in his case he'd already been bitten. As for the third, he was just bitten by a zombie. It has nothing to do with being "incompetent," and everything to do with being eaten alive and reflexively pulling the trigger.
    • The soldier in the tank was planned to be in a second webseries, starring Sam Witwer, when Frank Darabont was fired. It was described as Black Hawk Down, but with zombies", and be about the fall of Atlanta, and how the soldier was bit, grabbed a grenade, climbed into the tank, and died before he could kill himself.
  • I don't think the zombies really did much overwhelming. In episode one we're shown dozens of bodies outside the hospital. Clearly there is an air/water/contact strain out there. In the same episode we're told that he saw what happened AFTER they started killing the infected. Presumably everybody got sick one day then woke up dead. It's also the only reasonable way to explain how the military bases got over run. It happened from the inside out. The survivors of the initial wave were probably a lot fewer than we think.
  • At the end of episode 5 you see dozens to hundreds of bodies all over the streets and yards surrounding the CDC building. It's likely they were overrun simply because zombies are nearly inexhaustible while ammunition isn't. The fact that Browning M2s are used suggests the military wasn't prepared to deal with the true nature of the threat, or they would've been using small caliber weaponry like the M249 or even just M4 carbines. Mowing down wave after wave of incoming enemies bent on killing you doesn't work when everything below the neck is of no consequence when hit.
    • All bullets generate a concussion wave. The concussion wave of the .50 BMG is larger than the human body and can gib multiple humans (which is why no movie will ever show the realistic effect of being hit by one of those suckers. Anything over the belt would kill a zombie. There should have been many more bodies, and they should have been in smaller pieces and the military should not have been overrun so easily. However, is the entire city reanimated was descending on them they would have lost from attrition anyways.
    • No, no they don't. There is no concussive wave from a bullet. If there was, there would be more than just a half inch hole in paper targets. Here's◊ a ballistics gel target with the permanent and temporary cavities created by a .50 BMG. Are those wounds nasty? Yes. Can a .50 calibre bullet destroy a human body in one shot? Not a chance in Hell.
    • Actually it is a valid argument that the terminal impact of a large caliber round from a machine gun or a 50 cal could kill a walker if the round hits the upper body. The Hydrostatic shock of military grade munitions can turn a person's brain to mush inside their skulls, even if they are hit in the extremities. It basically pops your brain cells like tiny balloons. Even if their brain isn't turned to jello, getting hit below the shoulder by a BMG round can easily destroy limb function or just blast it clean off your body. It may not kill the walker, but it would probably ring its bell pretty darn hard. As for typical assault rifles and carbines, the walkers would likely tolerate the effects, though a shot that hits the spinal cord could probably send enough shock through the body to splat the neurons in the brain stem, though such shots would be rare as well.
    • On the mundane side of things, a lot of military weapons are designed to injure, rather than kill, or drill through heavy armor. Frangible rounds make messy work for battlefield doctors, but a walker doesn't care if you make Swiss cheese of his bowels. Blow off a foot with a claymore, it'll limp after you. And a high-caliber machine gun round meant to punch holes in a tank will drill through lots of walkers without slowing down, meaning its not expending much energy against them and generating the kind of shock that would destroy the brain on a non-head hit (especially if said walkers are a little "mushy," as the ones we've seen in the show have been.) And that's not mentioning tactical doctrine that's wholly ineffective. Soldiers are trained to shoot for center-of-mass, not the head (yes, even military snipers aim for the heart.) With the prevalence of body armor, it may not be that unusual to see someone you shoot with a high-power rifle in the chest stumble, go down, then get back up. Because vests are less effective against successive hits, the answer is to keep plugging them in the same spot. But again, walkers don't care how many bullets you put in them, they just keep getting up. Soldiers may waste their entire clips shooting at one walker, thinking "where can I get that armor" instead of "aim for the head." Even grenades won't be terribly effective, unless the shrapnel luckily gets the head. World War Z does a great job illustrating how weapons and tactics that are devastating against living armies don't mean squat to the undead, while also demonstrating how very minor changes in weapons and tactics can completely curb-stomp them. So basically, the question becomes "Can the military adapt tactics while there's still enough of them to make a difference?" In The Walking Dead, the answer to that question was clearly "No."
  • In the comics it is revealed that the strain is indeed an airborne type where everybody who dies returns as a zombie. It's not the bite that does it, that's just liable to be what kills you. Also the point is precisely that they're not really that dangerous by themselves; it's when they get into a large pack that it turns dangerous because they don't stop following you.
    • Nope, that never happened. There is no confirmation of "airborne" or "virus", just that everyone will become a zombie.
    • Rick reveals that Dr. Jenner's last words to him are that everyone is already infected. When they die, they reanimate.
    • In the prison arc, they find out that people can turn without being bitten, and realize that this means everyone must already be infected and the bites don't turn, they only kill.
  • Another frequent Zombie Apocalypse staple is that by the time people work out what's actually going on, the numbers are already tilted against them. Most nations, sadly, do not have a good zombie defense protocol on the books, and it would take awhile psychologically to adapt to the fact that zombies exist enough to get your act together. You also have to deal with other random factors — denial by both governments and individuals, zombie-ism being treated as a disease at first and thus getting a chance to spread through/shut down the health care system, people not wanting to kill zombies because they hoped to rehabilitate them, and above all the fact that every dead human is a potential zombie, so every successive defeat for humankind is a force multiplier for the zombies. Beyond that, you just need to put your Willing Suspension of Disbelief hat on and accept the genre for what it is.
  • There's also the very real issue that emergency services can and do break down. EMTs and Police are going to be the first people called in and naturally the first ones bitten. As for the military, imagine if large chunks of the unit decide "I've gotta get home to protect my family!" all at once.
    • You also have to remember that about half of our military is National Guard and reserve units that have to be called up to be put into action. The other half is spread between domestic military bases and overseas assets. So those soldiers that could readily be deployed within the US would not be enough to police very large portions of the country (perhaps just the areas immediately near their bases).
  • It's not clear how the plague spreads. I agree that bite-only transmission probably would not have led to an apocalypse. Others have mentioned an airborne transmission — but I don't think it's even a virus. Nothing biological could cause a body to change in the fashion the show portrays (mutant influenza won't make you capable of surviving for months without food, blood, or the lower half of your body). Even if it it's a disease, it's necessarily a supernatural one. We can also look at the zombies themselves. They are decayed but relatively intact — they don't have limbs eaten off. I think that a lot of people change without direct exposure. If we assume an infectious agent, you could have billions seeming to spontaneously transform.
    • According to that logic, almost all zombie apocalypse stories are supernatural, when in fact, many, if not most, explicitly aren't. The thing about zombie fiction is that it's very common for the zombie-ism to be caused by some crazy virus that can somehow or other allow a corpse to keep moving and walking around despite having nothing but the brain still functioning.
    • In the comic and video game, it is made clear that everyone who dies comes back as a zombie. So if it is some kind of plague, everyone's already infected and the disease is just dormant until you die.
  • This was also addressed in Romero's Day of the Dead. Basically, people are freaked out by two things. 1) Zombies are human beings functioning on pure primal instinct. Whether they're devouring someone alive or trying to break into a shopping mall or something else that provides social commentary, we get a good harsh look at what we are when all conscious thought is stripped away, so that scares people and leaves them unable to react. 2) Zombies are our loved ones. People don't want to kill their friends and family, even when they're trying to eat them. Sentimentality spells doom for the human race. By the time everyone realizes this, it's too late.

• Is it really plausible that a system designed to eradicate all the dangerous viruses / bacteria in the CDC building would consist of a bomb that would rupture all the walls and roof, and blast debris out all over the place? Even if they were trying to invoke Kill It with Fire, wouldn't it have been safer to have something that would collapse the building in on itself and bury everything, rather than releasing aerosolized CDC material into the atmosphere?
  • I agree. When the scientist described the process and said it "set the air on fire" I assumed it would be something similar to what we saw with the contaminated sample at the start of the episode; essentially, a WHOOMPH of fire that incinerated the interior, but left the building intact. This would surely make more sense if the safeguard was to be used in any other situation, other than the end of the world. If there was a terrorist attack that took out the power grid, or the fossil fuels eventually just ran out, they would want to decontaminate the building to prevent bio-weapons leaking, but leave the complex largely intact, you know, just in case the government still had control, so they could re-use it.
  • I'm calling Rule of Cool here and going with a wild guess that the writers or director or whoever just thought that the explosion would look cooler and appear more dramatic as they raced to get away from the building in time to escape the blast. But who knows really.
  • Collapse inward so all those things are still there just waiting to be found instead of incinerated which we know kills just shy of everything? The better question is why didn't he spend a few days trying to figure out how to turn that off? Keeping weaponized Ebola is important in case of a terrorist attack or missile attack. Not so much in case of zombie apocalypse or other outbreak. When you've got a bacteria, virus, parasite whatever the one place you absolutely cannot afford to lose is the CDC.
  • The explosive is explicitly said to be a fuel-air bomb, which makes Jenner's description of "setting the air on fire" an understatement, if anything. An FAB strong enough to bring the building down is certainly strong enough to sterilize every square inch of space inside it; this is a weapon that is rarely used in reality because of the worry that it's so easily mistaken for a nuclear bomb that one might prompt A Nuclear Error from someone.
    • Concur. A thermobaric Bomb actually creates a vacuum that sucks all oxygen from the surrounding area into the flame. Though it creates a concussive force, it is primarily a heat based weapon that would incinerate anything in the air or building.
    • Fuel-air explosives are all about the concussive effect. Sure, they burn hot, but not for nearly long enough. They don't "create a vacuum that sucks all oxygen from the surrounding area into the flame" — they wouldn't have time; the total burn time is measured in mere milliseconds. The whole "vacuum bomb" confusion comes from the fact that there's a "rebound" after the initial massive overpressure, as the volume previously occupied by hot expanding gases cools and drops in pressure.^note Ever see those old nuclear testing videos where dust and debris are first swept one way by the shockwave and then flung back again? Exactly like that. TL;DR: thermobarics are great for flattening structures, not so much for sterilization. For that you want high, long-lasting heat. Or a nuke.
  • The really nasty stuff was kept deep underground, so the part that we saw explode was just the tip of the iceberg. The explosion probably vaporized everything down there and then collapsed the only entrance to keep it in.

• Shouldn't Felipe be turning into a zombie in "Vatos"? He got an arrow that has pierced countless geeks heads right on the ass, and I've not seen Daryl clean 'em once.
  • Just because you don't see him clean them doesn't mean he doesn't. He also uses the crossbow to hunt, remember, and he'd definitely want them clean for that.
    • And then there's Daryl's knife. If he puts it back in the sheathe after dispatching a zombie the blood and infected matter goes in with it, contaminating it every time he puts it back.

• When the doctor knocks that stuff over in TS 19 and it sets off the fail-safe for that room. After he leaves the room. he strips out of his hazmat suit to get sanitized... unless there's more than one way of doing that, they must have not done the research because to my knowledge those things spray a deadly mixture of bleach and all sorts of other chemicals to make sure it kills anything that could cause an infection. It would kill a person very quickly, and painfully.
  • Maybe it had run out of the bleach mix? I imagine the decontamination showers would be used every time he exited the lab, and given the apocalypse going on I doubt the chemical reservoirs would be refilled at all.
  • He actually goes through a bleach shower (presumably bleach, anyway) while in his suit, and then takes a water shower in the decon chamber. Excessive? Not in a place that works on WEAPONIZED SMALLPOX.

• If fresh material is so hard to come by, why did Jenner shoot TS-19 through the head? I would think the brain-stem, which he destroyed, would be the most important part of a reanimated corpse to study.
  • TS-19 was his wife, so maybe he couldn't bring himself to dissect her.
    • The flashback sequence in "Wildfire" shows that the sample Jenner was experimenting with was labelled TS 19, which better explains his Big "NO!" when the lab and sample are decontaminated after he spills the corrisive material.
  • A lot of these comments are presuming that the survivors are behaving rationally, when it's pretty clear that every single person left alive is suffering from deep psychological trauma. Expecting people, in that state, to make good decisions is a bit much.

• If zombies tell who's alive and who's dead through scent, at what point do their olfactory senses decay past use? And if they're in a large enough herd, how can they smell the difference? And after a few weeks of no bathing and no perfumes or deodorant do humans really smell all that different?
  • I don't think it's just that they smell rotten, but that they have a distinct "undead" odor that's not found in anything but zombie flesh.

• How did Rick survive being alone, in a coma, in a hospital full of the undead?
  • I wonder how he survived several weeks worth of dehydration and starvation. I wonder if the comics have a better explanation of how he slept through the Apocalypse** In a later episode, they show Shane blocking the door with a locked gurney. Since Rick wasn't moving or making any noise it seems plausible that they never knew he was in there. As for food and water, ehhhhhh....
    • There have been accounts of people in certain survival situations surviving for long stretches of time without food or water. In a sheltered area like he was, this reduces his exposure to the elements. He's unconscious, so he breathes less which means less loss of water that way. A person can survive 3 weeks without food being active, he was lying still in a single spot. As well he was hooked up to IVs that would continue to drip to sustain him for sometime. As well, we see the water still flowing as he heads to the sink which means there's water pressure. So you could say that he was left unattended for weeks instead of two months. We're not too certain on the time frame of when he was in the hospital and when the outbreak occurred. Requires a little plausible deniability for certain, but not a whole lot.
    • My guess is that if Rick didn't wake up when he did he was only a handful of days away from dying as it was. Probably one of those "by the skin of your teeth" things where the difference between life and death is measures in hours.
    • It's also possible that Rick's caregivers at the hospital had been giving him a mild sedative to prevent muscle spasms and to alleviate pain if and when he did regain consciousness. If so, it wouldn't be pure coincidence that he woke up before he could die of dehydration: being left without IV fluids and medication could have been what caused him to revive.

• In Season 2, we're seeing people not getting infected when it should probably have happened. Andrea stabbing a walker in the eye with a screwdriver sprayed blood all over her. Daryl hiding T-Dog under a freshly killed walker while T-Dog had a profusely bleeding arm wound. Shane punched a walker in the mouth. In the same scene, Daryl and possibly Rick get walker blood on them, something that Rick specifically mentions not to do way back in episode two. It's possible they just got lucky, but still.
  • Having the blood on you carries the risk of infection, but it seems that only actually getting bitten and having the walkers' blood/saliva/whatever actually enter your bloodstream is what does it. Incidental contact isn't enough to force an infection.
  • The show hasn't really gone into detail regarding just what presents the possibility of infection beyond an actual bite taking place. Unlike Max Brooks nobody has elaborated on whether or not the virus is in the blood and the tissues of the body, or just in the saliva. Everybody taking the precautions that they have with gloves, masks and coats may simply be an example of safety first rather than an actual necessity.
  • The Virus being carried by saliva makes the most sense, it was stated that bites and scratches(The zombies eat with thier hands so it makes sense that they would get some saliva on thier fingers)causes the infections that make people turn.
  • If the nature of the show zombies is anything like the nature of the comic zombies, the means of transmission is irrelevant.
    • It is.
  • Word of God says that it's not the zombie virus that kills you, but the infection caused from having a rotting mouth cause a wound. Most likely, Walker blood is a semi-coagulated goop.
    • If it helps any, Big Tiny is Season 3 is determined to have to be put down after being stabbed not particularly deeply by a walker's arm bone.
  • As of the end of Season 2, we know for a fact that everyone's infected, and will turn no matter what kills them. Getting "infected" blood on you won't kill you, unless there's something else in the blood that will do that. And zombie blood is probably so rotten any kind of blood-borne pathogens died out awhile ago, assuming the "zombie virus" or whatever isn't the kind of infection that kills everything else.

• First episode of Season 2: Right at the end the boy gets shot by Otis who's hunting the deer. This scene annoys me so much because it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Why would the kid want to walk up to the buck anyway? And even more annoying: how can he be so quiet (and unsmelling)? The deer should have feld the second the boy made his first step.
  • The kid is walking up to the deer because it's the first good, natural, beautiful thing he's seen since, you know, zombies started eating people. Also, not all deer flee the instant something makes a sound. There are places where you can definitely get that close to deer because they're not hunted. The Shenandoah Valley, for instance, where my father nearly tripped over one deer while he was approaching another to take a picture.
  • Because God wanted him to get shot? No, seriously, I don't think it's a coincidence that after Rick asks God for a sign, Carl gets shot. Clearly the writers have a view of God similar to mine.
    • Okay, lets play that out. Carl getting shot by Otis got the group to Hershel's farm, where T-Dog and Carl got much-needed medical attention, saving both their lives (granting that Carl's life wouldn't have been in danger in the first place.) It forged relationships between Hershel's people and Rick's people, which ultimately lead to the discovery that Hershel was sadly mistaken about the walkers' condition, allowing Rick's group to set them straight (granted in the most horrific way possible). This equipped Hershel's people better to survive, and ultimate lead to them fully embracing Rick and his group. The whole period of time spent on the farm also demonstrated to Rick the true depth of Shane's mental issues, culminating in Rick taking Shane down in a much more controlled circumstance than, say, if Shane had snapped completely while the group was on the road surrounded by walkers. Finally, the note Rick's group left for Sophia when they moved to the farm proved a convenient meeting place after the farm was overrun, letting the group merge back together. Sure, it cost the lives of Otis, Patricia, and Jimmy (Shane was going to die eventually anyway, assuming he didn't get everyone else killed first), but that one bullet saved a lot of lives.
  • Deer have very poor depth perception, so have a hard time judging how close a person is if the person isn't moving. This troper has gotten within five feet of browsing deer, simply by waiting until they've lowered their heads to feed and quietly taking a step or two straight towards them while they're distracted.

• How was the hanging walker able to move? Hanging breaks the neck, severing the spinal cord. Most spinal cord injuries cause loss of limb functionality (or, at worst, quadriplegia), which the hanging walker clearly shows control over.
  • Guy might have screwed up and choked to death rather then broke his neck. Hanging is a rather exact art, screw-up and a relatively quick and painless death gets traded in for a long and horrible one... there's actually one instance back in the old west when the executioners screwed up a hanging so bad it decapitated the man.
  • The way hanging breaks a person's neck is the sudden drop from height, usually accomplished by the trap door, or before that, putting someone on a horse and having the horse run off. The guy who hung himself wouldn't have had either of those, from the look of it.

• Why is Carol staying at camp while everyone else (Even Carl!)looks for her daughter? Does she not have a single Mama Bear bone in her body?
  • If I had to guess, I'd say she's probably deathly afraid of finding her dead.
  • And she's an abuse victim. Most abusers systematically brainwash their victims, so Carol is probably convinced she'd be completely useless on the search and in any other situation that didn't involve cooking and cleaning and doing laundry.
  • Ed convinced her she was weak and useless, and she believes it herself. Best to let the big, strong, capable menfolk do things while she meekly stays behind and does what a good, obedient woman is supposed to do. Ed literally beat that idea into her, and loosing Sophia is actually the start of Carol becoming not just a strong and capable woman, but a full-on badass in her own right.

• Season 2 winter finale's big reveal; Sophia was a walker in Hershel's barn. What. They mean to tell us that Hershel forgot putting a little girl in his barn (in most believable circumstances) days before people show up looking for her? It's not like he had reason to hide her presence from them; he wanted the group gone and she was one of the main reasons they wouldn't leave.
  • Hershel didn't know. They said earlier in the episode that Otis was the one who caught and placed the walkers in the barn. Note that it was never mentioned to Otis that they were looking for Sophia due to Carl getting shot, so he wouldn't have had a reason to tell Rick and Shane about it himself before he died; the fact that Hershel didn't mention it implies that Otis never told him about catching her, either.
  • Also, Hershel probably wouldn't have told the survivors even if he knew Sophia was in there. After all, he never wanted to tell them the barn existed in the first place.
    • The more pressing question is why we never saw her in the barn before this point despite Glen having a full aerial view of the interior.
    • Really? Glenn saw the Walkers, freaked out for a few seconds, and then got the fuck out of there, he didn't have time to look at them all. And considering how she was the last to stumble out of the barn in 2.7, she may have been in a corner or something.
    • Not to mention the fact that it was night and the entire interior of the barn wasn't lit up, making it even more unlikely that he would be able to see her in there amidst the other, much larger zombies that were gathering right underneath him.
    • Sophia was the smallest walker in the barn, and walkers don't really cooperate when they go after someone, they shove each other around in their attempts to reach potential prey. The adult-sized walkers could easily have knocked her down and been stepping on her as they reached for Glen; heck, she probably took so long to exit the barn because the others had trampled right over her.
    • The question I have is, was Sophia bitten in the woods and brought to the barn as a Walker by Otis, or did she stumble on the barn looking for shelter and get bitten in there. While it may not be that feasible that Sophia only had one bite from a barn full of Walkers, I think it adds a lot of pathos that Herschel was pretty much directly responsible for Sophia's turn.
    • It isn't remotely feasible. The writers have said that Otis put her in the barn. "Pathos" or not, it just is not what happened.

• Why is Rick the default leader? Season 2, Episode 7 is a perfect example: Shane plans to shoot the Walkers whilst his wife adamantly pleads that "it's not your call to make" why? because he outranked him as a Deputy? if anything his steadfast refusal to make the hard choices makes him a liability not an asset. Not to mention that Shane's proclamation to Lori is 100% accurate: Rick never does seem to be the one that saves her life does he?
  • This annoys me too. The group was doing fine, it was only when Rick showed up that everything went to shit. Although when she said "It's not your call to make" she probably meant they should have a vote. But really, none of Ricks decisions have been good so far; go save Merle, now Jim, Amy, and the asshole are dead; go to the CDC, now whatsername is dead; have Carl come look for Sophia, then he was shot and Otis died. I can't tell if we're supposed to be against Shane at this point, personally he's my second favorite character after 2.7.
    • Not to mention the whole Sophia situation was almost entirely his fault. Yes she disobeyed her mother and ran off but she was also a scared, emotional little girl who had seen more horror than most of us can imagine... and he just told her to just sit in the middle of a Walker infested wood and wait for him to come back. For all we know (and what is most likely) is that she ran off because another couple of Walkers had flanked them and were in the immediate proximity the whole time. To give him some kudos however, Lori was quite correct when she stated that no one else seemed to be in any particular hurry to run after her.
    • Episode 2.7 is a perfect example of why Rick is the leader. Because after all of his chest thumping and all his self-righteousness, Shane didn't have the balls or the willingness to do what had to be done for Sophia. Rick did. Rick thinks long term which is way he was willing to make a compromise with Herschel about the walkers in the barn, because it gave Herschel a reason to trust them and thus allow them to stay on the farm. Rick probably knew the barn wouldn't hold for long and that they would be forced to deal with it down the road, but he wasn't going to force it because it would have pissed Herschel off. Plus, I'd rather have Rick as a leader than a mentally unstable, attempted rapist, who's looking to murder his supposed best friend because he wants that friends wife. Shane isn't looking out for the group, he's looking out for himself. He wants Lori because it would make HIM feel better, not because of her safety.
    • Shane does honestly care about Lori. He was perfectly stable until Rick came and started taking over everything. The only reason Shane wants to murder Rick is because he feels they aren't safe under his leadership, not just to make himself feel better. Almost everything bad in the series that has happened and put the characters in danger is RICK's fault. Of course Shane would want his irresponsible self dead.
    • Not to mention that Rick vacillates between the leader and supposed speaker of the house when it suits him. Because he didn't want to do what he knew he had to do to Randall, he instituted a democracy. Then, when he couldn't do it, he decided that he wanted a dictatorship and declared his word law even though it was completely irrational. This is putting aside just how fucking irresponsible this is. Later on, Randall does in fact prove that he knows exactly where he is, and is even able to give Shane directions from their to his camp. If Shane had any doubt, he probably stopped caring then.
    • Randall wasn't much of a threat. He's implied to have been a hanger-on of the other group and whose loyalty is to whoever gives him food and safety, and, if he is to be believed, that group moves at night, and since they lost four men to a picked over, walker infested town, why should they stay there for over a week? By the time Rick decides to execute him, that group is likely long gone, never to return. There was never a strong argument to execute Randall. He didn't rape anyone, and he was no longer part of that group.
    • Let's go over Shane's decisions as "leader". First, he lets four people tag along with Glenn on a routine scavenging mission, when Glenn says outright he'd never done that before, and, surprise surprise, the one time four people tage along with him, one of whom is a violent racist, they almost end up getting killed. And there are no other decisions. It's likely that if Rick hadn't come around when he did, Merle (assuming he hadn't gotten himself and everyone else killed in Atlanta) would have likely taken control from Shane.
    • The group was doing fine? Shane almost beat Ed to death, and though Ed was unquestionably an Asshole Victim, Shane still scared the shit out of the women who were there (who were begging him to stop) and almost killed a member of his own group, yet complained to Rick later that Rick was responsible for taking away group members to rescue Merle when they needed more muscle back at camp. And I don't feel that Shane would have ever bothered to go back to try and find Merle/get the guns, which were desperately needed, as Rick pointed out. Honestly, I never even saw Shane as a leader of the group. He stated himself that he only cared about Lori and Carl, and it's pretty obvious he continued to think that way after he left Otis for dead to save Carl yet never saw Sophia as anything more than a liability.
    • I think the episode with Randall's group is something of an object lesson to Walking Dead fans who think Shane is a better leader. Rick's leadership style keeps you alive against assholes who want to take your stuff and rape your women. Shane's leadership style gets you shot in the head by Rick.
    • It's pretty unfair to blame Rick for all those things; a lot of them aren't solely his fault, if at all. It's arguable whether or not Jim and Amy would have been bitten or not if Rick and the others hadn't gotten the guns. Jacqui didn't die because of a call Rick made, Jacqui died because she wanted to and chose to die. Carl got shot by Otis by a mistake Otis made, not Rick, and Shane was the one who killed Otis.

• The hanging walker who had only been eaten up to the knees brought up the fact that zombies, in this universe, do not have enough brainpower to climb trees so that they can get at their prey. Since there weren't any zombie guts around, why didn't Rick give Sophia a leg up into a tree, then come back with some gunpower and shoot any gathered zombies so they could get back to the road safely? Even though it took place after the scene where Sophia is last seen, the walkers had enough trouble climbing stairs and getting through a maze of cars to make tree-climbing unfeasible for decaying, unthinking bodies.
  • Rick has maybe 20 seconds to think in this case. He doesn't have time to go over in his head every small fact that they've gathered about the Walkers thus far.
    • In most combat or survival situations, taking higher ground than attackers will guarantee better chances—especially against attackers which are already struggling against gravity as it is. One would think that Rick, as a police officer, would know this.
    • He was also tired and the walkers were really close behind him. Even if the thought did occur to him, he didn't really have time to help Sophia up a tree, and since he is a police officer, he probably expected her to stay put like he told her too.
  • Rick's been traveling with Sophia for a while by then, so possibly he's already learned that she happens to stink at climbing trees. Having her fall out of one is hardly going to help the situation.

• So Dale is willing to sacrifice his own life to keep Andrea from committing suicide by staying at the CDC but neither he, nor anyone else, seems to care about the black woman who does the same? Unfortunate Implications anyone?
  • Dale appeared to be in love with Andrea specifically. It's not about "white woman vs. black woman" it's about "Andrea vs. Jacqui."
  • Not only that, but Dale had a connection with Andrea that he didn't have with the other woman, and they only had like 30 seconds to snap her out of it.
  • This really looked bad. Nobody cared that Jaqui was staying behind. I'm surprised they mentioned her name in the next episode.
  • Watch the scene again. T-Dog tries to convince the black lady to leave but she refuses. She's made up her mind about not trying to live in a world with zombies and describes it as a perfectly sane decision. Andrea only wants to kill herself because she's sad about losing her sister. Sure enough a short way into Season 2 she starts to regain the will to live.
    • No one seems to give too much of a shit about Andrea either to be honest. Only Dale is willing to go out of his way.

• I must admit to being quite confused as to the motivations of the guys from Philidelphia in "Nebraska". Were they intended to be an expy of Rick and Shane (trying to do their absolute best to protect their own respective group by any means possible) and thus we were supposed to pity their tough choice to try and steal the farm and kill Rick; or were they nothing but looters trying to steal as much as possible?
  • It was meant to be ambiguous through the whole scene, but Tony complaining about not getting any "cooze" really established their true motives as villains. And Dave drawing on Rick clinched it.
  • They were clearly "bad guys" from the beginning. The tension rose dramatically from the start of the scene. It was meant as character development for Rick and Glenn, to give the audience a little more information on the outside world, and present a new problem. (Randall)
  • What really bothers me is that the writers had a perfectly good moral dilemma on their hands (Dave and Tony being not so different from Rick and Glenn, as mentioned above) but abandoned it in favor of almost cartoonish (albeit well-performed, at least by Dave's actor — you could taste the tension as soon as he walked in the door) villainy. It's the apocalypse. Anything goes. I wouldn't hate Rick if he shot two people who were just trying to make their way in a broken world. But no, they have to remind us how evil Dave and Tony are. That's just lazy writing.
    • Well, none of the other survivor groups Rick had met up to that point were anything but decent folk. The Vatos put on a front, but they were just looking after some elderly people. Hershel's group had walkers in the barn, but they had a more or less understandable reason for it, and a quite compassionate one. It's not "lazy writing" to establish that there are people who there who are dicks and will fuck you over if you give them half a chance. We'd met two other survivor group who were not so different, so Now For Something Completely Different.

• Why are so many fans already describing Shane as a rapist who tried to kill his best friend. He clearly realised she didn't want him and backed away in shock and horror about what he nearly did, and he lifted the gun off his best friend *before* noticing Dale so clearly he wasn't willing to do it. He's nearly crossed the line, but he always manages to pull himself back. Even the whole Otis thing: he had to do it to survive and escape with the medical supplies. Together they'd die and Otis refused to leave him. It was a necessary piece of pragmatism, and in that same situation the only way a character not willing to do that (like Rick) could of survived with the medicine is through a Deus ex Machina.
  • This Troper argued the exact same thing not to long ago on this very page. for some reason, it was deleted. Honestly, i'm getting kind of annoyed by everyone calling him a psycho, seeing as how i agree with him in nearly all of his decisions. What's interesting, to me, is that in-universe people have the same reaction to him (that he's a friend-murdering rapist) and people (Dale mostly, but also Lori) keep telling that to his face. The guilt and shame are making him extremely unstable. If someone just told him "Shane, we know you've had to make some really, really hard decisions, and we know those decisions are eating you up, but you're beginning to scare us. Do you wanna talk about it?" he'd probably calm down a bit. What's especially jarring to me is how he's compared to Rick. people are trying to make it sound like both of them are doing good jobs protecting the camp, but Shane is too harsh and cold. This is despite the fact that Rick has yet to make a good decision, Whereas Shane continually keeps making level-headed, rational decisions. I hope someone else weighs in, because truth be told, the only answer i have for your headscratcher is something along the lines of "The writers want you to think he's a horrible person, and most fans seem to be following this interpretation."
    • While this troper doesn't like imagining Shane "the designated villain", we see back during the first season when he beat down Carol's husband that he was unstable even when he was still "in control". You can argue it's because he just lost what he thought he had with Lori at that point but that's still not much of an excuse. Say what you want about Rick's decisions, you can't deny that he's trying to save people's lives (he even comes back for Shane after their fight). Shane's motives are a bit too selfish and/or convoluted for my tastes. I hope he stays around but Rick needs to lead.
    • In the most recent episode, i feel like Rick got his point across to Shane. They didn't exactly have the same conversation I suggested, but it did feel like Shane understood that, yeah, he's been going off the deep end, and that Rick may be the better leader in the long run. So, hopefully the whole "Shane-as-villain" arc is over and done with.
    • Personally I think a selfish-out-for-himself is exactly the kind of person you want as a leader during a Zombie Apocalypse. In those situations being alone would kill you, so the selfish-out-for-himself person would protect the group to keep himself safe. At the end of the day, wanting to save everybody requires taking stupid risks that cause more people to get killed than not. Motives don't matter when pragmatism works whilst idealism leaves you dying cold and alone.
    • You know what happens when the selfish-out-for-himself person leads? He does things that are selfish, and benefit himself, not the group. He's not going to risk himself to save people, he's going to risk other people to save himself. It's exactly the opposite of the kind of person you want watching out for others.
    • There's a difference between being practical and volatile. As I mentioned before, his interaction with Carol's husband is indicative of his innate volatility. I'll sum it up like this: Shane can protect his allies from the Zombies but he cannot protect his allies from Shane. Don't get me wrong, Shane's input is important and he needs to lead along side Rick, but Rick should have the final word.
    • There is a difference and Shane is volatile. However lets examine the results of Rick's decisions vs Shane's decisions. Bag of guns or not Rick lead the group back into the city to to save Merle. Merle not saved, the bag of guns gets negotiated down severely and the camp gets over run causing a few fatalities and several people to leave the group. He was told that was a bad plan. A barnful of walkers isn't something you rationally talk over. You eliminate it and considering that the group as a whole hadn't even officially thought of putting up a night watch until it came time to set the boy loose combined with several people living in tents just means they've been lucky not only with the barn but just with walkers in general. Shane by contrast told Rick not to go into town, beat down a wife beater as he was threatening several women and that was at least in part because Lori snapped at him. Was she justified? Perhaps partially. I don't personally consider it lying to tell someone that a man alone in a coma (heartbeat or no) in a zombie apocalypse is dead.
    • There's a few things wrong with that statement. The group had very few guns when the walkers attacked their camp, and even with four extra hands to fight the walkers, there's still the likelyhood that their losses would have been greater if they hadn't had those additional guns. The barnful of walkers, being fed and contained, weren't an actual, active threat, and Rick was making a comprimise by humouring Herschel so the group might be allowed to stay on the farm, with food, water and medical attention. Shane killing those walkers sooner would have resulted in their removal from the farm, thus losing the closest thing to a permanent settlement they'd had in weeks. Shane beating Ed was more Shane venting about losing Lori and Carl than about Ed beating Carol. Hitting Ed a few times would be enough to teach him a lesson, but Shane was beating Ed within an inch of his life, and was only stopped when the everyone else started screaming at him to stop. Then, at the CDC, he threatens to kill Jenner, and when talked out of it, starts shooting computers wildly until Rick forcibly takes away his shotgun. That does not sound like a stable man.
    • I don't blame Shane for thinking Rick was dead and taking in Lori and Carl as his own family. Nor do I blame his reaction to the walkers in the barn, however that particular example is a moment of his volatility. If you really want to get literal Shane really wasn't "leading" anyone when before Rick arrived. He apparently allowed T-dog, Glenn, Jacqi, Andrea, and Merle to go out to the city. Judging by Merle's behavior, he would have probably taken control of that group. Really, Shane's "actions as leader" were all but non-existent until Rick arrived. Glenn attributed them returning in the first place because of Rick, and the bag of guns probably made a difference in being able to take out the Zombies after the 2nd trip (without the guns there would have been more surprise bites like with Jim). I'd say the worst decision Rick made was making the group look for Sophia (which was a shoot or miss). Challenging the leader=/=showing leadership skills.
    • Adding to this point. Rick has shown a willingness to "kill the living" if necessary, but he's able to do it with a much calmer demeanor. The only time he really seemed to go off was during his fight with Shane and like I mentioned before he took out his time to save the guy after he clearly tried to kill him with the wrench.
    • Shane is prone to violence, snapping, and just plain flipping his shit when he's frustrated. Those are exactly the opposite of the qualities you want in a leader, plain and simple. Level headed? No, when you're screaming your head off, physically beating people to vent, and just in general frothing at the mouth, you're way, way past "level headed".
  • And about Otis, fair enough to argue that he had no choice, but then why didn't he shoot him in the head? Would have been a quick, painless death vs kneecapping him and leaving him to be eaten alive. The fact that he went for that latter option just goes to show the creators are trying to tell us something of his state of mind, and it shouldn't be interpreted as "unfortunate, but not a big deal".
    • Sadly, the insta-kill would not have kept the walkers on Otis very long. They prefer live meat (usually) and a screaming Otis works better in this case. Gruesome and terrible, but does the job.
    • And even then, if they hadn't been hobbling along and turning around to shoot single walkers and instead ran for the truck, they probably would have made it.
  • Okay, Shane didn't actually commit rape. But he came damn close, close enough that what he did, in a court of law, would still be sexual assault, which is not okay. And he did try and kill Rick, granted in his final episode, but he was still fully ready to carry through with murdering his best friend in cold blood. And not because he actually believed he'd be a more effective leader, but because he wanted Lori and Carl. And through all this, Shane has shown that he's violent, irresponsible, irrational, volatile, selfish, and borderline-sociopathic, using people to get what he wants. As for his leadership. . . when has he ever demonstrated anything even remotely resembling leadership skills? Yes, Lori credits him with getting her and Carl to safety, but at best this makes his leadership an Informed Attribute, at worst means he just got lucky (you can't tell me that Ed, who likewise got Carol and Sophia to relative safety, was blessed with exceptional leadership skills). Shane as leader would have been an utter disaster, and group would at best have devolved into something like Randall's raiders, or more likely just wiped out.

• Camouflage. Smearing walker remains on yourself seems to be pretty effective, but is only used very occasionally. It seems like it be worth putting on more often, at least for those really dangerous missions, and especially after discovering that everyone is infected anyway. Why does hardly anyone do it?
  • Because it's seriously gross, and while the zombie infection may not make a difference, smearing rancid guts all over yourself regularly can't be healthy.
  • Also, doing it as a regular thing always carries the risk that another survivor might shoot you because you look like a walker.

The TV show 2

• How exactly can the farm have a marsh that extends ALL THE WAY around it, keeping the walkers out — and no walkers ever saunter up the driveway.
  • It's a cattle ranch so its probably fenced in around the perimeter. Absent any specific provocation to climb the fence the walkers probably just bump into it and then wander away.
  • Maggie specifically mentions a gate leading up to the driveway when Glenn and T-Dog show up, asking if they closed it back up.
  • In "Judge, Jury, and Executioner", Hershel does mention that a minor stampede broke down the fence in places.

• Am I the only one who completely fails to see Dale's argument in keeping Randall alive? whether innocent or guilty of the various crimes (including but not limited to rape, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, torture) he is the member of a heavily armed thirty something strong militia that has already proven themselves as extremely dangerous. Our heroes only have Rick, Shane, Dale, Daryl and perhaps Andrea and Glenn provided they can keep their emotions in check and our heroes are also starting to run dangerously low on ammo. The rest of the group would be little more than cannon fodder (and rape victims) once the attack begins. There is no alternative here — keeping him alive means an extra mouth to feed and water and someone would have to keep constant watch out of fear that he will escape or stab them in their sleep. Our modern concept of human rights works wonders when all we have to worry about is paying our bills and getting to work on time; but when you are, quite literally, facing the potential end of the human race you have to take the course of action that will best ensure your groups survival.
  • What bothers me about this whole issue is that they saved the guy's life in the first place rather than giving him a merciful shot to the head while he was impaled on the fence — as they should have done. Now they debate whether they should kill him or not? The only character to even bring this up is Dale, and nobody gives him a meaningful reply. Addressing why they saved the person who was shooting at them would be nice, here. Is it just Rick being Stupid Good, or are we actually supposed to rationalize Randall's continued existence on the show?
  • Saving an abandoned group member whose loyalty will then most likely be with his saviours is not an inherently bad idea — it is indeed the end of humanity, and maintaining a group means you can't afford to wait for new members by breeding. Terminating viable sources of labour is counter-productive, especially when it's perfectly possible to leave him imprisoned overnight more or less indefinitely and work during the day (whilst treating him more and more as part of "the group"). Actually the main thing that bothers me is that, after saving him, after him helping save a group member's life, and ultimately after failing to kill him all of three times or so, that the group then randomly tortures the guy, after he'd not actually done or said anything to incur such treatment. If they'd kept him imprisoned overnight, and had him work with everyone during the to integrate into the group (sans-torture), then the idea that he'd randomly betray his new group in favour of the ones who'd left him to die would be far less likely. The problem is that the group is broken — the best way is either going by Shane's or Rick's method, then sticking with it and if necessary terminating the dissenting members so you're consistent, it's entertaining both that's making the mess.
  • It's not really clear why the "30 guys" would even still be around. If what Randall said was true, they move every night and it's been over a week. It's not like they will be out looking for Randall — the guy who abandoned him has to assume he's dead, if anyone but Rick was there he would be. And from their POV, they lost 4 men to a tiny town that's overrun with walkers, so why bother staying? If someone had mentioned that even once in the week while he was recuperating, they would have seen there was no need to dump Randall in the middle of nowhere. He's got nowhere else to go.
    • The problem wasn't them looking for Randall, it was Randall being kept alive and then escaping once he'd recovered from his injuries and telling his people about the defensible farm with food, water, no walkers and hot and cold running women to rape.
    • That's assuming that a) he could find that group (if what he said is true, they were likely not even in Georgia anymore); b) he doesn't get killed/eaten in his escape (all things considered, it seems he would have died on his own if he hadn't found a group); c) he could figure out which direction the group went; d)that he would even *want* to return to the people who abandoned him to a horrible death. They could have headed to either Alabama (which would take them even further out of their way) or Tennesee (which would put them back on track), something that might be next to impossible to determine.
      
      A more pressing question is, if they were from Philidalphia and headed for Nebraska, how did they end up in Georgia?
    • Nobody said they were on their way to Nebraska. They mentioned it was one of the more outlandish rumors of safe haven they've heard on their travels. One assumes they've gone where circumstances take them. Quite possibly they were originally on their way to the CDC. When Rick suggests "I hear Nebraska's nice," for their destination, they don't take it well.

• Three questions, all about Melee: 1) Why do so few of the survivors use it? A quick trip to the farm's nearest garden centre and machetes for all would stop them from wasting around fifty bullets per episode on average. 2) Why do Rick and Shane voluntarily slice open their own hand before rubbing it along rusty surfaces (hence inviting at very least tetanus, if not simply getting zombie-blood in there)? It's not like Zombies aren't shown to voluntarily shove their heads into things to get into biting distance. 3) How the heck did Shane shove a dinky little pocket knife through the top of a skull?! I appreciate that using melee weaponry even in a remotely sensible way would remove a lot of the unnecessary drama from the series, but this coupled with the group's ongoing inability to operate in any sensible manner about the situation is really making it hard to watch.
  • As for why they don't use melee, it generally requires that you get within swinging distance of a walker, which makes it a lot easier for it to grab and bite you. It's personally safer to just use a gun.
    • There's something to this (though if they used something other than knives things wouldn't have to be quite so... "personal" when taking down a walker). But Rick already gave all the reasons for it: Ammo is limited, and guns are noisy — hence worsening the danger by adding more zombies to it. And when a walker gets into melee (as with a certain late elderly gentleman who was armed with only a rifle), the gun doesn't actually achieve much. Simply ignoring it the way they have (especially after Rick's already shown to have thought about it) boggles the mind.
    • He proposed it in the previous episode, and he's had a lot to deal with in the meantime. There's also the issue that it takes a lot of strength and some technique to properly get a killshot with a melee weapon reliably. Carl, for example, almost certainly doesn't have the strength to put a knife through a Walker's head, and most of the non-cops probably wouldn't be able to pull it off in stress conditions either. A gun, meanwhile, is pretty much point and click—the necessary force is already there, pre-loaded, and you can try again from a safe distance if you miss the first time.
    • Additionally, why is it taking so long for them to come up with decent melee weapons? The knives they've been using are garbage considering that they have lousy reach and require you to get very close to a walker's deadliest weapons. Is there not a single crowbar in the state of Georgia?
    • It seems they've gotten complacent in using guns instead of getting within reach of Walkers. Just look at how they were content with living in tents just outside Atlanta, with an almost constant threat of a Walker invasion.
    • I would also be very interested to know if things such as Tasers and stun grenades would work against Walkers. They may be technically dead but they still have human eyes, human brains and human nervous systems. I see no reasonable reason why electricity and a blinding light shouldn't still be an effective countermeasure.
    • It seems pretty obvious that TASERs, stun grenades, and pepper spray would be useless against against the dead. Since they aren't affected by by lethal shots to the chest and use smell to hunt, it deson't look like they're going to be stopped by being shocked, sprayed int he eyes or stunned.
    • Tasers should probably be effective at least while they're actively shocking the target, since they would cause uncontrollable muscle spasms even in dead things (Thanks for that factoid, Edison). Could be a handy way of disabling a walker til someone could do a melee kill shot on it.
  • Most people aren't trained in it (it's much harder than point and shoot), they don't want to get that close, and the walkers are supposed to be physically stronger than living humans, due to feeling no pain. Melee tactics that work on the living wont stop them. (but knowing this makes the scenes where they DO successfully take them out by hand much harder to believe)

• This could be a rather stupid question, but the end of "Judge, Jury, Executioner" confused me at one point: Was that cow just a sign that there was a walker nearby, and it was still alive, but only faintly? Or was it a fucking zombie cow that couldn't get up?
  • I would think the fact that we haven't seen zombie animals to this point means it's probable they won't appear. It seems like at some point somewhere in the series we would have glimpsed a zombie dog at bare minimum, given all the cites and towns they've visited.
  • I believe Word of God is that Raising the Steaks will not appear at any point. In other words, it was a cow being eaten alive.

• What exactly does Lori do to help out the group? Carol's passivity can be attributed to her long term abuse at the hands of her husband, as well as her still grieving for Sophia. Andrea pretty much does everything; she scavenges, scouts, joins search parties, fishes, cleans, stands watch, cleans the guns and sharpens the knives, and serves on grave details. Lori just seems to stand around and give orders and make demands people follow for some reason. We see her cut some carrots and a chicken quarter, but still. She doesn't even say please!
  • She helps clean and cook. It may sound unimpressive compared to killing and hunting Walkers but a clean camp and well prepared hot meals are equally important. In real life we discovered this hundreds of years ago where more of our soldiers were dying of things like food poisoning and disease then were being killed by the enemy. As for your second point about Andrea seemingly doing everything: I'll counter with Creator's Pet.
  • If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: Just because you're not a gun-toting badass doesn't mean you're useless. Conversely, just because you do carry a gun doesn't mean you're "helping." See Andrea shooting Daryl, for instance.
  • Her not being a gun toting badass has nothing to do with it. Glenn is barely competent with a shotgun and Dale has his infamously bad eyesight, but both of them take the time to run security, work on the vehicles, and so on. Even before her level in badass Andrea was out scavenging, searching for Sophia, and fishing for the camp, and now she's moving bodies and digging graves with the best of 'em. Meanwhile, we see more of Lori giving "royal we" orders, making demands of people with nary a "Please" or "Thank You" and picking mushrooms than doing actual work. Even Carol and Patricia do more while demanding less.
    • I'm going to refresh my previous point for you because I feel I may not have explained myself well enough. The Crimean War (1853-1856) killed an approximate total of 21,000 British soldiers. Of that only approximately 2800 were killed by the enemy and another 2000 by other wounds — the approximate death toll by disease and poor diet? 16,300. Only with the intervention of a certain nurse known as Florence Nightingale did any of that change. There is one very unfortunate fact that hasn't been touched upon in story; whether because the writers forgot or they are saving it for later story: very shortly the Walkers are going to be the least of their problems. Due to rotten food, poor healthcare, decomposing corpses littering the streets, the breakdown of pest control and other sanitation services such as sewers no longer being maintained; disease will soon become rampant and little things like the rat population would have quadrupled. So why am I telling you this? because without people like Lori (and the other women) spending all day tirelessly trying to keep the camp clean and cooking decent food there is a very good chance our heroes will get sick and die — and that includes Andrea. Getting off topic slightly I fail to see why you are making such a big deal about her manners because everyone else in camp is so courteous and respectful.
    • Perhaps it's a matter of Show, Don't Tell then. We see things like Andrea and Shane breaking down and cleaning the guns, or people standing watch, or Shane, T-Dog, Andrea and Jimmy digging the graves, or Glenn and Maggie scavenging and other things involved with keeping the camp supplied and secure. We see Patricia and Carol serving food and the former and Maggie helping around the farm, and we can infer Jimmy the farmhand's actions taking care of the farm by virtue of him being a farmhand. Lori tells us that she's been cooking and cleaning, and how it's so difficult, but that's a little difficult to swallow when we've seen her cut up maybe all of two carrots in between telling people "I need you to [Do X Personal Errand For Me/Look After My Kid/Risk Your Life To Look For My Husband]", and then having the gall to call them selfish when they refuse. That's why this Headscratcher is about Lori, and not about Carol or Patricia or Beth or Maggie, because none of them are taking people for granted asking for their help. And, in context, the woman she is accusing of laziness for not staying in the kitchen is the same one who, not three episodes ago (these three episodes all taking place during a 48 hour period), stepped up to the line to shoot down walkers who were heading towards her and her son. And the woman who took down walker Annette before she could eat Glenn's face, and the one who agreed to look after her kid, no questions asked, in between digging graves and disposing the bodies of a barn's worth of walkers.
    • Considering that only happens in one scene of one episode, I'd say it's a case of Depending on the Writer.
    • Fortunately for them, the problems of food are currently not nearly so severe as suggested. Since most of the population is dead, the sewers are barely in use. Since the decomposing corpses are ambulatory they appear to be rotting much more slowly and only have one major disease of note. Since Walkers eat all lifeforms with equal gusto, they perform the role of pest control rather tidily as well. Since they are currently on a farm, food is fresh, and they have access to clean water. Most diseases that require a human to infect presumably have died out entirely, or are present in walkers, where infection of anything else is fairly irrelevant, as death is inevitable upon contact. Whilst not useless, it's definitely questionable whether this role is currently as important as keeping a sturdy perimeter for base defence — a walker might take out a single survivor or more, but an armed raider could easily kill every survivor in their sleep with inadequate defences. In any case, they do not qualify her to dismiss Andrea's role of sentry and security, inherently more dangerous roles, which is probably why viewers are so dismissive of her as a useless human being.
    • I don't think some people are understanding the ramifications of a zombie apocalypse. The dead population has risen, which makes large parts of the coutry unusable because the dead are trying to kill and eat you.
    • OP has a point here. Lori does not pull her weight much compared to the other characters and is more of the load than even Carl imo. Her role on the show is either to voice her opinion on decisions that are being discussed between Rick and Shane just because she is the wife, asking people to go on errands for her, asking people to look after her son for her while she goes off to talk, or maybe cut a couple carrots. I'm not calling out on her for not being a gun-totting badass but her actions throughout the show have not contributed toward the group. She buts into discussions between Rick and Shane who are discussing what is best for the group and lets face it, this discussion should either be between the 2 designated leaders who monitor the group and actually are the ones who put themselves at risk the most or with the group as a whole. She has people go into town for her (asking Glenn to go into town for medical supplies twice and Daryl to bring back Rick and Glenn when they went after Hershel which she asked Rick to do so they can stay on the farm). Yeah she cooks and clean which is helpful to the camp but so does Carol who at least has the excuse of being a distraught mother worrying about her daughter. We never see her do any heavy lifting like help dig the graves or clear the walkers, scavenge for resources, go into town, pick berries for additional food, etc. Even if she cant or doesnt want to use a gun, she can still be shown doing things with the rest of the group instead of walking around while others are working. I really understand why viewers do not like Lori on this show.
    • Here is a point to consider about Lori: doesn't being Rick's wife and Shane's former girlfriend automatically make her the most powerful woman in the group? It's not as if she had much competition until Andrea pulled out of her equally useless and suicidal way of life. As things stand at the end of Season 2 Rick is the leader and Lori is First Lady by default.
    • This just means that Lori has some pull due to the fact that she is sleeping with them and thus has some influence with them personally. This itself does not justify her actions where she makes "royal demands" of others and "a set of rules for everyone but herself to follow" as stated by Andrea. And just because Lori has some pull on the leaders does not make her any more valuable a member to the group. She's only seen to be sort of helpful in dissolving some tension within the group such as when everyone was criticizing Rick for searching for Sophia or when talking to a shocked Beth. She fails to have any influence during critical emergencies like when Shane decides to kill the walkers in Hershel's barn, spends more time sitting or standing around while people are actively working, and seems to make herself more entitled than the rest of the group. Her argument with Andrea on living really gets the point across that she is a load on the team when she demands Andrea stay in the kitchen working with them despite already having Maggie, Hannah, and Otis' wife to help her in the kitchen while T-Bone probably actually cleans the campsite (he doesnt get much tv time). The total group is around 12 people so with around 10 of those people who can actively work (technically Carl can help out with chores or cooking but Lori just has him walking around and Beth is in shock). Having 1/3 of the workforce working on stuff inside the camp is a pretty good arrangement with the other 2/3 divided on guarding against walkers and going into town for resources.
    • It seems to be a severe case of Depending on the Writer, since Lori only acts like that in one scene of one episode, and never acted that way before this scene, and doesn't act like that afterwards.
  • Another thing about Lori, or rather, how they are writing Lori — I don't quite get how she goes all Lady Macbeth on Rick where Shane is concerned, only to be horrified and disgusted when he actually does kill him in self-defence. Seriously, first she tells him "you killed the living to protect your family... Shane is a threat now...", and then does a full 180 degrees on that. Yes, it must be emotionally wracking, and yes, she thought Shane was on his way to get a hold of himself, but it is still sloppily written, at the very least.
    • I don't think it's a matter of Rick killing Shane, it's the fact that her son did it. She was doing everything she could to keep him innocent then Rick drags him into this situation. As for her terrible "stay in the kitchen speech"... Jesus. I get that Andrea may seem like she's resting on her laurels but that's only because the women of the group refuse to learn to fend for themselves. If everyone could shoot and range then guard duty could become a regular shift for everybody, with the other work (cleaning, etc) being divided the same way. But I honestly don't think it's about that, she's mad because Andrea isn't part of their Martha Stewart club and pretending that all is well and good within the sisterhood circle. She's more standoffish and focused on the zombies which makes her grimmer. And honestly it's the most monstrously hypocritical thing to jump on someone for not pulling their weight or joining you in pretending everything's fine and dandy when you're planning to have a child that can jeopardise the group constantly. I mean, who's going to go find supplies for it? Not Lori surely? What happens when she's too heavy to run properly? What happens if the child cries out at a bad moment? What happens when the leader of the group is distracted during a crisis and trying to protect said child. That's at least one more hand going towards not fighting zombies. It is perhaps the most utterly selfish thing she could do.
    • It seems like Depending on the Writer more than anything, since she's only high and mighty in one scene of one episode, and that attitude never showed up before or after that scene.
    • I guess it's the same troper who repeatedly says that Lori just acts like that in that one scene with Andrea. Wrong. First, she asks Glenn to do her errands (twice, with barely a "please" or a "thanks" the first time) and keeps her pregnancy a secret. She gets called on it by Maggie, whom she almost got killed. Then, she asks Daryl to fetch her husband (although she has no reason to think he is in any danger), and calls him selfish, even though he spent the majority of his time looking for Sophia. Daryl calls her on that. Then the Andrea scene. It's not a behavior change Depending on the Writer, it's consistent writing.
    • I don't think that's entirely fair to Lori. All we know about her pre-zombies is a pretty typical housewife/wife of a cop existence. Lori's in an incredibly stressful situation like everyone else, coupled with the fact she's dealing with the man she thought she could trust's (Shane) behavior and the fact he continues to insinuate himself in her life/family when she said no, and trying to shield her young son from the bleak reality of the world they live in. Then, she finds out she's pregnant and it could be her husband's (who's progressively becoming less of the person he was before), or Shane's, which would give him another reason to never leave her alone. And she's (understandably) unsure if she even wants to continue her pregnancy in the first place, which means it has to stay a secret. There's also almost a sense of hope around the Grimes family, as they've gotten a lot of lucky breaks, especially Lori, but all of that is changing for the worse. TWD progresses very quickly over a really short period of time, and Lori's really just not handling all these changes/issues well, and that's reflective in her actions. I'm not justifying her crappy behavior, but it's not like she's being an asshole just because she can or because she thinks of herself as inherently better than anyone else.

• Good Job, Rick. No, seriously, by all means kill the man who busted his ass and put himself in harms way to save the life of your wife and child. The man who has, pretty much from the moment we saw him, tried to make good decisions only to be shot down by you, you idealistic hypocritical ass. Okay, i know someone is going to edit me out if i leave it at that, so here are my questions: 1. How did Rick come to the conclusion that Shane had set up the situation to murder him? it came out of nowhere, for me at least. 2. Why did the writers go back on what they were doing? It felt like all signs had pointed to the Shane plot being wrapped up. He even patched his relationship with Lori, in what i felt was a heartwarming scene that established, deep down, Shane is a good person, and then not twenty minutes later, suddenly he's a psychotic murderer for some reason. and, 3. Are the writers honestly expecting us to sympathize with Rick after what just happened? I guess i could've been misinterpreting it, but he was well on his way to defusing the situation; he refused to shoot Shane when he had the chance, Shane seemed to be calming down. They were doing it Rick's way, the good, heroic approach, trying not to get anyone killed, and then he kills him. I honestly don't feel right saying "Killed", i honestly want to say "Murdered" because its obvious, to me, that Shane is suffering from mental instability due to a combination of insomnia, stress, fatigue and guilt. It looked like some cop who managed to talk a jumper out of suicide only to kill him himself.
  • This isn't the first time that Shane has considered trying to off Rick. Rick gave Shane his second chance already and Shane repaid him by luring him out to the woods to kill him. Shane's been growing increasingly unstable throughout and has already murdered an innocent man. This wasn't a sudden, spur of the moment decision on Shane's part. He's been on the verge of killing Rick since the beginning. Shane was never recovering and he was never going to.
  • OP, you must have watched a different show. 1) How did Rick come to the conclusion that Shane was gonna murder him? Because Shane outright confessed a second after Rick asked him what he was doing! 2) That scene with Lori and Shane, that wasn't a heartwarming moment at all, that Shane thinking he had another chance with Lori and thus deciding to kill Rick. 3) What would you have done?! This man has tried to kill Rick not once, not twice, but now THREE TIMES!!! Rick knew that Shane was beyond saving, and thus when he had the upperhand and the chance he took it. And as I'm sure you saw, that devstated Rick. But there was no other way. Shane was determined to get Lori and Carl back one way or another. The fact that you think it was wrong for Rick to kill Shane after Shane tried to kill him for the THIRD TIME really makes me think you have been watching a completely different show.
  • OP Here. I admit that my earlier post was more of a rant than a IJBM because Shane is probably the only character i like besides Glen and Daryl. I can see now that the scene with Lori and Shane could've been there to make him think that he had another shot with Lori, but seeing as how Lori pretty much said the exact opposite, and Shane seemed to be fine with it, i guess i missed it. That being said, Shane has not tried to kill Shane twice. I'm guessing that you're referring to the scene in Season 1 where he considered shooting Rick. But, here's the thing, he put his gun down. Not because he saw Dale, because he knew it was the wrong thing to do. He didn't even try. the second time? With the wrench? that was a spur of the moment action, a reaction, TO A FIGHT THAT RICK STARTED. seriously, watch that scene. They're having an argument and then, BAM, Rick starts the fight. I don't know about everyone else, but i've been in fights where, due to a combination of adrenalin, pain, and anger, where it seemed that i had the intent to kill someone else, or someone else had to intent to kill me, which is why i'm willing to forgive that situation. And, again, the situation never should've come to this, the fact that it did is pretty much everyone else's fault BUT Shane's. I can't look at a single thing Shane has done and go "Evil". Killing Otis? Had to be done to save Carl. the attempted rape Lori? wasn't really an attempted rape at all, because he stopped when she made it clear she didn't want him. Killing Randal? THEY SHOULD HAVE NEVER SAVED HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE. Granted, i would've popped him right then and there when he was stuck on the fence out of mercy, but saving him was probably the stupidest thing that could've done. I do grant you that Shane is mentally unstable, and if you go to Fridge on this page, there's a theory that implies that he's probably not sleeping. Insomnia which is probably brought on from the stress of knowing his best friend is driving everyone into certain doom, the guilt and sadness he feels for "Lying" to Lori and losing her as a result, and everyone unanimously coming the conclusion, both in and out of universe, that he's as evil as fucking Hitler. Also, i don't think i mentioned this before, but if Rick had already decided he was going to kill Shane, why not just shoot him? at one point, Shane holstered his gun, which would have been the perfect opportunity to shoot him, but he waits to stab him instead, probably one of the worst ways to die.
  • The fact that he even had it in his mind in the first place to kill Rick shows that he's a mentally unstable and untrustworthy individual. And what did he do when Dale confronted him about it, he threatened to kill Dale. Yep,that's a good person right there. And the attempted rape? That was ATTEMPTED RAPE and you are blind if you think it wasn't. Sure, he quit, only when she started clawing at him desperately trying to get away from him. He only stopped when she CLAWED his face. The Insomnia excuse, alot of them including Rick probably have insomnia, but you don't see them goin off the rails. Why didn't Rick kill Shane when he holstered his gun, because Rick's gun was holstered too and right there thats a quick draw situation. You can't tell me that if Rick had went for his gun, Shane wouldn't have done the same. Then they both would have been shot with walkers on their ass. Rick got him destracted with the gun and took his chance in SELF-DEFENSE! To say that was murder is like saying killing the walkers was murder. Shane still had HIS gun trained on RICK. He wasn't giving up. Even when he was taking Rick's gun, he still had the gun on Rick. If he was giving up he would have put his gun down too, like Rick said. Instead, he was taking Rick's gun while still holding on to his gun, which would have left Rick totally screwed if he didn't stab Shane. Let me ask you this, what would you have said if Rick didn't try to stab Shane. What if he had given him his gun and then Shane executed him anyway. What would you say then. I have a feeling you still would be defending Shane. Your hatred for Rick and your love for Shane is blinding you from common sense and rationality. Kinda like Shane with his love for Lori.
  • Dale was POINTING A GUN at Shane, for no other reason than he thought, albeit correctly, that Shane killed Otis (And how he knew this is just a whole 'nother example about how the writers kinda suck). He had no evidence, and he was trying to hide the guns. Lets think about what would've happened in an emergency and the guns are just GONE. people would have died. What if the emergency claimed Dale's life, and only he knew where the guns were? then pretty much everyone dies. As much as i liked Dale (up to that point) he really deserved a good beatdown for the utter stupidity of that action, and i assume the only reason he wasn't beaten down was because there's no plausible way for someone like Shane to beat up a sixty-something without critically injuring him. I still disagree that the Attempted Rape was Attempted Rape; the entire scene happened in the span of five seconds, and as soon as Lori made it clear (which, granted, she had to do by scratching him.) he stopped. You're right, i guess. the quickdraw situation would've been bad, and i actually commended Rick for not doing it, it shows that he's still got his police training in his mind; giving your gun up is actually a good idea when you want to talk someone out of a rash action like murder, especially when that person is mentally unstable; it shows them you're not a threat, and while i'm sure police only do this when they have backup to kill the suspect if the plan fails, i know Police do that on occasion when they want to defuse a volatile situation, which honestly, i felt Rick could have done that, the way Shane was acting, it felt like he was calming down. I don't "Love" Shane, i like him because he's one of three characters who isn't an unlikable prick (To me). Granted, he's a mental unstable killer, but he's also the only person who seems capable of making good decisions, and i've yet to actually disagree with a decision he made, with the exception of him luring Rick out there to kill him, and I guess the root of my problem with this is that the entire scene came clean out of left field. it felt like they were FINALLY letting the Rick VS Shane plot go, and then, BAM, its back again in the last three minutes of the episode. Why? Why was this necessary? Didn't Rick and Shane see eye-to-eye in "18 Miles out" where Rick saved his life even though he didn't have too? it seemed like Shane finally understood he was going off the deep end a bit, and if you look up on this page, you'll find an earlier thread with that exact conclusion. It felt unnecessary, it felt hypocritical (of rick), and it felt like the writers trying desperately to make a character "evil" despite the fact he'd only qualify as "Anti-Heroic" if that.
    • Shane ONLY lowered his shotgun because Dale was threatening him. Dale didn't "guess" that Shane was trying to kill Rick, he saw what Shane was trying to do, and this happens BEFORE Shane kills Otis, not after. And the attempted rape was attempted rape, how you could see it as anything different is beyond comprehension.
    • This is the problem with this. What Shane did was attempted rape. There's no ambiguity, there's no argument. That's just what it was. There's nothing else it can possibly be called, there's no other way to interpret that scene. Shane attempted to force himself on an unwilling woman, she scratched him, and he backed off. That's still attempted rape, if the laws and courts were still running and Lori had reported him, he still would've been arrested and possibly jailed for it, and he doesn't get a free pass on it because he loved the woman he tried to sexually assault and felt really bad about it afterward.
  • Shane threatened Dale before he tried to hide the guns. This was after him and Andrea had sex in the car. How you don't think a man forcing himself on a non consenting woman isn't attempted rape is beyond me. And they didn't let the Rick vs. Shane plot go. Just in the next episode Shane was talking to Andrea about Rick being the leader and saying maybe there was something they could do about that. The way I look at it, Shane had three strikes. That fight with Rick and Shane, sure Rick did start the fight, but Shane escalated it from just a couple guys blowing off steam to one man trying to iill the other. And just when the fight had calmed down, thats when Shane threw the wrench at Rick's head. The first strike in the woods, the second strike in 18 Miles Out, and the third strike in the field. It would have been utterly stupid for Rick NOT to have killed Shane right there. How many times do you give a mentally unstable person a chance to kill you before you just say enough. Rick WAS NOT being hypocritical. He had straight up given Shane a chance to move on in 18 M Iles Out. Shane didn't take it. A person has enough to worry about in a zombie apocalypse, they don't need to be worried that their supposed best friend his going to shoot them in the back of the head, just because they want your wife.
  • Alright. I can see i'm not going to change anybody's mind, and i'm fine with that. Alternate Character Interpretation is one of my favorite tropes and it would hypocritical for me to get pissed if someone didn't agree with me. That being said, They lost a viewer in me, and honestly i'm very disappointed. I had been defending this show against criticisms pretty much since it came out, and i just feel betrayed. Does anybody agree with me about Shane? I feel like i'm the only one.
  • Sadly when I saw "Good Job Rick, no seriously", I thought that was sincere. Shane was a clear threat, and one that was never going to back down - just wait for a better shot. Rick made a hard decision which was most definitely not hypocritical at all. I actually find it sad that you think the writers tried to force the idea that Shane was evil, I personally thought the actor did a brilliant job of portraying someone with redeeming qualities along with a laundry list of bad ones. Was he evil? No, though he was mentally imbalanced and untrustworthy, which came through in both his acting and the relationship between him and Rick. The true villain of the piece is Lori. She had no reason to walk over there, and she was the direct cause of his mental break and the reason he acted the way he did. You could even see it on his face — another sign of his quality performance — the blank-faced look boys get when girls are brainwashing them. It was played subtly, but he sure as anything wasn't fine with it, and we could see the signposts clear as day.
  • Okay. I'm a huge Shane fan. If I had to chose team Shane or Team Rick it's not even a conversation. I'm going with the guy who kept a large group alive through an apocalypse not the guy who took the reins once things had more or less settled. However it was an obvious set up from step one. The odds of Randal getting his cuffs loose and escaping through the rafters is improbable at best. The same guy coming across and instead of avoiding knocking out Shane and taking his weapon and Shane seeing which way he went wanders so far into the unlikely that it's mildly amazing that nobody else caught on immediately. Rick let Shane get himself out there so he could eliminate a threat to himself and his group. Shane may or may not have been suffering from any number of mental break downs but a guy who's suffering from mental break downs and wants what's yours and has lead you out to a secluded area to point a gun at you is a guy you need to take out of the equation. It sucks. I wish to God that Shane had simply left the farm with Randall and joined the bad guys and maybe showed back up later but Rick really did the only thing he could given all the information he had.
    • About letting the Shane vs. Rick thing go after 18 Miles Out: On the way out to the dump off site, Shane and Rick have a talk. During one of Rick's optimistic speeches, Shane stares distractedly at a lone walker out in the field, and doesn't bother to mention it to Rick. On the way back from the dump off site, Shane and Rick have the same talk, and while Rick is talking later Shane sees the same lone walker out in the field, and still doesn't bother to mention it to Rick. It seemed to me that the writers were beating me over the head with the idea that Shane and his thinking hadn't changed at all, honestly.
  • Some points:
    • ・Anyone who would intentionally leave a man on his team (or maybe even an enemy) to be eaten alive is doing evil. It doesn't matter what the reason is.
    • ・If you were surprised by the ending with Shane, or thought it came out of left field — this was intentional, not writer incompetence. Sometimes you want to put the audience in a state of relaxation before you shock them out of it. Also anyone who paid attention during the talk between Lori and Shane could have seen the signs. While she thought this would finally give "closure" to Shane, it only made him think he had a chance with her — if only the other guy hadn't come back. That event would be a pretty stupid reason to stop watching The Walking Dead. I was a fan of Dale and thought the way they handled his death was even more pointless.
    • ・You guys are missing the Fridge Brilliance if you just try to take one side or the other. They hinted in the final episode that it was about Rick, not Shane. From past behavior he knew this day was coming, and he "wanted Shane dead." That's the only way he thought it would be over. Jealousy didn't help the situation any. His best friend had sex with his wife. Logically there was an excuse, but that doesn't make it easier emotionally. I agree that Rick was being reasonable, and acted in self-defense, but that doesn't remove the human drama from the picture.
    • ・Agreed that maybe it would have been better if Shane had just run off, so he could return as a rival in the future.
    • Honestly, as much as I hate Rick, I can't see him doing much else. Shane had proven that words had little effect on him, they'd already had a talk. Rick didn't say anything to Shane that he couldn't turn around and ignore later. The worst part wasn't just that Shane tried to kill Rick, it was that Shane did so in such a premeditated and calculating manner, it wasn't a crime of passion, it was a very wily person taking out a rival. There was no way he could guarantee that this same situation wouldn't crop up again. And while I really sympathise with Shane and him having to deal with Rick's utter idiocy at points, he had a chance to kill Rick, honestly I'm not sure what he was thinking, whether he truly believed the crap that Rick spun him or he simply didn't give a shit anymore (as evidenced by him trying to make it into a shootout) I think he was deliberately trying to push Rick to the edge.
  • This seems to be a quintessential example of Draco in Leather Pants. The problem is that it seems to be arguing that being an unhinged stalker is something that was forced into Shane's character. It wasn't, that was his character from the beginning. In one of the first episodes, we see Shane point a gun at Rick because he doesn't want to share Lori and Carl with him. Even if he stopped himself on his own (he didn't, he stopped because Dale caught him) the fact that he pointed the gun at Rick at all, well before Rick did any of his arguably bad decisions firmly and unambiguously cements Shane in the category of "wrong". The truth about Shane is that while he does care about Lori and Shane, that's all he caress about. That's why Shane would be terrible as a leader, because if you're not Lori, and you're not Carl, and you're not Shane himself, you're disposable, you're nothing. While Shane put himself on the line for Carl with Otis, honestly ask yourself: If it had been Glenn or Carol or even Sophia that had been shot instead of Carl, would Shane have done the same for them? Would he have risked his life for anyone other than Carl or Lori or maybe Rick? Of course not. The problem with Shane is that, while he does care about others, he's too selfish to lead a group effectively. What Shane wants is he wants Lori to be "his woman" and Carl to be his son. If you aren't helping him get that, you're in the way and he'd be perfectly willing to dispose of you to get you out of the way. This isn't something that the writers forced into Shane, that's just who Shane is. Additionally, while Rick may have stabbed Shane while he was surrendering, there's no way to argue he wasn't right about that. No matter who you root for, no matter who you think should have come out of that, ask yourself: How could Rick possibly trust Shane after he methodically lured him out into the woods for the sole intent of murdering him? There's no way he could have. To Rick, that's the point where it became clear that death was the only option for Shane, because if he allowed Shane to live, there's no way that would've been his last attempt on Rick's life.

• According to Dr Jenner's MRI of his zombified wife, the only part of the human brain that remains is the cerebral cortex — explaining why they can still do things like walk for example. The problem is that the Walkers in this series have begun to exhibit Villain Decay and have begun to take less and less damage to kill as time goes on. Why? because if the only part of a Walker that is alive so to speak is the base of the brain, how can you kill one by stabbing it in the top or side of the head? I could understand if this paralysed or stunned the Walker in question but that's not what's happening here — during the opening montage of Season 2 episode 12 it now appears that stabbing a Walker anywhere on it's head will kill it. So was Jenner's theory wrong and that MRI was incorrect or have the scriptwriters just forgotten their own back story on Walker biology?
  • That's pretty common in Zombie stories; any damage to the brain will a zombie, despite the fact that it shouldn't be that way. Hell, even in real life people can recover or at least survive damage to the brain. in a realistic portrayal of a zombie apocalypse the zombies would be damn near invulnerable, because only destroying the most protected organ on the human body would finally kill it. That being said, Zombies aren't exactly the most scientific of things in the first place, so i guess its best to just roll with it. That all being said, there's probably something Jenner didn't make known to the audience(whatever he whispered in Rick's ear), so its entirely possible that its intentional on the writers part.
  • You have a good point there — the writers have to toe the line between realistic and making a good story. Given what happens to Shane and Randall I think Jenner must have told Rick that the virus is airborne and thus doesn't require a zombie bite like the T-Virus would for example. It would seem as if everyone is now infected; probably why Jenner wanted to go the way he did.
  • Other obvious piece of artistic license with biology: if the rest of the brain is dead and only the brain stem has any life, then the zombies wouldn't be able to see, hear, move or do anything outside of have a regular heartbeat and breathing cycle. According to the "virtual vision" diagram, most of the cerebral cortex is dead too.
  • And, to quote Shane, "Why is it still coming?" Why indeed? If its muscle tissue has rotted away, it can't move the bones, so why is it still coming? If you shoot its lungs, then dead or not, the muscles aren't getting oxygen, so why is it still coming? And if you sever the neural path from the brain (stem) to whatever muscle is trying to move, as I'm sure people do in the various fights, it should be paralyzed there, so why is it still coming?
    • Uh... because it's FANTASY? Because zombies don't exist and aren't even based in science to begin with so what's the point of trying to analyze it and try to bring science into it?
    • Uh, no. This isn't fantasy, and zombies exist in this world and are based in science (from what Jenner has showed us). This isn't bringing science into it, it's taking a look at the science that they've already presented.
• Since he broke his neck, fatally.... How did Randall rise from his grave, and secondly, how the heck was he mobile? Zombies do not regenerate severed spinal chords.
  • ...What do you mean how did he rise from his grave? You have to ask that question in a show about zombies?
  • Well, actually yes. I could see him reanimating, possibly. I could maybe see him biting some serious toe.... But yeah, to kill the zombie, you remove the head or destroy the lower brain/central nervous system. For the guy who hanged himself, I can see he did it wrong and didn't break his neck. For Randall, he's explicitly lost one of the key requirements of unlife, yet he manages to not only reanimate (Okay, I could possibly see an animated head if a decapitated zombie head still functions, though I've not yet seen it in the series), but walk around and engage in hand to hand? Did they mention anything about restoring severed nerve tissue when they turned and I just missed it?
  • Severed zombie heads continue to...un-live. The walker that ate Daryl's deer in his debut episode survived through decapitation and kept snarling and biting until Daryl shot it with his crossbow. Also, the walker in the pharmacy (that Glenn killed) survived almost complete decapitation while remaining ambulatory. Finally, I'm not too sure about the...logistics, but Shane may have broken Randall's neck without completely severing the spinal cord. Maybe Randall suffocated or choked on his own blood or something. "Broken neck" is also a lot easier to say than "collapsed trachea," especially since it was dark and Daryl isn't typically one for technicalities.
    • It is generally established in zombie lore (ZSG for example) that zombies don't have to be unharmed to be able to move about. A broken leg will more or less stop a human because of the pain but that doesn't bother a zombie. Same thing with the neck, they appearantly don't need the spinal chord, the virus is enough to move them about. So basically, a zombie wizard dit it. In any case, it didn't bother me. The rest of his body was fine so he could still walk. Having your legs and lowered body eaten away (like the bike zombie in Episode 1) would slow you down however.
    • The spinal cord doesn't just carry pain messages, they carry the information that tells the body what to do. If Shane severed the spinal cord in breaking Randall's neck, he shouldn't be able to move. It would be no different than decapitating a zombie and having its arms and legs continue to work.
    • And a broken neck doesn't necessarily kill you by severing the spinal cord. Ideally that's how you'd do it, but it's not necessarily the case.
    • Many people have gotten broken necks and not suffered paralysis, as long as the spinal cord wasn't cut or bruised, and they were treated carefully. Plus, we don't know how the plague reanimates dead corpses. If it can activate parts of the brain, why couldn't it independently activate parts of the nervous system? It's all speculation at this point.
    • It bugged me, too, for a bit, but we never did see what Shane did, just heard a crunch. I figured he just crushed his throat; quick and easy. Breaking a neck is actually pretty hard, I hear.

• Is anybody else bugged by the fact that a good portion of the firearms Rick obtained with the precinct's armory room were nothing more than hunting guns? Both the rifles and some of the shotguns are literally marketed for people who are going to be hunting rather than law enforcement or military applications
  • I'm not entirely sure if this applies, but I lived in a small town once where the budget for cops was just above "fuck all", so most of them bought and maintained their own guns. Truth is that a rifle designed for military/police work is more or less the same thing for hunting, albeit probably less powerful, same thing with shotguns and pistols. This is actually why Rick having a revolver didn't bother me, i knew plenty of cops who used their own guns on duty and some of them did prefer revolvers to semi-automatics. That all being said, Rick is a Sheriff, and that means his department was probably better funded than some small town redneck police force, so they really should have more "Professional" looking weapons. Its probably a matter of aesthetics rather than what a police force would actually have; in reality, they'd probably have a few AR-15's, a few shotguns and maybe a sniper rifle of sorts, and they'd all probably be jet-black. Don't know if i answered your question or made it worse. sorry about that.
    • It's stated by Shane that the walkies were ancient because the police budget was a joke.
  • The guns Rick took from the Police Station could have been confiscated firearms. Not that big a stretch, along with the "small time, self-armed police force" theory.
  • Maybe those were the only guns left behind and the rest (i.e. assault rifles, sniper rifles) were taken at the start of the disaster. He did get to the party late, and mentions he cleaned out the cage. When we saw the cage in the pilot, it was much larger than what would be needed to contain six shotguns, three rifles, and an asortment of handguns.
  • There's functionally no difference between a gun designed for military or law enforcement use and one designed for civilian use. The Remington 700, for instance, is a rifle used by all of the above (the only difference between the three being the finish on the weapon). The Mossberg 590, Shane's shotgun, is also a gun very popular amongst civilians and law enforcement and has been used by the military.

• The world has been functionally over for the past month or so. Why are the lawns still so well-manicured?
  • The budget for the show took a serious hit but the season was lengthened. They've been having to skimp on the sets and locations through all of Season 2. Letting someone's lawn grow out and then fixing it up later was probably one of the expenses they cut out.

• Three things from the final episode of Season 2:
  • "No we can't go back to the farm!" (Never mind it's daylight, they're in cars and walkers don't go fast — if they see walkers ahead, just turn around!)
    • The farm is still, you know, overrun.
  • NOT checking the gas for siphoning in all those stopped cars on the highway
    • They did. The first time they were there. Back when they first lost Sophia. Remember?
    • I don't think "A few months ago" counts here.
    • ...What? Are you saying you think there'd be more gas that wasn't there previously?
    • That's a valid point. They couldn't possibly have taken it all at once, but just enough to fill their gas tanks and canisters.
    • It's doubtful the gas would have been usable anyway. It had already been several months after the apocalypse when Rick woke up, and the flight takes place an even longer time afterward. Gasoline that isn't being specially treated for long-term storage will probably last a few months at best before it deteriorates into something that the car can barely use to run. Those cars were probably sitting there for a very long time before the group came across them and any fuel that was left would have become gummy and worthless. Even the stuff that would be usable would run very poorly and be barely adequate at best.
  • One car runs out of gas, they ALL STOP. They couldn't have squeezed into one? Sent Daryl ahead to scout for more gas?
    • They said in the episode, right then and there, that they couldn't all fit into one car, and Rick shot down the notion of splitting up entirely.
    • If I'm not mistaken, the car with gas was a Hyundai Santa Fe and that seats 5. They had 8 for that car: T-Dog, Hershel, Beth, Maggie, Glenn, Rick, Carl, Lori. That's just too much to cram in.
    • There was also the pick-up truck, which could easily fit two in the cabin and two or three people in the bed. That would be room to fit 6 comfortably (4 in the Santa Fe, 2 in the cabin of the truck) and 2 uncomfortably.
    • Um...the pick-up truck was the one that was out of gas, remember?
    • Small issue, but that is a Hyundai Tuscon, not a Santa Fe. The Tuscon is smaller than the Santa Fe, so it can fit five adults fairly uncomfortably. To compare, Herschel's Suburban (assuming it has front and rear bench seats) can fit nine people easily, and more in a pinch if needed (a shame station wagons with three benches fell out of fashion).

• Aside from moving the plot along why are they leaving the farm? Sure it's got a zombie problem but we know enough about both how easily killed zombies are but also how easy it is to lead them away from something by making a lot of noise and staying just a head of them. Not to mention how easily they could take out zombies by driving around with weapons and killing them you'd need a lot more zombies than that to convince me to leave a stable food and water source like that.
  • Well the stable food source is certainly gone. That was a cattle ranch. But they were already running out of ammo and there were hundreds remaining and lord knows how many were converging on the sounds of the battle or the light from the fire. The farm was lost.
    • There is no indication the food source was gone. Cows will naturally return home to be milked. As for how many there zombies there were it doesn't really matter. Drive out to the road set off every alarm and sneak back. Hell if you really wanted to you could have a couple people pied piper every zombie within earshot all the way to Atlanta and just melee kill the straglers.
    • No indication the food source was gone? You don't think the zombies are gonna eat the cows, and chase the ones they don't catch?
    • Considering there were clearly zombies on the property previous to the finale as it's the last episode of Season 2 that they are shown actually doing a thorough sweep to clean up the farm and we'd already seen a few zombies on the farm it's clear that zombies either can't catch, can't infect or aren't interested in cows. Not to mention they clearly had a supply of chickens and likely were growing something off screen.
    • Are we watching the same show? The zombie that Carl let onto the farm eviscerated a cow before attacking Dale. In fact, the dead cow is what captured Dale's attention long enough for the walker to jump him. The chickens? They were being used specifically for feeding the barn zombies, so obviously walkers chase and eat them. How long is a chicken coop going to hold up against a zombie mob? The livestock is dead, the nearby town is basically picked clean, and the finale proved that the farm is basically indefensible. There's no reason to go back.

• If I was in the position that Jenner put Rick in — I wouldn't have told the group about the airborne strain either. At the time Andrea had just tried to commit suicide and a day or so later Sophia went missing and Carl was shot so obviously it would have been stupid to reveal anything at that point. Then he started to have all the problems with Shane and was making a determined effort to earn Herschel's trust... I fail to see the problem the group has here. Rick knows that half his group is teetering on the brink of a mental breakdown and the other half is becoming violent — telling them all they have been infected with the Walker virus has the potential to be disastrous. And even if he had been stupid enough to tell the group about it; what difference does any of them think it would have ultimately made? They neither have the resources nor the intelligence with which to cure or treat it. All that it would have gained is the group knowledge that none of them would face salvation after death. Fact is that false hope is better than no hope at all — and Rick knew this.
  • If the headscratcher here is: "why is the group so hilariously stupid about this fact" then I have to say I share the same question almost every week.
  • I don't think mental problems had anything to do with it. There were like four suicidal people in that group. They didn't know they would reanimate. Imagine Beth offing herself in the bathroom, they open the door to get her body and then two more people get bit. He was putting them in more harm's way by not telling them.
  • As much as I really, really, hate Rick, I have to side with him on this one, and here's why: We have no idea how Jenner worded what he said to Rick. Unless he specifically said "We're all infected, its airborne, everybody has it and when they die they're going to reanimate no matter what." (Which I think we can agree he didn't. Whatever he said wasn't anything more than a few words) then Rick was probably thinking "What? what did he say? and what did he mean?" Rick probably could've come to the conclusion eventually, but he had absolutely no way of being sure. There was no reason to tell everyone that there was a chance they were already infected if it wasn't true. To his credit, when he realized it WAS true, he did tell them almost immediately. Also, that's probably the only way the words "WE ARE THE WALKING DEAD" could ever get a mention in the show; if Jenner whispered that in Rick's ear. Of course, above tropers "Hilariously stupid" line seems to hold a bit more water given what we know.
    • This is a zombie apocalypse. All order has not only broken down, civilization is gone. Life is inherently more dangerous. Look at the people trying to commit suicide. Look at the possible death by injury like Daryl. It's much more likely that someone can just die without there being anything to be done about it. Rick knew and withheld important information. Salvation after death? What? That's achieved by a bullet to the head.
    • Whether or not he put the group at risk is all dependent on what exactly Jenner said to Rick. If he had said "We all turn after we die, no matter what", then Rick really screwed up. If he had said something more cryptic, like "we're already dead" or something then Rick probably didn't even realize the implications until he saw it for himself. Jenner was crazy, the situation was intense, adrenaline was running high and Rick didn't exactly have the luxury of hearing Jenner explain everything in detail.
    • He also had good reason to be suspicious of the guy, considering just a few hours later he sort of almost killed everybody (which he had failed to mention). I think it's understandable Rick didn't want to say anything until he knew. He even says it at the time that it was only when Shane got up that he really believed it.

• Why did walker Randall already look like a bloated and decayed body, when he'd only been out there a few hours? Rule of Cool?
  • Well, he was already beaten half to hell before he died.

• Did they ever explain why Dale had to be killed off when he was? The only thing I've heard was "this would present new opportunities for drama".
  • Well, during the show's mid-season break, reports came in that one of the stars had asked to leave after Frank Darabont was fired. Since Jeffery DeMunn, who plays Dale, has been a long-time Darabont regular, it's fairly safe to assume that DeMunn wanted to leave.

• It always bugged me every time we see the characters shooting walkers unnecessarily. By that I mostly mean like situations where they obviously don't have nearly enough ammo with them to fight off all the walkers, yet they'll run around shooting at walkers when it'll barely help their situation. For example, at the high school with Shane and Otis, when they were down to like a handful of rounds with a massive horde behind them, picking off like four walkers in that horde isn't going to do shit. Same thing with Andrea in the season finale, where you'd often see her just picking off random walkers in the distance. (It also happened with Rick hauling ass out of the tank, though I guess that was also kind of lampshaded when he met up with the other survivors.) In cases like those, you'd think the thing to do would be to only use your ammo if there's any particular walker you really need to kill, like one that's getting too close or is blocking a doorway or something.
  • Its been bugging me too how much more frequently the characters are relying on their guns to kill walkers when in the first season, they only used the guns as a last resort and focused more on running around and avoiding the walkers or even killing them with melee when cornered. After Shane's gun training and living on the farm for a while, I think everyone is getting way too complacent, especially when ammo is scarce and there is no cache nearby. The shooting walkers at the distance may be a rule of cool/adrenaline rush. If you're being chased by a horde of walkers like Shane and Otis was, you would still probably shoot back since instinct would have us attack to scare off the enemy. Too bad walkers aren't scared of bullets.
  • They're probably just hoping to thin out the horde. The times we see them shooting "unnecessarily" are usually when they're being pursued by a huge mob, when the choices are to shoot a few now and hope that if they catch up there aren't too many to fight off or just let them climb over you in their dozens, shooting is a safe bet.
    • I don't necessarily disagree with the notion using up your last rounds in a desperate last stand, but it seemed pretty premature to start doing that with, say Otis and Shane at the high school. There was quite a large gap between them and the walkers, and if they kept on running (as opposed to tussling around on the ground for a while, like what actually happened) they'd probably have lasted for a large chunk of time before the horde caught up with them. You never know what might happen during that time, so you might want save your ammo in case, say, a stray walker blindsides you from behind a tree, as opposed to firing them all off to bring the horde down from 70 to 67.

• So where have all the automatic weapons gone? Despite their immeasurable tactical advantages no one thought to lift an M4 from inside Jenner's lab or loot one of the soldiers — that explosion can't possibly have wiped out every piece of ordnance outside. Even the militia the team encountered were lacking the garden variety Uzi or Tec-9. Apparently only shotguns and handguns are allowed in the Walking Dead universe.
  • Automatic weapons were probably the first choice of most survivors—meaning they've been used, lost, broken, or out of ammo. The ones on the ground outside the lab have been sitting outside, exposed to the elements without any maintenance, for months. Plus, for all you know the dead soldiers next to them are only dead-ish. And honestly, I think you're overestimating just how prevalent automatic weapons are outside of the military. The movies make it seem like every street gang has enough Uzis and AK's to take on Schwarzenegger, but that doesn't make it anywhere approaching true.
  • I have to disagree with the "immeasurable tactical advantages" an automatic in this setting. Zombies can't be suppressed with rapid fire, so you lose the major advantage of having one in the first place. But the disadvantages: increased maintenance, jams, increased use of ammo — are all magnified.
  • Adding to the above or clarifying his point is me, a Marine. The main purpose of automatic weapons is basically to make a lot of noise so your enemy keeps their head down while your allies get to better positions. Even if you're hitting these are zombies. If it's not a head shot at best you eventually do enough damage where they can't stand but that takes ALOT. You literally need to rip/saw them apart or hit the knee or hip in a way that renders them immobile. Other than that all you've done is make a LOT of NOISE. And if there is nothing else this series has been clear about it's that being quiet is in your best interest. Additionally fully automatic weapons are difficult to accurately aim. Anybody who's done so much as play an FPS (and no, I'm not saying Halo or Call of Duty is realistic but for this point it's. . .well not close enough but gives the first hints of) that a vibrating controller and shakey camera make it hard to hit moving targets. Now multiply that by a thousand and you get the picture. A fully automatic weapon in this setting is probably more of a liability than a "immeasurable tactical advantage" especially if you don't have a fairly secure base to work out of.
    • Pelvic shots. Y'know, like you're supposed to do on opposition wearing bulletproof vests? A solid hit to the pelvis is a mobility kill. Raking a mob at about pelvic height is going to a)stop several and b)make it harder for their fellows to walk over them. I'd like to know why no one seems to be using smoke grenades and pepper bombs.
    • Pelvic shots aren't going to help much. With a living enemy, as long as they are capable of returning fire, they are still a threat. With the undead, shooting them in the pelvis isn't going to stop them. Even if it does cause them to fall, or even destroy their lower half, they are still capable of biting a person, as shown with Hannah, the 'Bike Girl' from the pilot, who had her entire lower half devoured by walkers, yet still turned and snapped at Rick. The other walkers in a mob will still be able to walk over the with relative ease, and firing at a mob of walkers instead of trying to escape would be foolish at best, as demonstrated on the show, several times. Now, as far as smoke grenades and pepper bombs, those have little use against an undead enemy, as smoke grenades are used to blind the enemy with a blanket of smoke, which is useless against zombies as they do not seem affected by thick fog or smoke, and pepper bombs are used to blind the enemy, which would be useless as zombies are not affected by pain, so nothing short of killing them will actually stop them.
  • If you're still wondering, they found assault rifles in the ten months between the season two finale and the Season 3 premiere, and there's other groups with automatic weapons.
  • "Immeasurable tactical advantage"... an M16 on full auto will drain a 30 round magazine in less than 5 seconds. Even if you have stripper clips for loading a magazine, you will spend more time loading mags then you will shooting if you are constantly firing full auto (and more of your shots will miss, which is an issue when you need to hit the head and only the head to put a zombie down). I personally would see full auto as a liability in a zombie setting - wasted ammo, more noise to attract bigger hordes, fewer zombies killed, more maintanence on the gun... very few upsides for this sort of setting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl8fzCPjmwg

• Time for an excellent point of confusion to discuss. In "What Lies Ahead" we see the herd besieging the Atlanta survivors and passing through the traffic snarl. The road they were on was a long section of highway, that was pointed out by Maggie. Where exactly did the herd come from in such large numbers and still be invisible to the survivors until after they came to a stop? They had to pass the herd at some point since they were both going in the same direction down the line. Three vehicles of people didn't see a lumbering mass of a few hundred undead cannibals as they passed right by them?
  • This seems to be an error caused by rewriting the premiere. The horde was following them after they go to the Vatos' stronghold, only to find it overrun and themselves swarmed, and only just get out alive. This is a better explaination of why the horde is leaving Atlanta in the first place. They were running from the horde in the third part of the original premiere, and come across the traffic snarl, and the horde catches up to them, forcing them to hide.

• Couldn't Merle have just cut off his thumb?
  • Simple answer: he was in a panic, and the thought didn't occur to him.
  • Just taking off the thumb wouldn't have done any good. It doesn't add that much width to your hand, and if the cuff was tight enough around his wrist it still would have caught on the rest of his hand.
    • A better question is why didn't Merle try and cut through the pipe at the other end of the handcuffs? Galvanized iron water pipe is greatly softer than the hardened steel of police issue handcuffs.
    • I didn't know that. Presumably neither did Merle.

• When Rick is riding into Atlanta on his horse, we see that the outgoing part of the highway is gridlocked while the incoming lanes, where his is, are completely free of cars. This is even the picture on the box for Season 1. This is all well and good thematically, as well as something that should have tipped Rick off that all might not be well, but Fridge Logic kicks in when this means that there were 5 lanes of perfectly good highway that nobody used to escape an infected city during a zombie apocalypse.
  • Maybe we don't see the inbound lanes backed up because when people used it to escape, it wasn't backed up, probably done after traffic laws went out the window.
  • Real people can be Lawful Stupid at the worst of times. Sad, but true.
  • it's also possible that the inbound lanes were being used by the military, and they didn't want them being clogged up by civilian traffic.

• The scarcity of resources is presented as being a big challenge to the survivors. Food maybe, gasoline less maybe, but we're supposed to believe that guns are difficult to obtain in the Deep South? Even if we were told that every single gunshop was locked up or empty, they could just start raiding houses. Odds are good that any given household will have at least one firearm.
  • That's assuming that in the several months that have passed, nobody else has thought of that.
    • That's been tossed around, but I don't really buy it completely. The human population rapidly dwindled, clumped into groups then turned into walkers or left the city. Some stores were probably skipped by looters because there were walkers all around. (And some of those walkers were from previous attempts to loot the store!) With the lack of resistance Rick ran into upon entering the city on the horse, it's pretty obvious these people either weren't trying hard enough or were too scared to try. I mean look at how long it took to check all the homes in New Orleans after Katrina by an organized military. We are talking thousands of homes and shops.
    • That's just it, though. The chances of finding a cache of weapons and ammunition in a city the size of Atlanta, with a population of roughly 420,000, are slim at best. Plus there's at least one group of survivors in Atlanta, the Vatos, who implied that there were others there, plus the Philidalphia group seen in "Nebraska" mentioned passing through from Philidalphia to Nebraska, so any stockpiles of guns and ammunition are going to very hard to come by, considering anything is likely to have been picked over several times already by the time Rick showed up. And, since this Atlanta we're talking about, people panic when snow is forecast, and stores run out of stock in mere hours. Imagine how bad it would be if the dead started to rise and eat the living. Any supplies left in stores would be a miracle, even without other groups getting there first.
  • My take was that guns might not be altogether rare, but that ammo would be. Plenty of people might keep a gun in their attic but they're much less likely to carry around more than a few weeks' worth of ammo at the most and ammo for one gun isn't guaranteed to work for another.
    • That's what I was thinking. You don't need ten boxes of bullets if your only reason for having the gun was for home defense.
    • Just the opposite. Most gun owners have multiple guns in their home and a fair amount of ammo. Three reasons. #1 Ammo lasts forever so buy in bulk to save a bit of money. #2 guns are often owned by people who want to be ready for trouble so extra ammo makes sense. #3 guns eat ammo fast. Gun owners practice and shoot for fun. A single box of ammo is not enough.
    • Eh, actually, it depends. Ammo doesn't last forever, but it will last for quite a while if it is properly stored. Good ammo costs money, however, and buying in bulk requires adequate storage. Simple home defense doesn't require more than a few boxes lying around, and that would go quickly in a zombie outbreak. Sporting goods and gun shops would have a lot more available, but would also be the first target for looting — which would have started before everything was overrun by the walking dead. Also, you need to have the right ammo. Sitting on a crate of 5.56 NATO doesn't do you much good if all you have is a .357 and a shotgun.
    • Any stores of ammunition in Atlanta would require checking houses in a Walker infested town, and even if it weren't infested, finding a someone's cache of ammo in a major city is like finding a needle in a haystack.
    • Plenty of people who keep guns for hunting or sport keep them in gun safes, which are heavy-duty, massive steel boxes protected by combinations locks. Not exactly the easiest loot for scavengers, if they find said safes closed.
  • So, your average citizen has a few guns and ammo in his house. He hears there's troubled times ahead, so he stores up some more ammo, until shops don't have anymore. City gets overrun by zombies, so he makes a run for it with his gun and ammo in his pockets or in a backpack. He gets surrounded by walkers in a deserted area. He is eaten or turned. Since zombies are not known for searching their victim's bodies for anything valuable, we can suppose the poor fellow's weapons are left lying around in said deserted area. Considering that most of the world's population is by now dead, and most of them probably carried weapons, I wonder how many guns are just lost somewhere, never to be found again?
    • Your average citizen doesn't have a few guns and ammo in their house for starters. Despite what the media would have you believe less than half of Americans have guns in their homes. The people who DO have guns tend to have multiples. However two major points. The first is guns rust relatively quickly left out in the elements. I'm sure there are exceptions but I wouldn't expect to be able to get a gun that had been left out in the elements for a year to function. I doubt there are lots of weapons lying around from the above scenario anyway. Zombies don't search bodies but they seem equally unwilling or unable to shed themselves unnecessary items. So a backpack or holstered weapon probably contrary to the idea of dropped weapons probably still carry them around.
    • "Less than half the population" still means a whole lot of guns, given the sheer number of American citizens. Besides, once the apocalypse started, a lot of people would've bought guns right away, especially if they didn't have any before. And then, if they had weapons in a backbag, I doubt that once they were zombified they cared enough to put it on their shoulders and carry it around; and if they only had a gun strapped to their side, it would've likely been lost, since our heroes (understandably) generally prefer to shoot zombies from a distance and leave them there, instead on going up close on purpose and searching them; not counting the fact that zombies would not be very invested in keeping the guns on their sides clean and functional, so after a while the weapon would be useless anyway.

• Why have none of the women been taught how to defend themselves? They are three healthy, uninjured adults. Lori especially should be going Mama Bear when Carl is threatened, but instead her tactics are limited to Human Shield, crying and screaming, or running and hiding. Andrea's lack of access to her dad's gun is justified, but there are plenty of melee weapons that they could use if they need to. If there was at least one guy among them, it would be a more realistic "Not everyone is going to become a gun-ho zombie slayer if Z-day actually happens," but right now the Stay in the Kitchen implications are VERY unfortunate. Even Glenn is showing some potential for Badassery, so why haven't these three done anything like it?
  • It's not just the women. The entire group, men, women and children should have their own melee weapons at worst, and realistically, they should all have guns as well. They were either lazy or stupid.
    • Agreed, but Shane did make a good point about untrained people with weapons wasting ammunition and making quite a ruckus by absentmindedly shooting at something that moves before they verify the target.
  • It could be argued that the group would be justified to go back to an antique lifestyle of men doing the fighting and the women staying home. Eventually the process of making babies will need to restart as it already has!, and one of the main reasons to keep the women off the front lines was not that they couldn't handle themselves but the fact that you don't want to lose reproductive capability in the group you are trying to defend — otherwise eventually, over a period of years, there's no group to protect and all of your fighting has been for naught. (In a society like ours with MANY reproductive pairs to keep things going for the future, woman and men alike have the freedom to be single and reach for their dreams, these folks don't exactly have that sort of latitude — numbering less than 20 and all.) So while Stay in the Kitchen understandably strikes a bad nerve with some female viewers, keep in mind that the guys on the show are having to fit Men Are the Expendable Gender, and there are many men who don't exactly jump up and down in excitement at the idea of taking that role, either. And I'll also point out that there is an Action Girl in the group, and Dale's job seems to be back at home with the women. (For the record, I'm a male who would prefer to stay back at camp helping out with the chores and spelling Dale guarding on top of the RV. I wouldn't be much good out killing walkers, I think.)
  • Nobody is asking the women to become battle-hardened zombie slayers. We're asking them to pull their own weight. It's not that hard to get a baseball bat/crowbar/giant stick and swing it at anything that looks like a zombie. It wouldn't kill them, obviously, but it would SLOW THEM DOWN enough for them to escape or reach the men.
    • One word: Michone.
    • Three words: What's that mean?
    • Michonne is a highly capable female character in the comics. It's hoped that she will appear in the T.V. show earlier than she did in the comics
    • Confirmed; she's set to appear in the last episode of Season 2. Hope this works out.
  • Andrea at least has started training with her gun, and went with Shane to look for Sophia...though it's fortunate she's not too good a shot, or she would have straight-up killed Daryl. No excuse for Lori, though, especially since she's married to a cop. Given how psychologically fucked-up Carol was by her abusive marriage, she kind of gets a pass for now, though I wouldn't be surprised if she starts picking up a weapon now that her daughter's dead.
    • And "Triggerfinger" proves they're not entirely useless. Lori manages to take out a handful of Walkers and survive for several hours, alone, while injured from a car accident, and using improvised weaponry.
    • Mitigated by the fact that she's a Southern cop's wife and she still doesn't know not to look down the barrel of a gun...
    • Well, apparently she does know how to use a gun. She is able to sucessfully gun down some Walkers in "Nebraska" and "Beside the Dying Fire" when the barn is being overwelmed. Lori is perfectly capable of firing a gun. She just chooses not to.
  • Actually, keeping your potentially childbearing women safe in a post-Zombie Apocalypse world is completely useless unless you have an extremely well fortified home. A pregnant woman is a resource drain which slows down the rest of the survivors, and the child she carries really wouldn't be a benefit until after at least a decade.
  • To be fair on this whole thing, somebody does need to do chores like cooking and cleaning because, well, diseases. Being a hardened badass is pointless if nobody is keeping the place sanitary. It would make sense that Lori and Carol would take on these roles because they were probably ordinary housewives before the whole thing started and would therefore already know what they're doing in these departments. The handful of times we see Lori and Carol attacked by the walkers, Lori can handle herself fairly well. Carol can't, although she probably hasn't sought training.

• In the first episode, Morgan points out that anytime the car out front is bumped the alarm goes off and the noise attracts more Walkers, especially at night. Why didn't he and Duane go out and disconnect the battery during the day when all the Walkers wandered off?
  • They might not have known how. Tampering with a car battery without knowing what you're doing is a good way to electrocute yourself.
    • No. You might get a painful shock, but car batteries aren't all that complicated.
  • More specifically, it's pretty hard to get under the hood of an alarmed car without setting off the alarm. And then you've got problems.
    • Setting off the alarm wouldn't be a problem so much if they could work fast. Once the alarm is going off they can disable it any way they want, or at least pop the hood then run so they can snip the wires the next time the coast is clear.
  • Many people unfamiliar with automotive electrical systems are often uncomfortable with handling electricity. Even though a 12 volt battery isn't enough to electrocute someone (and even then you have to touch both terminals just to get a shock), the idea of being shocked is usually enough to scare off those unfamiliar.

• In the episode "Guts" the group of survivors in Atlanta includes Glenn, Morales, T-Dog, Jacquie, Andrea and Merle. Given that Merle is a racist and a sexist individual can anybody explain why he would be included in a group made up almost entirely of non-white individuals?
  • Merle is a veteran and an experienced gunhand, but he still needs backup, so both sides consider it a marriage of convenience.

• Between episodes 3 and 6 how did Rick NOT notice the absence of the hand grenade in his pants pocket? It's combination of weight, contours and sharp edges would make it impossible to forget about when it's riding against your hip, thigh or any other part of your body. - Charlie XT
  • He probably had bigger things on his mind, and might have thought it had slipped out or he lost it when it went missing.

• So in the Season 2 finale, Daryl said something along the lines of "a horde that size would tear through the house." What I don't get is why it would. As long as nothing inside the house grabs they're attention, at most all that would happen is they'd probably just bump into it and then wander off in some other direction. The only reason they busted through that fence in the beginning of the episode is because they were all walking in that direction because of the chopper, and there was no way around it, which isn't the case with the farm. Granted, I can understand trying to fight off the horde for other possible reasons, such as that they could possibly end up starving inside the farm if the huge horde outside never clears away, but the reasoning the show seems to give us is that they can't just safely hide inside.
  • The horde knows there's people there. If the group were to try and hide in the house or try to evacuate someone hiding in the house, they would be spotted and the house attacked. What exactly do you mean the walkers breaking through the fence isn't the case with the farm? They broke through the farm's fence. That coldn't possibly have anything more todo with the farm.

• Something that I don't understand about Lori; in the second season, when Carl asks to be taught to shoot a gun, she tries to shut the possibility down, insisting she doesn't want him to learn how to shoot things. Uh, has she somehow forgotten that the world is crawling with undead cannibals? Meaning that her son learning to fire a gun may be the only thing standing between him and a horrific death someday?
  • She's being unreasonable, it's sort of her major character trait. In addition some people are skitish about guns and as much as I hate supporting Lori I might be a bit hesitant, even in zombie land, to have my son around guns right after he was shot accidentally. I'm not anti-gun by any means but they are what they are and I figure having your child prove that fire arms can have unintended consequences might sound especially true given the circumstances.

• This may have been covered, and I missed it, but do the zombies ever die "naturally"? I.e. from causes not including being bludgeoned / stabbed / shot to death by a living person. They clearly need to eat. So can they starve? And if they can, shouldn't they be dying off by this point? No one has suggested trying to outlast them.
  • You're mistaken. They don't "need to eat". They just eat. They're not living beings that can starve. They're corpses which are still moving.
    • Jossed in Season 3 during an autopsy by the Governor and his doctor. The Walkers do need to eat however they have a far greater resistance to starvation than a human being — these particular ones had gone several months without eating with only marginal hunger related degradation. In short they will eventually die of natural causes but the human race will be all but extinct by the time they do.
    • I disagree with the Governor's doctor in that his research is flawed. The Governor has a lab of decapitated Zombie heads, how can he say those are starving when they're not even attached to a body/stomach?! I agree with the theory that the Walkers are relegated to their primal instinct to walk and eat due to their limited brain activity and not out of hunger or starvation.
    • Who's to say the heads weren't slowly starving to death?
    • The Zombies cannot "starve." They eat out of pure primal instinct not for nourishment or to sustain their "lives." These are basically walking corpses. No working nervous systems, no higher brain functions, no beating heart, no blood flow, and no working digestive tracts. Think about how our digestive system works and how it breaks down food and sends proteins throughout our bodies. These creatures don't have the nessasary bodily functions to digest the food. Whatever they eat will just sit there and rot in their stomachs for the rest of that creatures reanimation. The zombies have been shown several times to have eaten a good "meal" then immediately turn around and try to attack someone else. Why would they do this if they have a sense of being "full" and "nourished" from their previous meal? It's because once again, they are eating out of pure brainless instinct. We've even seen evidence of this when Rick and Daryl cut open a walker looking for Sophia's remains. There was nothing in the walkers stomach except undigested animal flesh and bones. No stomach acid.
    • All organisms need some way of obtaining energy, and animals can only do it through eating. If the walkers can gain no usable energy from their "meals," then they will eventually "starve." It might take months or years, but it will happen.
  • Everyone turns into a walker when they die, bitten or not. There's no way to "outlast" the zombies unless some form of cure is found, because otherwise humanity will be at a constant risk of an outbreak even if they manage to gradually repopulate the planet because impossibly strict disposal methods would be required for every single death that occurred on Earth. Considering how many people have died or turned into walkers (to the point where the United States seems to have become almost entirely depopulated), it's highly unlikely that humanity will ever manage to outbreed the deaths and transformations enough that they can rebuild. Unless some method of curing everyone is found, humanity WILL die out and leave nothing but zombies until those eventually die, whether by starvation or accidents. And then evolution picks up where we left off.
    • I don't see why. There could just be strict laws and social taboos requiring destruction of the brain upon death. If it's ingrained enough in the culture, then even clandestine mob-murders will be done in this way. Leaving dead bodies with intact brains will be something you simply don't do. The only danger would be from hermits who die alone, but if society gets organized enough after clearing most of the existing zombies, then those people would have to be accounted for too and checked on regularly.

• If, barring head trauma, everyone turns regardless of means of death, why are there so many dead bodies in the cars in the traffic snarl, yet none are zombies? The only zombie we see in a car is the one in the pickup blocking the road in the mid-season premiere (which Glenn should totally have seen right away).
  • A car crash is a pretty good way to get head trauma. Presumably the pile-up leading to the snarl happened long enough ago that anyone who died of causes other than head trauma has reanimated and shambled off in search of fresh meat. Alternatively, it may have happened early on in the crisis and not everyone there was infected yet.
    • I wasn't referring to the dead bodies in car wrecks, I meant the bodies in the cars that were stopped because of the crashes, like the one in the truck that Carl finds all the knives. And would they even be able to get out of a car, or even a seatbelt?
    • There have probably been any number of other groups that followed the highway into the city, looking for help, only to die there or go away disappointed. Many of those passers-by could have taken the time to jab one seatbelt-trapped zombie after another in the head along the way, to put them out of their misery or simply to stop the moaning.

• Why hasn't anyone commented on how weird Christianity just got? I'm on Season 3, Episode 2 at the moment, so it might well come up later. But there has been some praying going around, and I'd have thought someone would be enough of a wiseass to mention it.
  • What on earth are you even talking about?
  • Hershel does mention at the end of Season 2 "The Bible promised a resurrection, I was just expecting something different." But really no religion touches on the matter of the walking dead all that much, so Christianity isn't any weirder than any other religion left standing.

The TV Show 3

• So, why exactly is bum rushing a prison yard full of zombies a safer bet than ambushing five or so zombies at a house?
  • It wasn't because it was "safer" and they didn't "bum rush" the prison. They went to the Prison because—as Rick clearly says outright in the episode—it looks like the prison wasn't hit by looters or outside people, and therefore there's a very good chance that it's still full of food and medical supplies. Plus, you know, big frigging walls and iron bars and all that can keep Walkers out better than wooden doors and walls.
    • To elaborate on that point, it's not just the strength of the prison's walls/fences/bars that provides better protection, but the amount as well. Even if a massive horde of Walkers pushed through the two fences leading into the prison complex, the group would still have several vantage points where they could (provided they find a good cache of ammo) safely pick them off one by one.
    • And continuing on that point, prisons have armories. If it wasn't completely depleted when the prison fell (I give it 50-50), then Rick and his gang may well be sitting on a pretty hefty stash of bullets.
    • Rick addresses this point when they first enter prison. He says that prison armories are offsite, and that they will go look for it once they are secure.
    • In "Killer Within" Rick stated that the armory had been picked clean before they got there, meaning the group has no more ammo than what they came in with.

• Same episode. You're about to bum-rush a prison full of walkers, armed mostly with melee weapons. You get partway in and oh no, riot gear walkers! They're MUCH harder to kill, what with the armor and whatnot. You nonetheless kill them, and then you just LEAVE those suits of bite-protecting armor as you go in FURTHER to the prison full of walkers? Why not take them, wash them (if able) and freaking WEAR them!? We already know Rick and Glen (at least) are relatively ok in being slathered in any residual walker goo that mat be left inside.
  • They've held this Idiot Ball for three seasons now; remember all the way back in episode two where the group first meet Rick? yep they were indeed wearing armoured leathers and helmets that they completely forget about as a tactic by episode 3. If I was in this situation I would sleep in my armour let alone go into a place where I knew for absolute certainty I would be going up against a zombie horde.
  • They do discuss it, but the walkers have been in those suits for ten months now and are started to melt and peel off inside them. Safety or not, nobody wants to be covered in zombie skin goo.
  • Helmets and body armour are probably more useful to the zombies then they would be to the living fighting them. What bugs me is that virtually everyone goes into combat against the walking dead in t-shirts, tank tops and open-necked shirts with the sleeves rolled up. I get that it's hot but surely it would make sense to cover up the parts of the body the zombies go for ; necks, throats and arms. Gloves, long sleeves and even a scarf of some sort might impair your combat effectiveness slightly, but surely it's worth it for an increased chance of survival? At one point Milton is saved by the fact that he wraps duck tape around his forearms and it's treated as a joke by the others, almost as if it makes him less of a man!
    • They rely on agility. Gloves, long sleeves and/or a scarf wouldn't be much help against bites.
    • In the case of Milton being made fun of, it's by a group of "macho" men who are probably dumb enough to think that looking tough and cool is more important than being safe.

• Okay, in the second episode of Season 3, the group meets five prisoners, three of which die. Now, Big Tiny, the first Black Dude Dies First guy, gets stabbed by a walkers bone when the walker's hand gets ripped off. Why did Tiny just stand there when the walker spend at least ten seconds ripping off his hand? He wasn't established to be slow to react or anything. Also, why did he wander off from the group for ABSOLUTELY no reason?
  • He backed up because he was scared of the fight and the zombies. Just because he's big doesn't mean he's brave. And he didn't react to the cuffed zombie because it was behind him.
  • However, just the scene before, Tiny joins the other prisoners just as gleefully in "prison riot" tactics, and appears to have no problem with violence.
    • It's possible he was Squicked by Walkers that can't be killed by shanking to the stomach.

• Same guy from above, another question. This one has minor spoilers, so beware. After the second prisoner dies, the second black guy attempts to run, because he tried to attack Rick, who killed the second prisoner because he threw a zombie at Rick. Why did Rick Lock the running-away prisoner in with a horde of zombies? Honestly, he didn't seem to be much harm, and it is quite out of character for Rick to be that cruel.
  • Rick didn't know that he was harmless. All he knew was that this guy had come at him with a bat after Rick murdered his friend. Also FWIW, he didn't lock the guy IN with zombies, he locked him OUT with zombies. He even told him to run.
    • Rick's options at that point were either A. let the guy who just tried to attack him back in, B. run out and finish him off himself, or C. close the door and leave him to his own devices. He's disinclined to go with A because for all he knows the guy's going to go after him again; B is risky for any number of reasons. That leaves C, AKA not risking his resources, time, and safety on a guy he's probably already decided to kill.
    • Didn't Rick have a knife or pick he could have mercy killed him with when he ran to the gate though? I'm pretty sure he did. Plus, I think using a gun would have been okay in that circumstance since the zombies were locked out,the zombies already knew they were there, and the path behind them cleared.
  • At this point it needs to be clarified that this is not the same Rick we started with in Season 1, nor is he the man he became throughout Season 2 nor is he even the man that Season 2 ended with. This is Season 3 Rick who the apocalypse has made dark, dangerous, unpredictable and paranoid. In other words debating the many ways in which he could have resolved this situation peacefully or with mercy killings falls flat on its face because you all seem to be under the impression you are talking about a man who is still playing with a full deck.
    • If anything, Rick has become more pragmatic and reasonable since Seasons 1 and 2. Rick would forgive almost any crime in the past and keep on risking his life time and again for people who'd try to kill him. By now, he's learned that that approach is just plain stupid. Rick has moved on from Good Is Dumb to Good Is Not Dumb.
    • I think it is fair to say that since the airing of episode 6 the Rick has lost his sanity argument carries an awful lot more weight than the fact he is simply pragmatic considering he thinks his dead friends and family are talking to him from beyond the grave using a telephone.
    • I contest that the argument has grown stronger, if only because it's being retroactively fitted to new circumstances. As of episode 6, Rick admittedly has a mental breakdown following Lori's death. One he seems to shake off reasonably well by the end of the episode no less. But this does not mean that Rick wasn't 'playing with a full deck' before episode 6. His actions before Lori's death don't seem like the actions of an insane man to me. Just because he's not thinking straight now doesn't mean he was insane all season.

• At the end of "Walk With Me" (the episode in which we're introduced to the Governor,) the camera lingers for a long time on a specific head on the top shelf of his collection. Are we meant to surmise that there's some special significance to that particular severed zombie head or was that just a stylistic choice?
  • It was the head of the helicopter pilot.

• In the same episode, why did the Governor kill the soldiers for their supplies when he could have just as easily brought them back and added their skillset to the community?
  • Firstly, it's a simple question of resources. He doesn't know who these people are, and doesn't know what problems they could cause if he bought them in to the community. As a group of highly-trained professionals with loyalty to only one another, not The Governor, they could conceivably orchestrate his downfall. It's not worth the risk or the resources they would use. Secondly, I don't know if you've noticed yet, but The Governor is.... not a nice person. At all.
    • That's not the point. We know the Governor is "not a nice person," but we also know that he's highly intelligent. Killing potentially useful assets would be a waste if he were simply doing it because he's psychotic.
    • ^ They might be useful assets, but it is more probable that they would be threats or hindrances and the Governor is not one to take chances. Like one of the tropers below theorised larger groups would be more loyal to each other than to him, and as a dictator loyalty is the main trait you need out of the people below you. Note how he starts to subtly drive a wedge between Andrea and Michonne once they arrive; both are useful, but Andrea is more liable to be loyal to him while the one who constantly suspects him is removed from the equation (almost permanently). The Guardsmen would have loyalty to each other and wouldn't be liable to turn, so they represent too much of a threat to leave alive.
    • I would go a step further and say he didn't really care about resources at all. Yes, at some point the population and available farmable land might make that a concern, but for the time being the Governor wants to be emperor and have only people around he know's he can control. Those military guys might have gotten the automatic trust of the townspeoples not in the Gorvernor's personal little guard, or at least challenged his authority, which would have riled him to no end. He seems to prefer lone people or small groups that will be indebted to him and unlikely to challenge his rule. If it had been an equal number of women, children, and older or disabled men the Governor probably would have welcomed them into the fold.
    • It shows he will take in individuals or small groups who are likely to be thankful to him, but is mistrustful of larger groups loyal to each other. This is why when he finds out about Rick's group at the prison, we know there won't be a peaceful ending as far as he is concerned.
    • "Highly trained professionals"? They were ambushed in their own base by a group of amateurs. If that's the best they can do, they won't be adding much to the military assets of Woodbury, leaving aside any "questionable loyalty" issues.
  • There is something else to consider here: In numerous flashbacks now we have witnessed soldiers gunning down unarmed civilians, apparently hunting Shane in the hospital, using fighter jets against a populated city and generally doing very little in general to help the survivors at the beginning of the Outbreak (when there was still presumably an infrastructure.) It is possible that the government in this universe is corrupt and/or evil and as such the Governor really doesn't want to associate with them. The man may be evil but he also demonstrably clever.
    • Not so sure about that. The hospital staff were probably infected (perhaps even bitten in places covered by their scrubs), they weren't hunting Shane (they never even saw him when he was visiting Rick), and Atlanta was, you know, overrun, and they were firebombing the streets that were swarmed with Walkers, not attacking or otherwise not helping survivors.
  • His hate for National Guardsmen makes more sense if you take the novel Rise of the Governor into account, where Woodbury was initially ruled by a group of cruel Guardsmen who ruled the town with an iron fist.
    • That doesn't work since the novel is set in the comic continuity, which is very different from the show continuity (such as Tyrese never being married or having a daughter, Carol being a completely different person, etc.). It's most likely that this Governor isn't masquerading as his brother. But to answer the question, the soldiers gear is useful to him, the soldier's themselves aren't. They are either loyal to the government or loyal to themselves, and more to the point they proved they can survive without him. He has no hold over them so he takes them down hard and fast before they can become a threat, the same way he planned to kill Rick and his entire group the second he found out about them but before they attacked.
  • He murdered his only militia because he was butthurt that they weren't ready to fight. I don't think he's as clever as we all thought he was.

• So why does Michonne act like such a jerk to the Governor in Episode 3? lets just make one thing absolutely straight and clear: WE know that he is evil and kills innocent men for the their supplies and has a fish tank full of heads etc but THEY don't. As far as she and Andrea are concerned a man who acts very much like Rick used to in the opening of Season 2 has rescued them (Andrea had a potentially fatal fever for a woman weakened by hunger in a world without antibiotics) and brought them to a village where all the residents are apparently well fed and happy. In effect this is exactly what Rick's group were trying to achieve with Hershal's farm just on a far smaller scale. In fact Andrea even points out that they have no reason to be suspicious at one point and yet she still marches off in a huff. I personally think that in an effort to try and make her a strong willed Sarah Connor type character the writers forgot about the one thing that this show has consistently done well: realistic characterization.
  • Well, it's the end of the world and the Governor just captured them, dragged them to a heavily-armed town, and stole their weapons. It is understandable that Michonne may be a bit paranoid and her examination of the stolen military vehicles confirmed that something was probably up.
  • Micchone also notices that they are being watched by the impossible to miss Woodbury Only Black Guy who makes no secret of following and glaring at them. That, coupled with their weapons being put under lock and key, and the Governor saying they can leave at any time but never making a move to begin making arrangements to return their weapons (like giving them to one of his guys with instructions to hand it to the women at the gates), and always tries to talk Andrea into not leaving, definently suggests he has no intention of letting them leave.
  • Plus, perhaps she has picked up on reading people as a lawyer, especially body language. She may see that the Governor seems to be surrounded people who are subserviant, dependent on, or indebted to him in some way, and that coupled with his talk about re-establishing society (how he does it)comes across as creepy.
  • When Andrea and Michonne are brought to Woodbury, Andrea is semi-conscious, but Michonne is wide awake. Michonne has had more time to get a sense of the place, and she got a good long clear look at the corpses hanging outside the place.
  • While Merle is far from a reassuring presence, he does qualify as The Devil You Know to Andrea. Where as Michonne doesn't know a single soul in Woodbury.
  • At this point in the series, Andrea's Level In Badass still has that fresh from the factory New Badass Smell. She is still relatively naive compared to Michonne, whose Badass Odometer has at least 100,000 miles on it.
  • Some people can pick up on lies/deception better than others. And a lot of signs of manipulation and deception aren't something we are aware we are picking up on, so she may have just "felt" something was off and was going on instinct.

• How does Michonne's chained-walker camouflauge technique work? We've seen several times a living person caught in a herd of walkers get torn to shreds in an instant. Not just by the ones right next to him or her; all walkers within viewing, smelling, or hearing distance rush in. Why is it different if a couple of them are chained up near said person? Especially since she never has enough decoys to completely surround her. And Michonne does it with two bringing up the rear, while Andrea's makeshift version has one in front, but they both seem to work without incident.
  • Zombies tend to ignore other zombies, and from behind it would seem like Michonne is just another zombie because why else would the other two zombies not attack her? It'd fail from the front, but that's what the katana's are for. The trick is to just be quick enough so that the zombies don't have time to give you a second look.
    • That seems like a bit too complex of reasoning for zombies, deducing that because other zombies aren't attacking, they shouldn't either. I would think they could still smell her and her living flesh through them. But I guess we can chalk that up to all the other things that don't make sense about these zombies and their brain stems. But then why would Andrea's version work at all? She was holding one decoy in front, and didn't even have a weapon as I recall, and in any case her back was totally exposed.
    • Having now seen part of the third season they do explain it. The scent of the walkers overpowers the human scent, acting as camoflauge. So long as you don't get too close to one they'll never realise you weren't another walker (think of it is as variation of covering yourself in walker guts. If you spent long enough around them you probably would start smelling like them). Andrea's doesn't work as well because there's only one walker, but they only notice her when she's passing by.

• So, this was unclear: is Carol dead? we didn't see a body and she didn't get a death scene.
  • Probably not. The group found T-Dog's body, Carol's head scarf, and simply assumed the worst. Nobody has found a body yet.
    • It does make one wonder why they bothered to dig up a grave and then apparently fill it in and leave a marker without having found a body.
  • Cleared up: She was alive but trapped inside a room in the prison.

• Why does Rick stop Carl from eating that can of Dog Food in Episode 1? I can tell you from personal experience (I was drunk) as well as a legion of Youtube videos that it is absolutely possible to eat Dog Food without any ill effects whatsoever. Remember that this is a survival situation in which they are constantly on the run scavenging scarce supplies of food and water whilst being permanently hunted by predators and bandits. They no longer have the luxury of passing over perfectly good food just because it was originally designed to be eaten by animals; especially since that the related dialogue heavily implies that this group hasn't had so much as a morsel of food in days which is one of the reasons they were so happy to come across the prison. I am curious as to whether Rick would object to his son eating a stew made out of assorted bugs and insects given the general disgust our society has for them despite being ridiculously plentiful and nutritious.
  • That left me confused too. To me it played like Carl was willing to do things the others weren't while his father still had some naive belief that they weren't at that point of desperation yet. As for reasoning I've heard that some types of dog food have ground bone meal that that human body can't safely digest and could cause internal bleeding. Another possibility is that the food was from a chinese manufacturer and chinese dog food doesn't have the best track record of being safe even for pets, due to salmonella and another nasties contaminating the product.
  • It's quite possible the dog food was expired. Long shelf life is one thing, but if it's sitting on a shelf for long enough pre-outbreak, well...unless Word of God comes out, all we can do is guess.
  • Pride. Rick didn't want his group resorting to eating dog food. If they did, that would mean that they are no better than, well, dogs. He wanted to believe that they deserved better than having to resort to that, and that they would at least have some humanity left.
  • Or maybe Rick just wanted Carl to save it for later. Better to eat the owl and any other game they can scare up for now, keeping the canned goods for future meals.
  • Look more carefully. The top was rusted and looked a bit bulged; it wasn't likely fit to eat.

• So are we supposed to believe that the boiler room walker managed to completely devour Lori's body, all by itself, in the space of less than a day, and yet show less of a distended gut than Lori herself did despite supposedly consuming a greater amount of weight? And what about the bones, did it eat those too?
  • In the episode of Talking Dead that followed, the director of the episode stated we were supposed to assume the walker dragged her behind the corner, ate most of her and only got that far before falling over. It wasn't shown very well in the episode though. Also, the object that Rick finds on the ground is supposed to be the bullet that Carl shot through her head.
  • Except walkers don't seem to drag anything anywhere but rather eat on the spot where they find it.
  • I always thought we were meant to assume that Karl had failed to destroy the brain with his shot, and the boiler room walker WAS Lori, which is why it had a distended stomach at all. It looked pretty bad for a fresh zombie, but I suppose having just given birth might have had....some effect.
    • The boiler room walker looks nothing remotely like Lori. It's balled, round faced, and fat all over.
    • In fairness this show has never been internally consistent when it comes to walkers. Sometimes fresh zombies are rotting and sometimes they're not, sometimes they can move at speed and sometimes they can't, sometimes striking them in the face will kill them and sometimes it won't. And lets not even get into the fact that in season one we see walkers that can open doors.

• Andrea and Michonne. Why the heck don't they tell anyone anything? So many Season 3 plot elements are hinging on them withholding information for no good reason. First, Michonne refuses to articulate any of her suspicions or findings about the Governor, leading Andrea to conclude that she is a paranoid and refuse to follow her from Woodbury. Second, the guts trick. Michonne stumbles onto this purely by accident when she disembowels a walker, but Andrea was in the room when Rick discovered this way the hell back in episode 2. It's not like she could have forgotten it, there is no more pertinent information than how the walkers hunt. Third, Andrea helps the woodbury scientist without once mentioning that she talked to the last survivor of the CDC, who explained much of what he knew. Finally, Michonne finds the prison and tells Rick's group that "some Asian guy" was kidnapped and taken to Woodbury. But if she was close enough to hear them mention the prison, she must have been close enough to hear Glenn and Merle talking to each other. In which case she would know Glenn and Merle's (assuming she hadn't already learned the latter's from Woodbury) names, that they spoke as though they knew each other, and that Merle had a brother among Rick's group. And since she doesn't volunteer why she wants to attack Woodbury in any detail (and Rick doesn't bother to ask), they don't reveal Andrea's presence there.
  • You should have seen some of the decisions they made during the comic version of The Governor Arc.
  • Michonne does articulate her reasons for distrusting the Governor, "nobody who comes to this place leaves" Andrea just isn't trying to hear all that. Second, Michonne did stumble into the guts thing but she was already aware of using smell to keep the Walkers at bay hence her pet Walkers. Personally I'm amazed that plan worked. I'll go back and rewatch the episode but I'm pretty sure Michonne hearing about the prison was the writer's goofing up. The rest of the information you mentioned isn't the kind of thing you'd be likely to talk about without being asked specifically.
    • Nobody who comes to this place leaves. Nothing Andrea had seen about the place suggests that anyone would want to leave. Aside from being taken there by Merle (which the Governor apologized for), Woodbury appears safe and well-supplied and they saved Andrea's life. Andrea doesn't know about the caged walkers, the Hummers riddled with fresh blood and bullet holes, or the Governor's diary of crazy because Michonne tells her nothing about it. Regarding the smell of the walker pets, there was no TV show explanation that she was using them for that purpose - that was the comic explanation. On the TV show she used them to carry her stuff so she could travel father and be agile with the sword, and the guts thing suggests she wasn't even aware of the side benefit. As for the remainder, she deliberately went to the prison carrying the baby formula and then refused to give a whole lot of pertinent information.
    • Actually, no. Milton, the Governor's doctor guy, outright says that's why she had the Walkers chained to her, and what they did.
    • That's Milton's explanation, not Michonne's. She never said anything of the sort. Again, she might not have been aware of that benefit.
    • That might technically be true, but it's pretty obvious that scene was intended as exposition. Otherwise it means they just randomly added in this whole inconsequential plot point about how Michonne doesn't know about it but Milton spends a whole scene incorrectly speculating that she does.
  • As of the Attack on Woodbury Episode this point goes even deeper. How different would things have turned out if: a.) Michonne mentioned Andrea to Rick? She knew that Andrea and Merle were connected, and she knew Merle and Daryl were connected (and Daryl's name must've come up during the long trek back to Woodbury with him). She really seems the type who would listen for this sort of thing. b.) When Andrea stumbles across her about to off the Governor, all she had to do was mention that the Governor was torturing two survivors — even if Michonne didn't understand the connection between Glenn, Maggie and Andrea, she still should have justified her actions with SOMETHING.
  • Again, Michonne had no reason to say any of those things. Michonne had no reason to assume Rick and Andrea know each other, and if Michonne did talk about Andrea, she had absolutely no reason to mention her by name. Even the most specific things Michonne would realistically say about Andrea to Rick ("a blonde woman I was traveling with") wouldn't tell Rick anything because Andrea isn't the only blonde woman on the face of the earth. As for Merle not mentioning Daryl, why would he do that? Michonne isn't even a talkative person and remember that Merle is still racist and sexist. I can't imagine those two having much to talk about, let alone about Merle's family. Any of those subjects being brought up in those specific circumstances would be rather forced and coincidental.
  • Word of God says that Michonne has PTSD. A common symptom of PTSD is paranoia and not trusting people enough to share all their information with them.

• In Episode 7 Milton introduces Andrea to his experiment to see if Walkers retain any trace memories and all evidence would point toward him never having found anything. However, all the way way in Season 1 Episode 1, the wife of Morgan Jones made repeated attempts to try and open his front door by turning the handle — isn't that concrete evidence Walkers have partial recollections of their previous lives and something that could be replicated pretty easily? Morgan actually points out that she apparently does this every single night. I realize Milton obviously wasn't present during these events but surely to god at least one Walker must have repeated this or similar behaviour at some point.
  • This whole mini-plot made no sense. Andrea was in CDC and listened when Jenner explained what happens with dead person and the brain after reanimation. She saw what happens with the brain functions on neat LED displayer. She heard the lecture made by professional biologist about all the data the CDC collected and all his own experiments conducted with proper equipment and knowledge. And she didn't tell Milton a single word about it. Instead she helped him to conduct his own experiment. Probably the only reason why this was placed was to allow Andrea and Milton create a bond.
  • An in-universe explanation would be that Milton's experiments cannot get a response from the biters. Instinctively remembering a house and how to operate a doorknob doesn't mean a biter will remember the names or faces of family or be able to understand and perform specific instructions. A meta explanation is that with Frank Darabont's exit the writers have either forgotten that bit from years ago, lack the same vision for the series' progression, or are specifically trying to distance themselves from the scene-setting events of the first season.
    • Honestly, it's more likely that Milton simply botched the experiment by getting too close to Mr. Coleman. Because we did see another hint that the Walkers retain some of their old selves after Darabont had already left. When Glenn and Daryl found the Randall walker, it actually shoved Glenn aside to charge after the guy who had tortured him.
  • Milton was testing if the Walkers retained knowledge, which they clearly do not. What they retain, if anything, is muscle memory, habit, and some bit of instinct. Morgan's wife might not have tried opening the door every night because she "remembered" her previous life, so much as she, as a Walker, knew there was food in there and had some vague, lingering understanding of how doors worked.
    • The Pilot establishes that Morgan is inhabiting a place that's not his original home. Rick knew the former owners; it's a sign to Rick/the viewer how quickly civilization has vanished that a total stranger is living in his friends' house. Morgan's wife was not reconnecting to her old life...a walker had a suspicion that turny-knob-thingy might lead to food.
    • I think another problem is that Milton was right there and wether or not Mr. Coleman would have had any response to the cues is outweighed by his hunger as a walker. We see a little girl walker pick up her teddy bear, but she only does it before she knows Rick is there. Similar for Morgan's wife and the door. It's possible they do have some echoes of their former lives, but only when they are calm.
    • And we finally have an explanation of why the lawns are all mowed! All the landscapers are just going back to work in between attacks.

• What was the deal with the crazy guy in the cabin? How the hell would a guy who's too insane to even realize there's a zombie apocalypse going on be able to survive nearly a year into it?
  • I doubt he was always crazy, but probably driven to madness by the isolation. How he survived after he snapped though, is beyond me.
  • Crazy Survivalist is named that for a reason.
  • In watching that scene, the guy looks like he's on drugs or something. He leaves his door unlocked and sleeps through the group storming in an all the zombies bashing on the walls. Then he wakes up INSTANTLY and is waving a gun in everyone's face as soon as Rick pulls back his blanket.
  • What bothered me was that he doesn't seem to realize his dog has died. I'll file this under Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.

• How did Michonne find the prison and know to bring the food? I know she claims to have heard Glenn or Maggie talk about the prison and it's location but they were very specifically NOT talking about where the rest of their group was so much so that they both spent the next episode being interrogated.
  • Both Glenn and Maggie do mention the prison when they think they are alone at the store. Maggie says something along the lines of "A little girl growing up in a prison could use some toys." So it makes sense that Michonne would grab the supplies since she heard about the baby. I don't remember them mentioning a direction or it being a straight shot, though.
  • No, but Michonne's been wandering in Georgia for a while. Once she heard "prison" I think she could have figured out where it was pretty easily. Especially since Glenn's convo with Merle suggested it was close (the 'We'll bring Daryl back to you' part)
  • I assumed Michonne saw the prison on a map◊.
  • When Glenn is first talking to Merle, he mentions which direction he and Maggie came from, and says it's a "straight shot" to the prison. Michonne relays the same information to Rick when he asks in the following episode. Pretty simple.
    • Glenn doesn't mention the direction, and certainly doesn't say anything about where they came from to Merle (he cautiously promises to bring Daryl out). Glenn was talking to Maggie when Michonne overheard "straight shot". She could've guessed the direction based on where they came from.

• Not being someone who knows a lot about guns is the silencer they improvised from a Mag Lite flashlight in episode 1 a clear case of a Hollywood Silencer or would it actually have a noticeable effect? could someone with arms as thin as Carl even wield such a weapon accurately given how the entire balance and weight of it has now been thrown off?
  • Strength has less to do with muscle mass than muscle conditioning. Considering the survivors have been on the run for about nine months between Seasons 2 and 3 and the need for everybody to cowboy up in order to survive there's nothing saying that Carl didn't take part in some exercise regimen to get himself into better shape to help out the group. Not being able to sit around and do homework all day gives you a lot of reason to get physically conditioned when at any moment you may have to bolt with as many supplies as you can carry because walking undead cannibals are coming your way.
  • For the first question, no, it wouldn't work. It's a case of Hollywood Silencer.

• So Rick decides that the best way to handle their shortage of weapons and ammo is to drive all the way back to his hometown police department and raid the armory. The same armory he raided in the first episode, the weapons and ammo from which sustained the group through the second season. Why was he surprised to see that there was nothing there? And why didn't he think to check out the police stations in the towns they passed through on the way?
  • Yeah that had me confused to as to why he went back to his old station to check the cage when he was the one who cleared it out (except for one single bullet apparently). As to checking other police stations we have to remember that at the beginning of Season 3 the group had M4 carbines in their possession, meaning they were acquired either from police stations or military personnel that didn't quite make it. There's nothing to say the other stations weren't checked, we just didn't get to see it happen.
    • In all honesty, I predicted the exact reason why the script writers made him go there the moment he set off: Reintroducing Morgan Jones. It was always obviously on the cards given how long Rick tried to raise him on the radio during Season 1 although why they couldn't have just written him so they meet up at a roadside somewhere is anyone's guess. As for the question: yes Rick was holding the Idiot Ball here. There are three places most likely to be looted in a time of extreme danger: supermarkets, gun stores and government buildings such as police stations and hospitals. Everyone would have had the idea to try and get at the armoury in the months since the apocalypse began; and the obvious fact that he himself had already emptied it once should have told him that it was a fools errand. Still... in Rick's defence the man has been bordering the lunatic fringe ever since Lori died so we can't really expect him to behave like a rational man at this point.
  • It's not clear why he went back to the police station, but he did give the reason for going back to his hometown: He signed all the gun permits and thought he knew where some hidden guns might be that wouldn't have been picked over. I thought it would have made more sense for him to check the hospital because the rather large Army presence outside should have produced something valuable — but Morgan's stash rendered that moot.
    • That manages to raise yet more questions, however, as neither Georgia nor Kentucky (I don't remember where Rick was from in the show) require permits for gun ownership. They do for concealed carry, but you wouldn't need a CCL to have a gun in your own business.
    • Even if he didn't have an "official" list of gun owners, a sheriff would have a pretty good idea of who's been casually shooting off guns in his county. There'd be a history of noise complaints, shot-up road signs, and other petty offenses that would suggest where to look.
    • Those people are called "criminals," not "gun owners." The sheriff knows who they are for other reasons besides "noise complaints."

• Why hasn't the group tried to secure a prosthetic leg for Hershel? I would imagine that one of the only things still left in hospitals would be fake limbs as most post-outbreak survivors probably would have looted on a stop-and-run basis where they pulled up in a car and loaded up with essentials such as medicines or first aid supplies. Add to the fact that most people probably would be living life on the road or holed up in a fortified house where space is limited; securing, transporting and storing a plastic leg would be a needless waste of valuable space unless you actually need one. And even if they couldn't get hold of a real one how about making their own? all you would need is wood, some basic tools and a couple of belts to secure it. Considering just how vital a stable footing is when firing a gun (particularly when you absolutely need nothing else but head shots) I certainly would be able to look over the probable discomfort if it meant my brains were less likely to be eaten or it meant I looked less like a nice vulnerable target for a Raider.
  • The amputation wasn't all that long ago. It's likely that Hershel's stump is still healing as of the season's end.
  • They did find a prosthetic for Herschel in the Time Skip between Seasons 3 and 4.

• The whole "breached gate" of the prison. For second half of the season, the main gate is breached and walker roam freely on the outer yard. It's shown in almost all episode till the breach and after it that it's extremely easy to lure walkers and safely pick them through the fence, killing them by dozens without use of single bullet. Then it's even more jarring when they set in penultimate episode roadblocks, easily going in presumely "lost" sector of the prison. Why no-one bothered for few months (assuming how weather changed from late summer into late autumn or even early winter) with picking up the walker in outer yard, blocking the main enty even with the broken gate and thus reclaiming the yard? It would save a lot of trouble, not to mention silecing the constant moans of walkers.
  • Mostly because after the gate was breached, they had bigger fish to fry, and really, having a yard full of walkers more of a problem for an invader than a defender—when Woodbury does attack, they have to spend time and ammo shooting the Walkers when they otherwise could've strolled right in. Hell, if I were the prison group, I'd have done everything I could to fill that space with Walkers just to slow down the Woodbury people.
    • It took seconds to clear the yard when Woodburians arrive and the prison crew wasn't even trying to stop them. Open gun fight with 40+ people was last thing they were trying to do. Then again, with proper use of roadblocks, the gate could be secured in such way that it would be simply impossible to get to the prison in any other way than on foot, slowing the attack much more than short firefight with walkers. Not to mention preventing the shock-and-awe tactic the Governor was trying to use. The only reason to not secure the gate I find is that it was the only way to get out of prison, so that's why the bus wasn't hauled back on it. In first episodes of third season the broken bus is right on the road and then somehow (which is a headscratch on it's own) it's pushed away, to clear the road. But that still doesn't explain why no action was taken to secure the outer yard until penultimate episode roadblocks (which work only on human attackers anyway). The time wasn't even the issue - many episodes are separated by days or even weeks in-universe.
    • Unless I'm misremembering, the gate is only broken when the Governor kills Axel—at which point the prison group knows that Woodbury is watching them, meaning any extended time at the gates trying to fix them leaves you exposed to someone from Woodbury who wants to take a pot shot. Also it's only a few days between that attack and the season finale. And by "filled" I mean something like a whole horde—yes, it takes seconds when Woodbury arrives in the finale, but that's because there's maybe a dozen Walkers or so spread around the yard. They'd have considerably more trouble if it was a hundred or more, if for no other reason than the sheer press of bodies would make it hard to drive through.
    • I can understand the fear about some sniper early on, but for few episodes not only they lower their guard against such surprise, but it's also obvious that no sniper is waiting around. More — when they roam around the prison, they do it in open manner, not bothering about chance of being sniped. And then, when roadblocks are being set, they basically ignore any other factor than few walkers on the outer yard. So they are obviously not afraid of pot shots from surrounding woods. If the outer yard is so damn valuable (I hardly see any use of it in winter), then why no actions are taken to secure it?
    • What would securing it even do? They know the Governor's going to attack them. Which means if they secure the gate, he's only going to knock it down again. Don't know if you've noticed, but they don't exactly have a skilled team of metallurgists and craftsman who can repair something on that scale and keep it secure against someone ramming a truck into it. What, exactly, do you think they could do, and what good would it do?
      
      And, once again, it's at the absolute most a week or two between the gates being knocked down and the Governor's attack. They don't know when that attack is coming. It might well come while they're all out there faffing about with the gate, because that's a project that's going to take a long time.
    • It doesn't take to be a rocket scientist to fix a gate. And what for? Well, if they got roadblocks, it's not a big deal to stop with them those ramming trucks. Giving the fence much more "stopping power".
    • Rocket scientist? No. But you need time and resources and knowhow, none of which they have. Nobody there has ever worked with fences or gates of that size, let alone had to make or repair them.
    • That's exactly why no know-how is needed to take gate lying on the ground and even chaining it to the support beams. More — they did this with secondary gate, leading to prison yard in final episode. So why not with main gate?
    • Because a man with a private army at his disposal is going to come and kill you, why would you want to have to send a good chunk of your guys (you need two or three people just to keep the walkers at bay, plus at least that many people to actually lift the gate up and position it right), and there is a world of difference between using one chain to keep a gate that's still on it's hinges in place and using chains to take a gate that's been knocked fully of every hinge in place. You'd need to secure it at least on all four corners to keep it in place, which prevents you from leaving the prison in a hurry and leaves you exposed for the men with guns to come and shoot you, which is really the main reason why they don't try and fix it. When the governer's army is dead they probably did get around to fixing it because they weren't at risk of an attack by a superior force.

• How was a heavily armed militia of 40+ people driven off by two people firing A-Team style? I know the Woodbury Army was basically just a bunch of civilians with little formal training, but they had such overwhelming firepower and numbers it's pathetic how easily they were driven off.
  • You answered your own question: Most of the Governors army were untrained and, far more importantly, unwilling. Despite what Hollywood and Shane's replacement Carl Grimes might say, murdering a living breathing human being because someone else said so is hard. They had no say back in Woodbury because they were worried about the consequences at the hands of the Governor and his Lieutenants (note how Sasha worked that out pretty quickly) and as soon as they were directly faced with those consequences they ran away and were subsequently executed.
  • Yeah, seriously. Despite what the movies show, people don't turn into super badasses who can kill anyone put in front of them just because someone put a gun in their hands. A lot of military training boils down to two simple things: A. Overcoming the human reluctance to killing another human, and B. overcoming the human reluctance to being shot at. Woodbury's militia had neither—in fact, they'd been living a pretty damn cushy lifestyle up to then. Frankly it's amazing that nobody got killed and eaten when they ran into the walkers in the tombs out of sheer panic.
    
    Added to that, it wasn't just "two people firing A-Team style." It was a group of people who were very, very clearly willing and able to defend their territory, people far more prepared to do that than the Governor's militia was prepared to attack. They went in thinking it was going to be a handful of people they could easily rout, and quickly found they'd walked right into a trap. In short, they vastly underestimated how badass the Prison group was going to be—they were expecting pushovers, but ran into flashbangs, walkers, and people in full armor firing on them with fully automatic weapons from cover and the high ground.
  • Also if the Wordof God that 27 people died in the Season 3 finale is correct, minus Milton and Andrea, that means the Governor had 25 people backing him up, plus Martinez and the other guy that he didn't kill. That's nowhere close to 40+.

• In the first season, it takes a lot of Willing Suspension of Disbelief, when Merle saw his hand off with a hack-saw, instead of going through the handcuffs or the pipe they were attatched to. Hack-saws are made to cut such things. Then how exactly Andrea was able to cut two handcuffs' chains in mere 10 seconds using pair of pliers and having both her hands cuffed? Not only it's impossible to generate so much force with single hand, but if force required to cut hardened steel would be applied on pliers, they would simply fell apart.
  • I think Andrea was being held by plastic handcuffs.
    • No, they are regular, metal handcuffs. They are clearly visible all the time and even in her final moments Andrea still wears the remaining bracelets.
  • I can't think of an in-universe justification because it was extremely implausible; Andrea is pretty well built for a woman but she must be exhausted from the chase and the resultant torture so I personally don't believe she could have mustered anywhere near the strength Merle did even if we did accept pliers have the same handcuff defeating capabilities as a hacksaw. As for the real world explanation it was obvious that the writers wanted us to think that she had earned a happy ending to her ordeal; its the reason why Milton is the first body we see and why Andrea's wound was hidden beneath her top. Unfortunately what we actually have is an Idiot Ball that rivals the time she shot Daryl because given just how easily she actually cut through the chain why did she stop halfway through to talk to Milton despite the latter outright telling her to hurry up? all she needed was ten seconds and she would have lived.

• Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand the idea behind finale last scene. After most of Woodburians get killed, the rest are packed into bus and everyone rides into prison. As far as I remember, there are few things that made Woodbury better place than the prison: A. The prison is not really safe. The gate barely holds now and there is a breach in the wall, if not breaches. Woodbury got set and working wall. B. The prison suffers serious squalor problems. C. Woodbury got furnished houses, electricity, pressured water supplies, functional medical bay... you name it. And the winter is coming. Instead of packing from the prison to Woodbury, they drive children, old people and all the stuff they could pack on single pick-up and school bus (assuming they packed anything on the bus), driving to the prison. While you can look through fingers on everything else in the finale if you judge the Governor's actions as revenge before any reason, the last scene is just jarring. It's not that the Governor and his two remaining soldiers could do any harm to resettled Woodbury, because in terms of security it's on the same level as the prison when it comes to human attacks. And now he got just two people under his command and virtually no resources, so really, why not retake Woodbury, when it's open to grab? Rick's Honor Before Reason to not take advantage over your enemy and pulling All Your Base Are Belong to Us? Then that means Rick grabbed the Idiot Ball again and his whole character arch went back into Status Quo Is God again. And as usuall, Rick and pack didn't bothered much about scravaging — the whole lot of military-grade equipment is left where the Governor dropped it with people he killed.
  • Indeed you could even add a D. to that list by the fact that Rick and Daryl would presumably be itching even harder for the Governor's head after immediately following up Merle with Andrea. The most obvious place he would eventually try to reach is Woodbury as its his town and there is no reason to suspect he has given up his claim to it. If I had to guess they may be setting up the annexation of Woodbury for Season 4 episode 1 where Rick works out his empty cold prison is unsuited to housing a large population of people who, most likely, don't trust him entirely.
  • Woodbury might be comfortable, but it was an inevitable death trap. The walls required at least ten people guarding them at all times and constantly picking off any walkers. The Governor killed just about everyone in the town who could fight, leaving only children, invalids and old people, who wouldn't be able to guard the town. It's also a suburban area — what would they do about food? They'd eventually run out of canned goods; there's no way in hell the town would last. The prison has suitable land for farming and is built for defense. It has multiple fences that have held up against any walkers that have come close, only requires one person on watch at any given time, and every area of the prison is self-contained and can be quarantined in case of a breach. Hell, in the comic, Martinez says verbatim that Woodbury is falling apart at the seams and they won't be able to hold out for much longer, and the Governor doesn't crash through the gates because he initially wants to take over the prison rather than just kill everyone. Woodbury might be closer to the pre-zombie standard of living, but they don't live in that world anymore.
    • The points are that: A. We are not talking about comics here. B. Prison's defences are almost all breached and the ones that are still in place are damaged at best. C. What will you do with your farmland in winter? D. There are no means to house all those people in run-down prison, when they have warm houses behind a wall as an alternative. I'm not postulating that Woodbury is indefinitely better place to live. It's just much better place to take as winter shelter. And Woodbury wall was manned not because of defence reasons, but to keep people inside from doing stupid things (hence the curfew). The wall by itself is as good as fence around the prison. Please, note that we are talking about setting of TV series, not comic book continuum, so Woodbury and prison are in hell of a different condition that their drawn counterparts.
    • I have to disagree. A: Not sure what this was about. B: The prison's defenses are far from almost all breeched. The prison ITSELF is a defense by virtue of barred windows and being built of concrete as opposed to burnable wood. And fires don't necessarily mean being attacked. C: I have no idea what you're going to do with your farmland in winter but you have to figure something out. I imagine there is a very good reason why the group didn't disperse, use all of their luring techniques and then return to Hershel's Farm. Sooner or later the canned food is going to run out and when that happens we need farms, the sooner the better. D: Keeping people from doing something stupid is actually quite important in a zombie apocalypse. Combine the facts that in the dark it's hard to see, someone could have died any number of ways so you can't risk not shooting someone just because they're inside the wall and zombie's incredible sneaking powers when they need them a curfew is pretty much a must for a large population. The bottom line though is there is no good reason not keep both, live in the city and have a skeleton crew maintain what is effectively a bomb shelter for when the shit hits the fan.
    • Walkers keep pouring into the prison and by prison I mean inside of it. They don't really know from where. That means there is a breach in the wall or even breaches. Then we've got the main gate knocked out and the secondary gate barely holds. That means it's hardly working as defence. Fire is as much an issue inside of concrete bunker as it is for wooden lodge. And you are still talking in some far-fetched future, when I simply ask what you need farmland in winter — it's useless now and infested with walkers. I'm asking why not holding the winter out in Woodbury. There is no longer a large population. That's 20 people when both groups are combined.
  • After what happened to Axel, the visibility through the chain link fence seems like a massive security risk. The Governor has already proven that any living person can cause chaos from outside the prison, using guns. And, at this point in the series, the Governor isn't dead yet. The transparency of that chain link fence is far inferior to the opaque Woodbury walls, and you could man those with a skeleton crew of 2, as proven by Tyreese and his sister.
    • That was just one of presumably at least four watches around Woodbury. We see it several times because Tyreese and his sister are viewed (correctly) as the weak point in the defense not because they are the ONLY defense. Woodbury might not be a huge city but it's more than big enough that two people, especially at night, aren't preventing people from climbing in or out of the walls at the opposite side.
  • At Comic Con 2013, Andrew Lincoln stated Season 4 would address why they chose the prison over Woodbury.
  • The prison itself however is the clear superior choice for a few reasons: the Governer built Woodbury up into it's current state, which means if there is any hidey holes or hidden suprises there he could use that against any future tenants. The prison itself only has two breachs in it's defence; the front gate and the hole in the back, both which are easily fixable (but were discovered/made when the prison itself was under threat of invasion). Both breaches have also been contained; zombies in the front yard can't get into the courtyard, and the zombies sneaking in the hole in the back are trapped behind the thick prison doors (and can be slowly cleared out and fixed). Finally the prison itself is designed to be secure, Woodbury had to be jury-rigged into it's current state. One attack by Rick's group and walkers were able to break into it. Without a lot of guards to keep going over it with a fine-tooth comb zombies will eventually force their way into it. Concrete on the other hand will hold up rather well in the long-run, and so long as the zombies are routinely cleared the chain-link fences will hold.
  • Moot point now, latest episode shows the Governor burned the whole thing to the ground, eliminating the one thing that made it an attractive location.
  • Maybe it was just me, but I thought it had a bit to do with the mentality that came with Woodbury. The people of Woodbury were clinging to the old way of life. Not many of them knew how to fight, how to survive. Whereas the prison group all did. Woodbury seems to encourage that since of false security that would have ultimatly lead to people dieing. Look how many people wanted to leave when they had the "terrorist" attack, if they believed the Govenor, still made Woodbury safer than the world outside. It encourages letting your guard down.

• Am I the only person who thinks Carl really made the only choice he could in the situation that he was in with the kid who stumbled over them? I heard Hershel tell him to drop the gun. Drop does not mean approach slowly while gauging the situation. It means DROP then preferably back away. Had Carl stood there and then got kicked in the gut and the other two got shot everybody would be jumping down down Carl's throat about how stupid he is (just like last season) but he's getting no love for what at worst is a case of Poor Communication Kills since neither he nor Hershel repeated drop the gun or gave any additional instructions or orders but someone was the adult there and instead of taking charge he just tattled after the fact.
  • I think the problem Rick had was not the decision itself but the fact his very young son has learnt how to kill without remorse. Now you may be thinking hey so what? it's the apocalypse he'll have to learn sometime which unfortunately is not true. As Rick pointed out after Carl got huffy he was going to be hiding in the woods instead of fighting; he is still a child and moreover is a child who has barely entered puberty meaning he hasn't got a handle on just how violent and unpredictable hormones and a lack of experience can make you — there is a reason why most violent crimes in real life are perpetrated by young males. Next time it might not be because he was faced with a militiaman with a gun; it could be because he has lost his temper with one of the team. Considering the writers have been setting this up for a long time I'm predicting a Season 4 storyline here.
  • The kid had it coming. Both Carl and Hershel told him to drop the gun. And he just standed there, slowly approaching them with the gun still in hand. I hardly see why Hershel is dissappointed about Carl's decision. Sure, Carl is too a kid, but this was a Hobson's choice here — drop the gun to not die.
  • Like I said; whether you agree with the decision or not is irrelevant. Its the fact Carl, a child, murdered a man without a single drop of remorse before, during or afterwards. Rick as a seasoned police officer knows just how absolutely dangerous that potentially is. A child is not an adult in a small body.
    • And no-one question his age and that he killed the kid with cold blood. The point is rather that he got every reason to call it by himself I Did What I Had to Do. I understand why everyone, both viewers and people in-universe are freaked out about this, but that doesn't make the kid's death any different. If Hershel would shoot him, no-one would even mention this. But as Carl, barely a teen, did this, it rise many eyebrows, forgetting that he got the point and went through enough bad things because he or his father was indecesive then protecting their own group. So while it's still a murder by a teen, it's not simple Black-and-White Morality. Plus, isn't the disarming procedure all about telling the other person what to do and when there is no cooperation, just shooting that person? Sure, not by a kill-shot, but still shooting to deal enough harm so other side won't shoot back.
    • I question if it was in cold blood. If I tell you to drop a gun I mean drop it. Not hand it over. I can pick it up just fine on my own once you walk away from it. As is mentioned before (and can be evidenced about once a month in the News) real Law Enforcement don't exactly take chances with people who aren't complying EXACTLY with the instructions they were given. As was mentioned above both Hershel and Carl did a terrible job of taking charge of the situation but that doesn't make this a cold blooded murder. Shane murdered someone in cold blood, they were helpless and there was currently (little) reason to do it and none to do it when and how he did.
    • The only way to shoot enough so the other side won't shoot back is to kill. Any law enforcement officer with half a brain will tell you that. That said, Carl is, what, 12? And he's suddenly deciding on his own who lives or dies? That's a decision that most adults will have serious problems with. Carl doing so without remorse means there's something broken inside of him. Rick is worried because he sees his son turning into a remorselessly-killing sociopath. And because he is still, despite the situation, a child. When a child is able to kill a surrendering person in cold blood, there is a problem.
    • It would be suprising if something wasn't off with mental state of young teen after surviving a year during zombie apocalypse and giving a Mercy Kill to his own mother. Not to mention his Survivor Guilt after Dale got killed. So we can clearly assume that Carl's mentality is already damaged, maybe even beyond recovery and that murder (because it was a murder) is the point when it's became obvious to everyone. It's also a case of in-universe Double Standard. As long as Carl was gun-totting kid taking down zombies it was ok and considered good. But after talking down enough walkers to create a Drinking Game for viewers, he kills single human and now everyone in-universe is suddenly surprised that he is able to murder someone in cold blood. The same routine, only milder, goes with viewers. Suddenly everyone waked up that he's just a kid and he not only know how, but feels no remorse over killing.
    • That wasn't murder in cold blood. At worst, it was a classic case of Poor Communication Kills. Carl was already close enough that he could easily have been tackled to the ground and overpowered by a much larger person and his help? A girl and a crippled old man. Sure it's three on one but that would be a stupid risk to take and everybody would have leapt down his throat had that played out. Frankly if you don't want him killing take the gun away. Sure there are zombies but we've proven that a good piercing weapon will do that just fine so make him a quality spear and call it a day. However in the world they live/lived in with gangsters ("Vatos", Season 1), wandering bandits (Season 2), and a well armed militia (Season 3) I wouldn't want anybody with me who couldn't both shoot and take a life if necessary. That person is simply a liability waiting for a place to happen. Like it or not currently everybody lives in a "military" compound with all the responsibilities that come with it until they can secure something at least on par with Woodbury with enough people to let the fighting fall if not to the men (sexist as it may be until men can have babies they are less valuble than women in any apocalypse scenario) at least to the adults.
    • Sorry to keep repeating myself here but the issue isn't whether or not he was right or wrong or whether or not was just a mistake or whether or not it was just self defence. The fact is that only sociopaths can kill without batting an eyelid; even seasoned soldiers can rarely do that. You know who else in this series besides the Governor who possessed this trait? Shane. Who murdered an innocent man in cold blood to save himself and tried to kill Rick over a woman. This is who Carl is growing up into and like it or not a child is not an adult nor is a boy a man. Its not a question of size or ability, its a question of self-control, and the reason why most violent crime in the world is from teen to young adult males is that young males are very easily overcome by aggression which means he is just as liable to shoot one of the team over a petty squabble as he is to shoot a bandit. You are very correct in saying that he will one day have to become a man and protect the women and the vulnerable and he will need to become one far earlier than any of us ever did... but the brain of a twelve year is simply not developed enough or experienced enough to make life or death decisions. And yes, if I was Rick I would take away Carl's gun and hand him a baseball bat until such time he has shown himself to be that responsible adult he needs to one day become.
    • Not that I'm one of those diehard Shane supporters or anything (frankly I sided with Rick more often than not), but while Shane was indeed very ruthless, he did not kill without remorse, especially not on the level of the Governor. They made it very clear on a number of occasions that killing Otis affected him deeply, and even Lori comments that he hasn't been the same since that night at the high school. And while he was fully prepared to kill Rick in the penultimate episode, he definitely wasn't doing it without even batting an eye.
  • There was probably meant to be some ambiguity to the situation. Yes, Carl is perfectly justified in shooting an armed man who failed to follow directions. But it's not as though Carl is a soldier; he's a child. And the man he shot didn't look to be much older than him and may have not meant any harm at all. So, for Rick, it's a question of what his child has become. If you recall in the second season, Rick insisted that they not let Carl pass away because he still felt that Carl could grow up and see beauty in the world. And now he's shooting people left and right.
  • Rick likes to agonize over morality. It's his way. I see it as having less to do with it being a matter of right vs wrong, but Rick facing the fact with his own son that the world is now not only a place where kids have to make those calls, but that Carl is prepared to do it so casually.

• How did Andrea get bit? Seriously. Not only were both her hands freed, but the walker was someone who was skinny as a weed, she had a metal object in her hands, and she saw him coming. It's hard to even justify she didn't want to kill a friend because she killed her damn sister in the first season. Not to mention the fact that her bite was on her shoulder, under her coat somehow.
  • Because she's probably spent the previous two days without sleep or food, maybe even water, while being beaten up and tortured by the Governor, after running from him on foot from Woodbury to the prison. She just wasn't in good physical shape by that point.
  • She was exhausted from her escape attempt before she was captured, tied to a chair, and presumably starved, tortured, and beaten for potentially a full day. She did kill Walker Milton, ultimately, but that's the thing: One mistake and you're screwed.
  —"The thing is, you only got to fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once. And how you ain't never gonna be slow, never be late? You can't plan for no shit like this, man. It's life."

• So, Michonne went out of her way to save Andrea, a stranger. Rick went out of his way to save Michonne, a stranger. Rick goes out of his way to save all the children and elderly of Woodbury, all strangers. Why did neither Rick nor Michonne care for the Backpack Guy when they passed by him, and he was clearly asking for help? What made his life any less valuble than Andrea's to Michonne or Michonne's to Rick? Was it becuase he wasn't in danger?
  • Point of fact, Rick did not go out of his way to save, Michonne, a stranger. Carl went out to save Michonne, and Rick only let her stick around at all because she had the baby formula. Also, Michonne saved Andrea, yes, but we don't know the circumstances other than she happened to be around and chopped off a single Walker's head. The whole of Season 3 is Rick progressively giving less of a damn about anyone who isn't already part of his group. That's kind of his character arc for the whole season.
  • Agreed. Rick wasn't prepared to take a chance on the Backpack Guy, someone they would have had to take along in the car with them. He obviously trusted Carl and was willing, somewhat reluctantly, to go along with Carl's estimation of Michonne. Unfortunately, the Backpack Guy had no one to vouch for him.

• Why would such a multiethnic mix of prisoners be locked together? Aren't American prisons basically defacto racially segregated? The probability of the prisoners being together in a nonviolent situation, as well as the probability of them not turning on each other after being locked together in a room seem slim.
  • Um, because American prisons aren't defacto racially segregated because that is illegal under US law. They can segregate themselves if they choose to, but there can and in fact has been many cases of multiethnic cells where you have two people of different ethnicities because space is not exactly an abundant resource considering the state of the prison system. So long as the prisoners aren't fighting each other, there's no reason to take them away, and prisons aren't hotbeds of racism like some media would have you believe; (case in point, in high school they showed a video of a former convict who turned his life around since leaving prison, he was racist going into prison because of how he was raised, but was paired with a black man because what the fuck does the prison system care? They got along without killing each other, and the man became depressed when his cellmate was murdered by other black prisoners because they thought he had done something). We also don't know if they were locked in the same cells before the outbreak, but if you're refering to why they were locked together afterwards when the dead started coming back to life and eating people, holding onto racial grudges you might not even have had before seems a bit silly.
    • "de facto" just means "it just happens". You're thinking of "de jure", which is legally sanctioned.
  • Axel was bullied pretty badly by Tomas and Andrew, so I wouldn't say "nonviolently."
    • That seems to have been more because Axel was a bit of a dick than because he was white, however.

• Milton, you're dying and it seems like you already accepted that, you couldn't muster enough strength to crawl over to Andrea, give her the pliers and give a surviving chance to escape or at least try to?
  • The guy got stabbed in the gut half-a-dozen times. That is not a series of injuries you can simply shrug off, and depending on where he got stabbed he could make his injuries worse if he moved (hell given the viciousness of the attack he could be holding his own guts in). Plus him moving around means he can't be trying to stop the bleeding through pressure, which means he bleeds out faster as he gets closer and ends up putting Andrea in more danger.
  • Blame AMC, who changed the plot from its original concept. Milton was originally supposed to be shot, and was intended to spend more time trying to help Andrea escape. He would be unable to get the restraints off, and tries to choke her with a piece of chain at one point, but fails and turns into a walker. He would then take a bite out of Andrea's shoulder, and Tyreese (who was looking around Woodbury for her) comes in and shoots Milton. They shot all the footage, then reshot it for the broadcast version. At the end of the day, it wouldn't have made much difference anyway.

• So, that thing Allen was carrying during the invasion of the prison... was that a bloody head spade? Because the tip looked way too broad for it to be a crowbar.

• Something that bugged me for a while, why didn't Rick, Michonne, and his son not pick up the hitchhiker when they went for a supply run, he was calling for help and another hand wouldn't have hurt. My only thought is that Rick was at a point he couldn't trust anyone, maybe he thought he was a plant set up by the Governer to take out the prison from the inside. Any other ideas?
  • It's more just that at that point, Rick doesn't give a damn about anyone who isn't in his group. If you're not already there, Rick simply doesn't care.
  • You should already have realised that point; prior to the field trip he forced Tyreese and his group out of the prison into the wild knowing full well that they would most likely die out there. He had no reason to suspect anything bad about them, he just didn't want to be responsible for their fate and didn't want to risk trusting them.
  • The hitchhiker wasn't merely a stranger, he was also quite clearly a liability. Someone yelling for help has not been trained in Walker Safety 101. Someone alone has not demonstrated an ability to work with others. Someone chasing your car and yelling is only attracting walkers to your position; there is no reason to help someone like that and every reason not to. Groups like Tyreese's have proven an ability to work together to survive. Individuals like the hitchhiker prove by the very fact that their alone that either 1. their previous companions abandoned them as a liability or 2. they got their companions all killed. Either way, Rick is only interested in helping those who can help themselves.
  • Besides, even if they would have helped out that hitchhiker in order circumstances (we see them doing similar things later on), at the time, they're preparing for an attack by Woodbury. So they can't trust this isn't a trap the Governor set up.

• When they went to Woodbury to rescue Glenn and Maggie they only took one vehicle. It would have barely held the four people plus all the weapons they carried. How did they intend to being back 6 people?

The TV Show 4

• At the end of the season premiere, Patrick staggers into the shower room, succumbs to the Incurable Cough of Death, and is shown opening his eyes as a walker. Granted, he's portrayed as very naive during his earlier appearances, but he's still someone who'd been living in Woodbury, under the Governor's hyper-vigilant administration. We know that Woodbury's officials were aware that anyone who dies becomes a walker — Milton's experiment with the dying man proved that — so why wasn't Patrick, and every other Woodbury resident, indoctrinated to believe that sick people must report their illnesses immediately, no matter how mild, for treatment and precautionary restraint? Not the sort of security-lapse you'd think a paranoid like the Governor would have overlooked.
  • Patrick isn't from Woodbury. He is one of the new people brought in by Daryl or Rick during the 6-7 month Time Skip. Also, we have no idea how the Governor treated sick people in Woodbury.
  • As for Patrick, he starts off with just an upset stomach and goes to get some rest, then dies a few hours later. The illness would make thinking clearly impossible, so by the time his health is in serious danger it's too late for him to sound the alarm.
  • There is also the unfortunate possibility that he didn't actually care what happened to anyone else after he died. Harsh I know; but not everyone is cut out to be a decent human being when your entire world (literally) has gone to crap and it's also not as if he got much character development for us to say otherwise.
  • It doesn't really matter if Patrick was from Woodbury the same basic rules should have applied everywhere. The most likely answer though is that it's relatively rare for young healthy people to die of random illnesses. It's always the very young or the very old and Patrick was neither. It probably hadn't come up in Woodbury and certainly hadn't come up (nor any natural death) for Rick's group and our heroes have been shown to be to dumb to live on a number of occasions prior. I can't think of a single time they anticipated a problem instead of reacting to a situation ever to be honest.
    • What basic rules? You yourself pointed out how rare it was for someone young to die a natural death, but let's not forget that we have seen (up until that point) exactly one person die of natural causes and that was old age and cancer. The rest of the deaths in the entire series are "death by zombie" or "death by gunshot/knife wound/snapped neck." When the two largest groups in the show have one natural death between them, it's safe to assume there are no "basic rules" covering spontaneous and rapid death from illness. As for them not anticipating problems, they anticipated the prisoners were going to be a problem right off the bat, Rick figured out straight away that Randall's group was bad news the second they entered the bar, he knew for a long while that Shane was going to kill him, really the things they've been blindsided by are the things they really could not have anticipated (a massive horde of walkers appearing, the Governor's existence, etc.).
  • Also, the flu strain affecting them is virulent enough to kill a previously healthy person within a day, something that is almost unheard of.
    • And he does report it, to Carol, who tells him he should just try and "fight through it", probably because she didn't believe it could possibly be as bad as it turned out to be. Perhaps the guilt over not taking Patrick seriously in the first place influences her to take the extreme measures she does to try and stop the virus spreading?

• So has Rick started to get complacent in between the end of Season 3 and the première of Season 4? Firstly, Hershel states that he has been going outside the prison walls without his gun which is possibly the worst of the amateur mistakes it is possible to make... alongside the second one he made immediately after which is him now suddenly trusting Randoms. I get why they need new blood at the prison as there is indeed strength in numbers but he knows full well from the incident with Randall that there are gangs of bandits roaming the country and he sure as Hell should remember that the Governor is still out there biding his time. This could have so easily been a suicidal trap that orphaned two children and left his group without their leader. The smart thing to do would have been to tell her to meet him somewhere out in the open so he could return and evaluate her with a team of armed backup.
  • Rick has probably gotten complacent. That's how real people are, after a while you start forgetting that there is a reason why we have so many rules about so many things. As has been mentioned numerous times zombies really aren't that big a threat under regular circumstances, it's only when they sneak up on you or overwhelm you with numbers that they are dangerous. We have to assume that during the entire time skip between seasons that nothing major happened. As for guns they've been intentionally not using them since Season 2. It's still stupid to go out without the gun but I can easily see how someone who had spent several months without incident would simply decide to stop carrying it and he is called out in-universe so it's not something that's gone unnoticed. He's just starting to believe his own hype. Finally that woman seemed half crazed and starving. He didn't really have the option to tell her to meet him some place it was either leave her to die or go with her. Wrong choice? Probably but those were his options.
  • I'd invite you to rewatch the episode in question. He's not going outside without a weapon, he's going outside without a gun. He still has a blade, which is silent and doesn't draw every walker for miles towards him (which was the main reason why the farm fell at the end of Season 2; gunfire drew hundreds of walkers at once). If he had gotten into trouble he would have just run from the shambling corpses and not waste the bullet. For the woman, he really had no choice there; he couldn't just set a time and place to meet her because A) if she is hostile that means she has time to prepare and B) where is he going to set this meeting place? The only open place that's close is the area outside the prison (which both reveals his home and is also constantly surrounded by walkers), and how exactly is he going to even convey the idea of where the meeting place is to a woman who doesn't know the area and has no major landmarks to guide her?
  • Also, part of the theme in the opening episodes is that Rick is trying to distance himself from his old occupation, putting away everything that reminded himself of being a police officer and instead putting all of his energy into farming. It's a big personal blow to him when he's forced to burn the pig sty and sacrifice the piglets.

• Sick people in the cells. Why don't they at least tie their legs to the bars with some rope? It doesn't have to be short, or constricting — you can give them enough line to stand up, walk around, get to the toilet — doesn't even have to be tight! You can even make a knot that any human could easily untie if they need to leave the cell. If they go walker, the walker won't be able to go more than ten feet or so — and wouldn't be able to untie the knot.
  • This actually leads to the second problem in that back in episode 2 people are now sleeping with their cells unlocked. If they had taken this simple precaution Patrick would have eaten precisely nobody whatsoever.
    • Because people want to feel safe. Closing the cell doors in those situations isn't needed, because they're supposed to be safe behind four sets of walls in the heart of their compound. The idea that someone could get sick, die and turn in such a short time span that locking yourself inside a prison cell is so out there that nobody has a need to lock themselves in. This ties into why the sick people aren't tied up; Hershel even gives a quote for it, "A sad soul kills faster than a germ." You start bringing in the bleak realities of what's going on then those sick people are going to look at it and go "why am I even bothering to stay alive?" Something similar was brought up in World War Z where survivors were dying more or less because the thought of living another day in the apocalypse was so soul-crushingly bleak that they just stopped waking up in the morning. Whilst getting depressed and losing the will to live can't kill a healthy person, a sick person giving up will die a lot quicker than one whose fighting with everything they have.
    • They may want to feel safe, but they aren't and they know it. Anyone dying in their sleep from even an undetected medical issue or an accident - or suicide, brought on by aforesaid depression — is a threat inside the walls.
    • Hershel does start telling the people in the sick ward to close their doors in the latest episode. Mostly, it's that they want to make the prison into their homes and not into, well, a prison. Locking yourself in every night in a prison cell is not something most people want to do.
    • Locking yourself in a prison cell at night sucks. Getting your guts ripped out is marginally worse, however. I could understand leaving the doors open from complacency at the beginning of the season, but after the fiasco in the cell block it shouldn't be optional any more. You're a threat to others if you sleep with your door open.
    • ^^If you have to start locking yourself in a prison cell just to be safe in the world, then why bother getting up in the morning? Hershel says it right at the start of Episode 5, a sad soul kills faster than any germ. The people have to believe that there's hope, that they can survive this, otherwise they just stop fighting the illness and die. There comes a point where surviving just isn't good enough anymore, you have to live or you cross the Despair Event Horizon and check out. Close the cell doors, the patients decide that it's already a lost cause and just give up. Keep them open, yeah it's a risk, but it gives them that small sliver of hope that they can pull through and they keep hanging on. It's a catch 22; it's a risk to sleep with the door open, it's a risk to sleep with it closed.
    • That's a matter of degrees. Where I live a lot of people don't lock their doors but if I lived in a different area I would. These people live in a world where someone could slip in the shower and become a zombie. Locking your room at night and never going anywhere without a buddy should be common sense. I agree about a sad soul and they have done very little to attempt to alleviate that. I don't see anybody, even the children playing any games, story time is survival training for crying out loud. I'm not trying to downplay the need for training time but why aren't the kids playing checkers (a Prison probably has a board and if it doesn't checkers is simple enough to draw a board in the dirt and play sticks vs leaves or what have you) in Reign of Fire they were putting on Star Wars the play and ended with an educational prayer. That's what's needed to help normalize things. Why is Rick the one working the garden seemingly alone? Give these people something to do!
    • The idea that keeping the cell doors locked will lead to widespread depression-related death is, frankly, absurd. The survivors are in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. They all know this. As mentioned, someone could die because of completely natural causes. There is no train of thought that leads to "We should lock the cell doors" to "I am so depressed that I will just cease to live." We all die, and yet most of us do not die of despair or suicide knowing the eventual outcome of our lives. The suggestion that this would occur if the prisoners were forced to keep their cell doors locked is untenable. Furthermore, not locking the doors is implausibly stupid because it involves an unnecessary risk. Those basically never pan out. Has Rick or Lori ever said, "Man, what a great thing that I have no idea where Carl is!" Is that how Rick treats Judith? With sloppiness? Not at all. There is no way that the characters would not have learned their lesson about taking risks with huge downsides by now.
    • You've got the argument wrong. Nobody is saying that if they left the doors locked people would start dying. People in the prison don't lock their doors because everyone in there is healthy and unlikely to just kneel over and die in a hurry. The flu killing people as quickly as it did wasn't a probable event to even consider, so why lock the cells? Hey the prison is old, maybe the ceiling will cave in, so let's go and live outside to avoid taking that unnecessary risk. Nobody is going to be doing anything risky at night, and if someone does get sick they aren't going to die in the time between people going to sleep and waking up. When it gets to the sick people Hershel doesn't want them to give up hope, because they will die if they just give up on trying to get better. Plus as someone else pointed out below at no point do we ever see the cells properly locked; in the comic at least the only time they ever lock someone in a cell they have to do it with a chain and padlock. They never once even float the idea of doing it with the prisoners or Merle, so it is plausible they simply can't lock the cells.
    • The argument was forwarded as I presented it — the claim that keeping the doors locked would lead to some despair horizon was forwarded explicitly. The problem with the line of reasoning you suggest is that it is implausible. The characters are all in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. They clearly feel that staying in the prison is safer than staying outside of it. Perfectly reasonable. There is no way, however, that keeping the doors locked is less safe than keeping them unlocked. Therefore, every cell door should be locked. The argument toward complacency is simply flawed at the most fundamental level. The group is armed with the knowledge that anyone who dies turns into a walker. It thus strains credulity too far to believe that they would not take precautions against this — no locked doors, no night guard. There is a constant threat of walkers, and there is no way at all that they would not take proper precautions when they have the means to do so. They are in survival mode. They have survived long enough to know that proactive behavior is necessary. They cannot merely respond to threats. Every time that happens — the original camp, Hershel's farm, the Governor's assault — people die. Lock the doors with keys. Can't do that? Tie the doors shut to the metal bars that are part of the door frame. Can't do that? Hammer a metal spike into a rough loop and put it in the wall or floor, then tie the door to that. Can't do that? Tie yourself to your bed. Don't want to do that? Tie yourself to a heavy object in the cell, or bring one in and tie yourself to that. The entire incident is just lazy writing. All of these things occurred to me before the breakout even happened, and I am not stuck in zombie survival mode. There is no way that no one in their huge group did not push for this, and no way that such an obvious suggestion would not be taken.
    • Except you keep missing the point; the odds of someone just spontaneously dying without warning are so long they are next to impossible. Your argument holds as much weight as "well while they were camped out in the R Vs they should have locked themselves in separate compartments in case one of them died in the night." What happened at the start of Season 4 was acknowledged by both medical experts as being a one-in-a-million circumstance that happens a grand total of once throughout the entire affair to two people (with all the people who catch the illness taking at least two days from the first symptoms to death to die, at which point they are separated from the others), and your ideas are frankly absurd; someone pushing for people to tie heavy objects to themselves every night? Saying that there is no way no one in the group pushed for that and that it's lazy writing shows a distinct lack of understanding how normal people think and operate, even under zombie survival mode. That is one step beyond "shoot every survivor you see because they could be a murderous cannibal" on the paranoia track. You're too busy thinking of ways to stay alive you're skipping the whole "living" part, because spending every waking second taking every last precaution against every last possible risk no matter how far-fetched (which the show establishes people going straight from healthy to dead within twelve hours is an incredibly rare feat) then what exactly are you living for? Plus your idea carries just as much risk to life as the alternative; you tie everyone down in their beds and then all of a sudden the Governor attacks again, well all of your defenders are fucked because they can't get out of their cells fast enough to get to their weapons and fight back, they die. This isn't lazy writing, this is the simple fact that people aren't going to just give up their lives and take ludicrous measures to combat highly improbable events from occurring.
    • You keep missing my point. First, my thinking is not abnormal at all. For one, I am not the OP, so clearly others thought the same thing. Furthermore, every single person I have talked to and half of the reviews I have read mentioned the exact same thing. It is not a matter of assuming the impossible. Does locking the doors or tying people down introduce any substantial risk? No. Does not doing so introduce any substantial risk? Yes, as the show demonstrated. Your suggestion that there would be risk if, say, the Governor attacked is flawed because the group would have ample warning, given that the group is presumably guarding the outside of the prison anyway. If there is enough time for someone to walk through an open cell door but not enough time to twist a key or slice through a rope or untie it, I would put the chances of surviving this extremely stealthy assault as 0% anyway. Keeping all individuals (save cases like Judith, who needs someone present to survive) separate during the night a dominant strategy that minimizes risk. This is not rocket science. It does not require a fancy degree or a high level of intelligence. It is just common sense. I am also surprised that you suggest that such a course of action would take away from living. That is like saying setting the alarm on my house is taking away from living. It requires seconds of time every night, and somehow I manage to summon the will to carry on with life. Making sure the cells are secure and having a night guard in every block is just good sense. In fact, it was so obvious that it was my first thought when they first took the prison, back in Season 3. It is not some transcendental mental magic or some cumbersome oppression. It is basic survival skills.
    • Do the block's residents even have keys to their cells? For all we know, any surviving prison guards might have fled the compound when it was originally overrun, taking the keys to a bunch of the cells with them.
    • Maybe maybe not. It doesn't really matter though because zombies are at best a little stronger than regular people (they don't hold back anything) and lack any real problem solving skills. A pair of jeans tied through the bars of the prison would probably keep most people from escaping through brute force the same way a wedge under a door would keep most zombies in as well even though it would only take a human two seconds to pull the wedge away from the door zombies aren't that bright.
    • One of the main problems with the lines of thinking on this page is that all the survivors are expected to think and behave rationally after a zombie apocalypse, when in all likeliness, everyone is suffering from mental problems, which would inhibit the ability to come up with these ideas. Another key factor is that when placed in a horrible situation, people want to feel comfortable. Yes tying a pair of jeans through a cell door would probably help keep them safe, but depending on how sick they are, tying it up and removing may not be so easy, which would mean they would be trapped in their cell, and even if they aren't sick, they usually have people on guard and they carefully checked and locked down the cell blocks from any zombie infested hallways. So yes, locking up the cell doors may be good sense, but this is their haven, their home. You set your alarm every night in your house, but do you lock your bedroom door when you go to bed? Chances are no, but even if you do, most people won't, and it's the same mentality here. Effectively the prison is their home and they own that area, at least, so they think they can do as they please. They took every precaution against zombies getting in to the cell blocks themselves, so locking all the cell doors would just feel unnecessary to them, and really the only reason they were attacked by zombies was because one of their own caught a strain of sickness most of them hadn't seen before, and that they had no idea it would be fatal, until they saw first hand and were attacked. And if you think it's a stupid mindset considering the world they live in, keep in mind the world didn't end too long ago (by my estimates, 3 or 4 years at best) so that mindset likely wouldn't have been broken yet.
    • (EDIT: this was written in response to someone who's original reply was deleted) How would a zombie get in to eat their brains? As I said, the cell block itself was locked down so that zombies couldn't get in, so why bother closing the cell doors? They all assumed they would be able to notice if a zombie got in the cell block and really, the only reason they were ambushed was because one of their number contracted an illness that he had no idea was fatal and no one else knew Patrick was that sick either. If you're talking about the sick ward, there is another reason to keep the doors open: It gives Hershel quick and easy access to those who are sick so they can be treated. Even if it takes 10 seconds to open the door, that's 10 seconds where it could be too late for him to get to them and they would be dead. People do not think rationally when they are sick, and they especially do not think rationally when they could be at the verge of death! I also fail to see the logic that going through an apocalypse and losing people that you care about AND having no access to therapy, will somehow make people more rational. Mental problems to not just go away, and they get much worse under stress, which being under seige by constant hordes of zombies will give you.
  • Just wanted to add something else to this discussion about locking your cell door at night: It isn't just the Walkers who are a potential threat. It may be horrible/depressing to think of things such as rape and murder but this is a very dark show and they are letting in random strangers who they barely know. It would only take one man to buckle under the strain and suddenly we have a cell block full of sleeping victims and a man who no longer gives a hoot whether he lives to see another day.
    • It being "a very dark show" doesn't mean people are going to randomly turn into murder-rapists. In fact, the show goes out of its way to show that the people at the prison are, until the flu strikes, living pretty idealistically. They get along, they trust each other, etc. It being "dark" doesn't mean what you think it means.
    • I didn't suggest (or mean to suggest) that it did. What was getting at is that they would only have to invite the wrong guy into the prison one time only for the sleeping residents to be in danger. What if for example they accidentally let in one of those bandits that Randall was rolling with in Season 2? The fact is that even normal well-balanced men will be highly likely to become desperate and mentally unhinged if they spend months in constant fear for their lives, suffer from prolonged starvation/thirst/illness and potentially have seen their loved ones eaten alive and to suggest otherwise is silly. This idealistic existence they were living was foolish and they eventually paid for it with their own blood.
    • You're acting like they just blindly open the door to anyone, when they don't. They do have something of a screening process, remember. They don't "accidentally" let someone in, they interview them and discuss it.
  • All this is short-circuited by the fact that most modern prisons have remote-activated locks on the cell doors, that likely didn't work without power. And even if they did, it requires someone in the control room locking and unlocking each individual cell (or all cells in the block), which would actually be a hazard if some other disaster struck requiring quick mobilization of the citizens.

• Hershel's extreme reluctance to be the one to destroy the brains of his dead patients seems inconsistent with his being a veterinarian. While human doctors' ethics dictate that they preserve lives first and foremost, vets are trained to consider the alleviation of suffering their primary goal: euthanasia is a routine and respectable part of their profession. In his years of veterinary practice, he'd have put down possibly hundreds of animals that were sick, injured, or aged beyond the point of hope, so why is Hershel so very unwilling to take comparable measures with his human patients, who aren't even alive to feel him do it and are even farther beyond hope?
  • Not sure when he refused to destroy the brains of his dead patients. I know that he refused to do it in front of the other patients because he wanted to keep hope alive in the others, but at no point do I remember him saying he's not going to prevent their reanimation.
  • I didn't say he wanted to interfere with the dead patients' brain-destruction; I'm just saying that it took a long time and pretty desperate circumstances before Hershel was willing to perform that act himself instead of letting one of his helpers do it for him. A veterinarian really ought to be more comfortable with euthanasia than that.
  • There's a world of difference between putting a suffering horse or dog out of it's misery and sticking a knife into the skull of a human being who was breathing two minutes ago. Especially for someone as kind-hearted as Hershel.

• Why does The Governor kill Martinez, right as Martinez is about to offer him the opportunity to rule along side him? Why doesn't he beat him to death with the club while he'd down and then feed him to the zombies instead of messily feeding him to the zombies while he's still alive?
  • The Governor is still bitter over Martinez' betrayal. The also does not desire to share power. Martinez would very likely be a more humane leader and would reign in The Governor's more extreme ideas. Martinez also knew about The Governor's past which makes him even more of a liability. And The Governor had no idea who would be coming around to check on them. If someone came up to him beating Martinez to death with a golf club, it'd be a dead giveaway to what he was doing. But holding Martinez over the pit gives a convenient alibi should someone stumble in — Oh, I tried to catch Martinez but the Walkers were too strong.
    • That makes sense to me, except the Governor yelling "I don't want it!" as he was doing it.
    • Because the Governor is a fucking sociopath. This wasn't some precision-planned coup where he was covering every contingency, this was him snapping like a twig and murdering Martinez because he was in a rage blackout. He wasn't playing with a full deck here, so there's really no reason to assume he's running on full logic.
  • At this point in time, the Governor didn't want to lead Woodbury 2.0. He's halfway through a Heel–Face Turn, and he still remembers the things he did the last time he was in charge, the sort of person he became, and is traumatized by it. So when Martinez offers to be "Co-Leaders" he immediately assumes the worst, that this is Martinez's way of appointing him a successor and stepping down, or that Martinez will die, etc. -and that he will be left as the sole leader of the survivors, a responsibility he doesn't want. So he panics and kills Martinez to avoid it. It's only later, after he tries to run and realizes it's futile, that he decides to take control and the old Governor reemerges.
  • The Governor is an addict, and his addiction is power. As mentioned, he's in the middle of a Heel–Face Turn, and he's trying to kick that addiction. Think about it this way. . . a man who's trying with all his might to stay sober for his family has just been offered a keg and a 21-year-old bottle of Scotch by an old friend who really should know better. Said recovering addict would have every right to be violently pissed off. The realities of the Walking Dead world let the Governor immediately point out to Martinez the depth of his mistake.
  • Just to add onto all this, the Governor specifically attacks Martinez right after the man admits that he's not entirely certain he can keep the group safe—he even presses him to clarify on that, and the drunk Martinez responds in a way that might suggest he expects to fail. So the Governor kills him because he (thinks) that he knows better on how to take care of his people and doesn't want anyone getting in the way of that. The reason why he's shouting "I don't want it!", and why he panics and tries to leave later, is because he doesn't want to do a hostile takeover, but he can't stop himself once his old instincts kick in.

• What did Governor was trying to achieve with his — mind you — second attack on prison? Rick stated all the obvious things about the assault before it even started, right in front of attacking force. That without the fence the place is useless. That the shoot-out will not only cost many lives of both sides, but also lure dozens of walkers. Who will roam free into the prison without the fence. And it all happend. More. They used the tank as a demolition machine, breaking and tearing apart cell-blocks they were tryign to capture and live in later. So what's the point of the attack beside revange before any reason? Not to mention that it's clear to all viewers that Governor lost it way in the third season, so he's practically a madman leading bunch of sheeps on slaughter. Which he can't win. Or gain anything from. Which makes him look like an idiot. But compelling antagonist? Hardly.
  • More, what's the point on going to the prison anyway? As far as it was shown in previous episode, Governor's group may be lacking supplies, but they are in low-infested area. And with enough manpower to recreate another community like Woodbury. Instead of taking what they got or starting somewhere else with only walkers to deal with, they decide to attack well-defended, well-guarded and well-armed prison inhabited by people who not only proved themselves dangerous, but also beat Governor in the past.
  • Not to mention that everyone is listening Governor like some kind of God-chosen leader, even after Rick is directly addressing his group about how wasteful and needless the attack is.
    • Number 1: The Governor is a psychopath but all evidence points towards a genuine love for his new family. If revenge was all he cared about he would have murdered Michonne immediately after capture, hidden the body from the camp and used Hershel as bait. Numbers 2 and 3: The Governor explained very well why the prison is superior: Sooner or later bandits or a horde of Walkers will overrun it as it essentially has no major defences. Hershel's farm is a perfect and indisputable example. As for listening to him like a God-chosen leader? they weren't. They were listening to him because they agreed with him and because none of them had the balls to stand up to him. Oh and incidentally Rick's group only defeated the Governor the first time around because they launched a sneak attack on his militia and they ran away frightened. Its a completely different scenario and everyone involved the first time around knows it.
  • None of them could get the message, or stand up to him, even after he sliced off someone's head?
    • Actually at this point it becomes closer to self-defence as Rick and party were shooting at them — it's not exactly inconceivable they weren't expecting much leniency if they surrendered especially if they knew Hershal's daughters were amongst those gunning for them. Retreat wouldn't have seemed like much of an option either as they had been fed the lies that the prison was full of bandits so a few of them may even have been scared of a revenge assault against their camp... which is exactly what Rick would have done so its a completely justified fear frankly. Only we the viewer know that they would have spared the innocent.
  • Moreover, it's entirely possible that the Governor simply can't stand the idea that Rick might be right about the groups being able to share the prison, or about how people who've done terrible things can still come back from them. He has to believe it's not possible, that there's no alternative to violence in this dead-plagued world. Because if Rick is correct about that, then the Governor has no justification whatsoever for murdering Martinez or Mitch's brother — not even his self-chosen, threadbare excuse that it's the only way he can keep Lily and Meghan alive — and his descent back into murder and power-madness is entirely his own choice, his own fault. He murders Hershel for spite's sake because he can't accept what Rick is offering, and his feeble self-justification still falls apart on him when Lily shows up with Meghan's corpse, proving that his own violent methods couldn't protect the girl any better than peaceful ones could.
  • I look at it this way; Episode 6 is the World saying to the Governor "Oh look, you can come back," whilst Episode 7 is the world in true Walking Dead style turning around and saying "Oh you thought you could turn back? Well let's just throw all this problems at you and stop you from being able to run away from it." For a brief moment the Governor is honestly considering what Rick is saying, that you can still come back from things, but then he remembers Episode 7 and how all his attempts to avoid the same mistakes never worked out for him and utters "Liar."
  • Rick said that he knew that they were not too far gone. That they get to come back. That they all can change. The governor knew that HE (the governor) was too far gone. He couldn't change. So he called Rick a Liar, and proved him to be one by decapitating Hershel.
  • My take is that the Governor doesn't care about justification for the murders. He is a psychopath; he started murdering again exactly when he thought it was in his interest. And he doesn't really care if Rick is right about what's possible for the prison. What he can't stand is that Rick is able to be the better man, to be more calm, collected, and humble, and say more things that the followers on both sides would want to hear than he can. His murder of Hershel is him giving up on retaining the appearance of the moral high ground among his followers, and simply betting (correctly) that the latter would just have to fight for him now that Rick's group will open fire.
  • The truth about the Governor is that, first and foremost, he's not only a psychopath, but a petty and vindictive psychopath. The Governor seems to feel that, on some level, Rick and his group have wronged him (despite the Governor himself being the aggressor in most of their interactions). It's true that he sincerely cares about Lilly and Meghan, but at the end of the day, he's just using them as an excuse to get his petty revenge on Rick's group the best way he knows how: kick them out of their safe place. The fact that he did this makes it clear that while he does care about Lilly and Meghan, he's simply too vindictive to really put them ahead of his hatred for Rick's group and he'll still opt to destroy the best refuge around so that nobody gets it than let Rick's group have it. My interpretation of episodes 6-8 of this season was that the Governor was shown that he's capable of redemption, that he's still human, and he had been presented with the perfect opportunity to redeem himself (and a lot of what he went through between Seasons 3 and 4 was similar to what Rick went through in Seasons 1 and 2 if you look at it the right ways), but he still actively chose spite over common sense. To me, it was to show that he can't be a good guy because he's just a bad guy by nature.
  • Mentioned above, but think of the Governor as an addict whose addiction is power, and things make a lot more sense. He's essentially high the entire scene (he's got a whole group of people hanging on his every word, they're ready to kill and die for him, and they brought a mother-fucking tank. And after Rick's speech, he's faced with the prospect of once again being denied his addiction, having his high stolen. Rick's offered the Governor's people sanctuary, peacefully, and Gov knows several of his people are just desperate enough to take it. Once again, Rick is about to take away everything he's worked to build, everything that matters to him. So he kills Hershel to force the issue. As for why attack the prison in the first place? Every addict needs more. More booze, more blow, more sex. Gov needs more power. He controls twenty people, now he needs forty. He controls a small, barely-defended camp, now he needs a fortress. And the ultimate rush of power? Taking power away from the only one you can think of who has more than you, and took your power in the first place.

• Would throwing a grenade down a tank's barrel really kill the operators and cause the whole thing to catch fire? I know absolutely nothing about how tanks operate but I would think that the firing mechanism would be sealed and separated from the cabin.
  • Not in a tank that size; you have to be able to load new shells into the barrel, which has to be done by hand (at least in all the tanks I've seen in movies). Dropping the grenade down wouldn't be enough to wipe out the entire tank, but it would be enough to set off any tank shells waiting in the barrel, or in the cabin if the tube was open for reloading, and those shells would be enough to cause the whole thing to catch fire. The real issue would be that the grenade should have exploded way earlier since they should only have a five second fuse. I suppose you could handwave it as the grenade's handle was being pressed in by the barrel until they opened it up for reloading, which would fit the timeframe presented in the episode.
  • It's plausable to kill everyone inside the tank with a single granade, when it's thrown inside by any means (but it's usually unsealed hatch in ubran combat). Basic M60 Patton's (the tank they used) loading system is build in such way that anything that can fit inside the barrel can roll inside it it's under any angle allowing such roll. The part that takes some Willing Suspension of Disbelief is the fire. Hand-grenade shouldn't ignite fire nor fracture anything fuel-related (engine compartment is in the rear section, sealed from the crew compartment) and setting explosion of ammunition rack is not that easy. So yes, the grenade would render the tank inoperatable, yes, it would kill everyone inside and the fire is possible, but somewhat unlikely. It doesn't mean it's impossible. The chances are simply low. So let's just assume they used few dashes of Rule of Cool.

• Is anyone seriously buying the idea that the Governor, who lost his daughter Penny, pushing him down the slippery slope to mental instability, would permit his substitute daughter Meghan to play in a pile of mud far away from everyone else? Its suspicious coloring aside, I find it impossible to believe that a man who has grown attached to a substitute for his daughter would be so reckless, especially given that the same episode includes a speech about the dangers of the position of the camp and its inevitable downfall to the walkers. Furthermore, while he and most other camp members are attacking the prison, Lilly is on top of an RV, very busy NOT paying attention to her own daughter. This is the same daughter that was almost killed by a walker in the camp not too long ago. After all of the grief that inattentive parenting has caused, the situation is totally implausible.
  • As he pointed out, on one side of her was a river that walkers couldn't cross, on the other side the layout would limit the walkers to only one direction they could come in which they could see coming ahead of time. Lilly is on top of the RV yes, which happens to give her the best vantage point to see Zombies coming in every direction except for directly below the ground beneath their feet, a situation which had not come up before in the entire series. It's not implausible at all; Lilly was protecting her from every direction except the one that the walker actually came from, which nobody could have seen coming since they didn't know the mud was on top of a flood area.
    • Meghan was playing next to a forest. The show has set a clear precedent for walkers appearing out of nowhere against all odds; this has been stated time and time again on the main page and on this sub-page. Meghan ran into a walker in the middle of the camp earlier in the season, so clearly the camp is badly defended after all. No one could reach Meghan if there was a problem or if a walker stayed out of Lilly's view, such as when her attention was focused on the river. Lilly's position on the RV does not permit her to see through the forest. Furthermore, all of that is irrelevant: if one asked the Governor whether the risk to Meghan was greater if she was near armed adults or off on her own, we know what he would answer. Again, these characters have survived the zombie apocalypse. The suggestion that they would take unnecessary risks is risible. Keeping Meghan locked in an RV or sitting right next to Lilly is less risky than letting her play where she was playing, therefore it is inconceivable that anyone would let her play far away without someone right next to her. Given the fate of every single child in the series who strayed from his or her parents, there is no way the parents would continue to take such unnecessary risks with their children.
    • You keep missing the point that they aren't at the camp, the Governor took them somewhere else, hence why that river only appears in that episode. If a walker appeared from the forest there's plenty of time to go back to the RV, Lily is armed with a gun, and more to the point the both of them are within walking distance of the prison, where the Governor is currently making a lot of noise that is attracting any zombies on that side of the river away from the RV. This is the same point you're missing over at the question about "why don't they lock themselves in their cells every night or tie heavy objects in case they just spontaneously die in their sleep?" There comes a point where the risk of something happening is so out there that it's not even worth considering. Meghan stays in the RV? The RV roof could collapse and crush her. Sitting on top of it with Lilly? A stray bullet hits her. Sitting behind it, making no sound and staying still? Hit by a meteorite. There comes a point where you just have to stop worrying about all the implausible ways you could die and just start living.
    • You keep missing my point. They are not at the camp. They are in a new area, and Lilly was alone on top of an RV, too far away from her daughter to protect her with a gun if a walker popped out of the forest. Keeping Meghan out of literal reach is a completely unnecessary risk, given that the group has not erected a perimeter that they can guarantee is impermeable to any walker. Keeping Meghan close by is a dominant strategy. Many characters in the show have died because of separation, however minuscule, from others. To say that the risk of the RV roof collapsing is equal quantitatively to that of dying from a walker attack is preposterous given the track record of the show. How many individuals have died because of roof collapses? How many have died from walker attacks when they were separated or away from the group? How did Sophia get lost? How many times in Season 2 did Carl wander off, only for disastrous consequences to follow? How many problems resulted when the children were safely locked in a confined space or within grasp of their parents? The evidence speaks for itself. Everyone knows it. If everyone just stayed together and took basic precautions that are obvious to viewers even before the shit hits the fan, there would be many more survivors on the show. Still implausible.
    • You've never had to deal with kids or teenagers much, have you? Lilly likely allowed Meghan to play out of arm's reach because it would have been easier to let her, than to just keep her locked in the RV, because kids like to be independent and go off on their own, which is what happened to Carl. Keep in mind, kids really don't have a grasp of just how dangerous the world can be until they get a lot older, and also let's take a look at the scenario itself: Lilly is on top of the RV and Meghan is by a pile of mud, which is surrounded by fairly steep rocks that no walker would be able to climb easily without being seen or heard, so really from Lilly's point of view, Meghan was safe. She was distracted by a walker trying to cross the raging river, and the zombie that attacked Meghan had been buried in a mud slide and so therefore both of them were caught off guard (really, how were either of them supposed to know that the walker was buried under there?), keep in mind, Lilly and Meghan led a fairly sheltered life from walkers until now, so it isn't surprising that they would make this mistake. The consequences may be obvious to the viewers, because we are not in that situation but rather observers. Of course it's obvious to the viewers what should be done, because we are thinking rationally about this with 20/20 hindsight, the characters in the show don't have the foresight to realize that a walker is buried under the mud where Meghan is playing, or that the walker, Carl is taunting will break out the mud it's stuck in and follow him back to the farm, etc. Plus as I've stated before, most of the protagonists are suffering from mental problems, so it's no surprise that any of this could happen. Finally, they are still human and contrary to popular belief, HUMANS ARE NOT RATIONAL BEINGS, especially in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, I don't get why this is so hard to understand, people make bad choices and stupid descisions all the damn time.
    • (EDIT: this was written in response to someone who's original reply was deleted) Ok, Meghan was not in the middle of a forest, because Lily could see her and was keeping an eye in all directions in case a walker tried to sneak up on them, and again, the only reason that Meghan was killed was because that walker came out of the fucking ground, and neither Lily nor Meghan had the omniscient viewer knowledge to realize that it was there (hell, when I first saw that scene, I didn't realize the walker was there until the mud started shifting).

• The behavior of Mitch Dolgen strikes me as extremely unrealistic. The governor murders his brother, flat-out admits it (with the only explanation being something along the lines "He was weak. It had to be done."), then forces him at gunpoint to become his Dragon and Mitch just rolls with it. He may not have been at the best of terms with Pete, but he was still his brother while the Governor was just some unsympathetic stranger he had met only days ago. Considering Mitch was something of a rough guy, why didn't he try to kill the Governor at the first opportunity? What's more, the writers could have avoided this issue by just making Mitch and Pete former neighbors or army buddies or something like that, since them being brothers doesn't have any importance for the plot at all.
  • It's called "please don't kill me" syndrome and the fact that deep-down Mitch is a coward. Look at his last appearance; he's all full of bravado and talking down to Rick while he's sitting in a tank, then the second he loses the tank he turns all meek and surrenders instantly (not that it saves him). The Governor has him at gunpoint, and is more or less saying "you work for me or you die." By that point he's already committed to being an accessory to his brother's death and cover-up and the Governor is the leader and beloved by his subjects. Even if he could kill him the rest of the people would take revenge (and as far as we can tell Mitch doesn't know where Pete's body is hidden so he can't prove anything). It's not that unrealistic; there are plenty of examples throughout history where the fear of death was enough to get normal people to do horrible things to their own families to survive. As for the reason behind Mitch and Pete being brothers, the purpose of that was to contrast with Merle and Daryl's relationship. It's a minor touch, but it tells a lot more about the character that doesn't have to be spelled out.

• Why did Lily and Governor have sex in the truck where her daughter and sister were sleeping? Were they worried they would run into walkers if they go out in the woods?
  • Yes.

• The episode with Hershel tending to the various ill people in the prison block seemed to end with Hershel going out of the prison with Michonne. As far as I can tell this is the same day that Rick arrives back at the prison without Carol, and is therefore also the same day where he and Carol spend several hours going around that small town (where they meet that couple who get killed), including travelling there and back. The Governor kidnaps Hershel and Michonne (this is after Rick has returned), keeps them in his caravan (trailer) at his camp, gives his speech, rallies his people, and attacks the prison by travelling there. The implication in the latest episode "After" based on Michonne being in the vicinity of the prison and killing Hershel's reanimated head is that this also takes place immediately after the prison massacre. As well as the stuff including Rick and Carl walking around until they find that house. Unless I'm missing something, *all* of these events take place in ONE DAY?! Did they mess up with the continuity? Or am I being unreasonable by thinking that this stretches belief?
  • It probably took Rick at least a day to get back to the prison after dropping off Carol, as they'd already searched all the nearby towns for everything useful and wouldn't have expected to find medicines (let alone living people) in those. The Governor probably also held Hershel and Michonne overnight: a possibility that probably wouldn't have alarmed the prison group much, as Hershel'd just gone through hell locked in the quarantine ward and nobody would've been surprised that he wanted a good, long break out on a "run".

• In "After", how the heck did Lizzie manage to kill those young rabbits without any of them either running like hell, fighting back, or screaming like a baby? With only two hands and three rabbits, it'd be impossible to kill one while restraining both of the others, let alone do so without getting all bloody and/or nipped and scratched by a terrified bunny. At the very least, the last to die should've had time to shriek, and a dying rabbit's shriek would've been heard for a few hundred yards, never mind by people sitting a few feet away.
  • The how is a very good question however I can answer the why: The script writers are foreshadowing the fact that it was probably her killing the rats back before the prison fell. She is after all clearly on the lunatic fringe (willing as she is to smother a baby) and in real life budding psychopaths generally begin by abusing the weak first such as animals or children.

• Did a scene get cut out when Lizzie was suffocating the baby? Mika fires her gun at a walker, but the next scene it shows Carol bringing the girls to Tyrese. WTH? We don't know if Carol saw Lizzie smothering the baby or not. I find the editing very odd. Carol had to see Lizzie harming the baby.
  • Quite possibly Carol did. There is a fan theory that it was Lizzie not Carol that murdered Tyreese's girlfriend at the start of the season and that Carol burned the bodies to hide the evidence and then took the blame to protect her. Its not really that unlikely when you consider the fact that Lizzie is a borderline nut and Carol has a Mama Bear thing going on (she may even be substituting Lizzie for Sophia in her mind).
    • The problem with that theory is that she confesses to Tyreese after Lizzie's death. At that point she'd have no reason to be covering for Lizzie anymore, and Tyreese would have had little difficulty believing it if she'd explained that Lizzie committed the murders. Indeed, Carol perceives that by confessing to the murders, she's not only putting herself at risk of Tyreese's wrath, but also causing him additional pain. She goes ahead with it only because she feels that at that point—after what she had to do to Lizzie—he was in a better position to understand.
    • Not exactly. The reason she told him was that after killing Lizzie she'd lost most of her hope and didn't really care anymore what Tyreese did to her. If he killed her, fine; it would be what she deserved.

• So am I the only one that thinks that everyone is just a little bit too eager to head to this Sanctuary place down the tracks? I get why Tyreese and Carol would be so willing to head there considering they are protecting two kids and a baby but Rick and Michonne? without even a sideways glance or handwave or spoken worry that this place could be exactly like Woodbury? or that it could in fact be the home base of that gang of bandits they just escaped from? Bear in mind that this is one/two days tops since the Governor destroyed the prison, killed Hershel and seemingly killed every single one of their comrades, including Rick's daughter. I'm just not buying that they would be so happy to introduce themselves to what is potentially another psychotic warlord so soon after being devastated from fighting the last one.
  • They needed a goal. Michonne asked Rick about one point blank at the beginning of the episode, but he decided he wanted a day to think it over. Well, he didn't even make it a few hours before he had to fight for his life from said bandits. I think we can all safely assume it won't be exactly what's promised, but they do need something to work towards. It does seem reasonable to assume they will scope it out a little beforehand.
  • It helps that they have no safe haven, limited ammo, Rick is still in a bad way and they only have a small amount of supplies. Taking a gamble on Terminus beats starving to death in the wild or getting eaten by walkers.
  • The logic behind going to Terminus is further spelled out by Maggie and Bob in "Alone": the signs are posted alongside train tracks all over the area, so other dispersed survivors are likely to have spotted them and followed the map, either seeking safety or in the hope of finding their former companions. Whether or not its promised safety is for real, Terminus is the only destination they can realistically expect others from the prison to share with them.

• It bothers me that Michone doesn't wash her swords after a kill. So if Governor had miraclously survived Michone's stabbing, would the walker blood on her sword had infected him?
  • Who says she doesn't? We don't see her do it, but we also don't see her sleep, eat a whole lot, drink, go to the bathroom, etc. etc. but we take it for granted that she does so because we understand that it would be very boring to see all the trivial little moments of their life. She just cleans it when there are no walkers around because it makes no sense to clean it when you're going to get it dirty two seconds later.
  • She must wash it. Swords, like any other weapon designed for cutting flesh, must be washed after every use, minimum. If not properly maintained, the residue will cause the sword to rust and become useless; therefore, Michonne must be cleaning it regularly.

• I'm all for shipping in fictional shows, but no one is bothered by the fact the writers are hinting a possible romance between a 18 year girl and a 45 year old guy? Daryl is a nice guy, but Beth isn't fully matured. She still likes to have fun and get drunk like a high school student. This girl wanted to get drunk in a forest full of walkers.
  • To be honest; no it doesn't. 1) She's an adult, not a teenager or a child, and as such there is nothing morally/legally wrong with any relationship between them and 2) Even if there was, you simply can not apply our values and culture to world that is essentially facing the complete extinction of the human race. Both Beth and Daryl know they are potentially moments away from being eaten by Walkers, murdered by bandits or otherwise injuring themselves in a world without any kind of professional medical care whatsoever. In these circumstances, turning down love and/or companionship solely because of age (within reason obviously) would be verging on the Idiot Ball. Besides which; they actually have a lot to offer each other relationship-wise. Beth needs Daryl's experience, fighting ability and knowledge; Daryl needs someone to be his voice of reason in the same way Rick needed Hershel.
  • If it helps, Daryl's supposed to be 35. And Beth's desire to drink was less about "having fun" and more about experiencing something she never has before. The life they had built for themselves was destroyed and potentially everyone they know is dead. Beth was faced with the fact that she could die at any moment and that she had no control over it, or really much of anything. So she took control where she could and decided she would do something new.

• This is a minor one but am I the only one that thinks the opening teaser to episode 14 ripped off the opening to Fallout? its the exact same song, same juxtaposition between devastation and happiness and it even ends with a similar dramatic sound effect. Surely it must have been inspired at the very least.
  • It's not a rip off, as the Fallout opening is the first glimpse of that world and serves a separate purpose. The only actual similarity is the song; Fallout pans out to the scenery, Walking Dead goes to the action. Plus the number of people who have actually played the original Fallout would be quite small. It's just as likely that both the writer for this episode and Fallout got the idea from the same source.
    • There are endless numbers of songs to choose from, but for a post apocalyptic story to pick that exact song in that exact context has to be an homage. And Fallout isn't some obscure game, it's one of the largest franchises around.
    • More people have played Fallout 3 and New Vegas than the original 1 and 2, largely because the PS3 and 360 gamer userbase was larger than the one available for PC at the time (not getting into the fact that I could spend a good ten minutes listing off gaming franchises larger than Fallout). So no, it doesn't have to be a homage, it could be that they chose "Maybe" because it lends itself to that kind of setting, the same way that if a film uses "What a Wonderful World" over scenes of violence they're not ripping of 13Monkeys or any other specific film that has used it before.
  • Fallout 1 used "Maybe". "A Kiss to Build a Dream on" was Fallout 2.
  • For what it's worth, in The Talking Dead afterward they talked about the scene's similarity to Fallout—"they" including one of the actresses on the show—so either it was intentional or at the very least they were aware of it.

• Minor one, but if Lizzie thinks Walkers are people and gets mad that they die, why did she help kill the Walkers that attacked when Mika got caught in the fence? Was it because Carol and Tyreese were right there when it happened or what? It seemed like she was going to let Mika get bitten until Carol and Tyreese showed up so why did she kill Walkers when just earlier she freaked out and called Carol a murder for killing a Walker she was "playing" with?
  • She clearly understands that they are dangerous and she states she understands that sometimes we have to kill them. She makes the distinction when they find the hurt walker on the train tracks. Her issue with Carol is that she didn't feel she was in any real danger (and if we've learned anything over the last four seasons it's that individual walkers that you're fully aware of are next to harmless so she wasn't in any real danger) and was trying to lead it away from where they were staying. Don't get me wrong that qualifies her for the Too Dumb to Live club in a heart beat but she had a plan and a mostly rational one at that. Certainly no more fucked up than Hershel's.
  • That makes more sense, but then why did she save Mika when the next day she killed her to turn her into a Walker? Seems a bit odd that she flip flops so weirdly between understandting that their dangerous, and then saying their harmless, but I guess thats, as you said, the Individual Walker vs the Herd.
  • I think Lizzie is just insane simple as that. She's not that different to the Governor when you really think about it; he also showed multiple instances of genuine compassion for Woodbury, his daughter and for his new family and yet was also capable of spontaneous acts of extreme violence without conscience against those he supposedly cared for. Its also likely that their final step across the lunatic fringe was also similar; for the Governor it was Michonne murdering his daughter and for Lizzie it was probably her parents turning into walkers. I can however understand the logic behind her point of view; she probably feels that walkers are just humans who are ill and just don't know any better and as such they should be treated with the respect you would afford someone with extreme alzheimer's for example. Hershel and to a lesser extent Beth hold similar views. Its just that her belief in walker-rights is twisted beyond measure.
  • Lizzie states earlier that she "knows what she has to do now." And later states she killed Mika to show Carol and Tyresse that walkers are just different. She wasn't planning on killing her the day before, it was only after Carol killed her "friend" that she decided she needed to "show" them that walkers were OK.
    • I wouldn't compare Lizzie with the Governor except to say that both characters—as well as Hershel—convinced themselves walkers were somehow alive and sentient, and in all three cases it seemed to be a coping mechanism to deal with the tragedies in their own lives. But they still were very different people. Hershel approached the issue as a compassionate doctor: the walkers were sick people in need of treatment. The Governor didn't seem to care about walkers other than his daughter, and it stemmed in large part from his desire for control. Lizzie viewed the walkers as fascinating playmates, and unlike the other two she'd completely stopped recognizing the fundamental division between the species. She wasn't evil or malicious, she had lost her grip on reality, and the sad thing is that it was probably in part reflective of the fact that she was still a child—it was not the kind of psychosis you'd expect to see in an adult.

• In "Us", Sgt. Ford's group finds a working minivan. He wants to drive it to Washington, but Eugene convinces him (and the rest) to head to Terminus instead. Ok, fine, but why did they abandon the van? Eugene clearly says it's "a day's walk" to Terminus, and the group arrives on foot.
  • Eight adults and all of their equipment are not going to fit in a minivan. They tend to seat seven, and that's cramped even if it's mostly children.
    • They don't have all that much equipment, not even everyone has a backpack or a gun. And if the alternative is hiking through zombieland while one of your party has an injured leg, then asking Maggie to sit on Glenn's lap or someone to sit in the back atop a backpack is much lesser concern. At very least, it can be bartered or used for a quick exit if Terminus turns out to be bad news.
    • They could have taken the van as far as it'd go and left it just offscreen, where it'll be the quick escape twist used at the end of the next episode.

• I find it odd Joe doesn't mind a member putting another member in a chokehold over a bed, but framing a guy by putting a dead rabbit in his sack is a big no no.
  • The Chokehold wasn't deadly in and of itself, plus that's not breaking one of the rules. Also, framing someone else isn't against the rules either. Note that Joe didn't call on the others to bet up Len until after he said he lied. He made a point of getting him to admit he lied, so that is presumably one of the rules.
    • Considering that he sets his gang onto Daryl just after calling him a liar, I'd say that's a safe assumption.
  • Len was the one who violated the "claim" and choked out Tony, IIRC. If so, then it's possible that the transgression was temporarily forgotten in the scuffle with the walker Rick left and then weighed on Joe when he decided to have Len killed.

• Isn't killing a member a dumb thing to do? I know it is to demonstrate how evil the character is, but in a zombie apocalyptic world, you'll need a lot of men to survive. What would the villain do if he is down to 2 people because the others pissed him off?
  • Difference between being pissed off and framing someone else is that one is just emotions and can be dealt with, the other is a betrayal/treachery. In a zombie apocalypse numbers is important but if you can't trust someone not to stab you or someone else in the back then there is no point in keeping them around.

• Does anyone else think that this cure Eugene is going to Washington to help develop that is going to save the human race according to Abraham suffers from an awful lot of Fridge Logic? Even if you manage to create a vaccine against both the airborne strain and Walker bites; it would still not change the fact that most of the worlds population (at minimum in the region of hundreds of millions) are still mindless monsters with a lot of endurance that are out to eat you. Secondly you would never be able to administer the vaccine on most of the humans due to the fact that they are well spread out over a vast territory with no working television or radio - and that is even whether they trust you enough to take it in the first place. The Governor might have opened the doors to Woodbury if he was on one of his less psychotic days; but gangs of bandits like those run by Joe certainly wouldn't. As such you would never be able to remove the threat of new Walkers being born completely. The real Fridge Horror here is if Abraham genuinely believes that they are going to Washington to develop a serum that works on actual Walkers; because who the Hell would want to be cured if their guts are hanging out and their flesh is rotting away?
  • Did they ever actually say they were going to create a cure for the Walker virus? IIRC, they only said that Eugene knew how the whole thing started and how to stop it. And keep in mind Abraham is the one saying this, I don't recall Eugene himself mentioning it, and since Abraham is a soldier, he likely wouldn't get the full details from his superiors. Regardless, considering where they are at this point in the show, I think we should just wait and see how it turns out (or even if it turns out at all).
  • Even if all Eugene is promising is a way to ensure that no new walkers arise, rather than eliminating the existing ones, it'd still be a vast improvement over the current situation: at least they could start whittling down the zombies' numbers via attrition, rather than add to their ranks every time there's a fight or plague or whatever.
  • A cure is unlikely, if not impossible, but there is always the possibility of a vaccine. (Cure = getting rid of an ailment. Vaccine = preventing any more people from GETTING said ailment.) And, if you read the comics, you'd know, or at least suspect, Eugene is probably full of shit, since in the comics he was just a high-school science teacher.

• How come Michonne's leashed walker trick isn't utilized for the most part during this season? It's proven to work, much more hygienic than covering yourself in walker guts and they're safe to handle. They look like they could have prevented unnecessary deaths during supply runs and maybe they could have been used near the fence to trick other walkers into leaving it alone.

The TV show 5

• So... is the whole point of the rape flashback at the end meant to make us feel sorry for the denizens of Terminus? The fact that they have a storage closet full of teddy bears with no owners should clue us in that they were irredeemable scum. Both Woodbury and the prison are proof that you can pull off a sanctuary that doesn't enjoy slaughtering and eating innocent children perfectly fine... these people make the Governor look cuddly.
  • It's to make it clear that they weren't born like this, the world and the things that happened to them turned them into monsters, with the implication that this sort of thing may well happen to Rick and his group.
  • Once upon a time the Terminus people were in the exact same situation as Rick and his group, and they went to extremes to survive against another group. Rick managed to avoid going as far as they did, but he still wanted to go back and kill every last Terminus survivor before moving on, so it's not entirely without merit.
    • To Rick's point, he was not entirely unjustified in making sure they were dead. Not long before, killing one man and escaping Joe's group led to them chasing him across half of Georgia and nearly cost all of them their lives.
    • And before that, he doesn't kill Andrew himself which resulted in his wife's and T-Dog's deaths.
    • Moreover, not making sure the Governor was dead after Woodbury's fall is what Rick thinks got his baby daughter killed.
  • Adding to everything above, it's almost stated outright at the beginning and then proved at the end that Terminus used to be exactly what it advertised, but was taken over by another, more violent group. An uprising happened and the original group regained ground, but instead of taking in new survivors, they refused to trust them as they did the first time. The "Never again, never trust" is pretty indicative of what would have happened to Rick's group had they let anyone in indiscriminately. Not that it excuses anything that they did, but a big theme so far in this season seems to be "our people vs. them," with both Termites and Rick's group pretty securely in the belief that they only have each other.
  • In fairness to Rick's group and Woodbury neither prove you can let people in indiscriminately and survive. Rick's group have some kind of screening process, (Have you killed anybody, anybody living? How many? Why?) and the Governor may or may not have been letting in anybody lucky enough to stumble up on Woodbury but as is demonstrated when he finds the downed helicopter he's clearly not letting in any and everybody. In particular he seemed wary of organized groups. By contrast Terminus was advertising to everybody in what appears to be a ten mile or more radius where to come find them and that everybody was welcome. Not defending eating children no matter how good a point was made that caring for a baby is currently Too Dumb to Live , a little like grabbing an anchor when you're lost in the ocean with no boat but no Rick and Woodbury don't prove you can take in every stray you meet and do just fine because neither of them bring in every stray they find and Rick was scolded severely for doing that in Season 2.
    • Moreover, if the Governor's behavior in the second group he took over was any indication, he was probably killing off potential rivals or troublemakers in Woodbury also. Rick's group screened out unsuitable people when they arrived, the Governor did it afterward.

• I know this is the a tv show and everybody has Improbable Aiming Skills but how exactly did Carol using a rifle like a mortar hit a gas tank a few hundred yards away with a firework? For dozens of reasons mostly amounting to they were never meant to be aimed with any precision fire works are hard to accurately aim more than a few feet. Most people would miss a car on the far side of the street nine tries out of ten.
  • She shot the tank first, puncturing it. So the firework didn't have to hit the tank - just the big cloud of propane billowing from it. Which is only slightly more plausible!

• Is there any accurate gauge of how much time is supposed to have passed? As far as I can tell Season 1 is supposed to happen over the course of a few days to a few weeks at the very most. Season 2 is a few months and ends in a time skip before Season 3. It is specifically mentioned that winter passed in the interim. In addition Lori is still pregnant at that point and it's heavily implied to be as likely Shane's as Rick's So no more than nine months have passed at that point since Rick joined the group since she shut Shane down pretty hard at that point. They were at the prison long enough to get comfortable, gather some livestock and start farming but beyond that no accurate markers are given. It seems that less than two years have passed in universe but. . .Carl does not look two years older than when the show started. Closer to five. . .
  • It's a little over two years. And to answer the Carl reason, it's because the actor started at like age 11 or 12, and he's now 15 years old. Kids tend to age RAPIDLY from 12 to 15.

• In The Stinger to Episode 1, are we supposed to know what the marks on the trees are?
  • And for that matter, who drew them?
  • There is a similar marking on a tree at the end of episode 2 just before Bob gets attacked. Clearly it is meant to be part of some kind of plot arc. My guess is that these markings are related to Father Gabriel and/or the group that has kidnapped Beth in some way.
  • Gareth explains this to Bob in S 5 E 3. The Terminus group used to live at the elementary school but had to flee it, leaving markings on the trees to find their way "home." They instead settled in Terminus, and we learned how that turned out.
    • That's incorrect as the markings lead back to Terminus; When Rick and the group head away from Terminus after Rick writes his message on the sign there are no markings on the trees, but when Morgan comes across that exact same sign there is now a trial of markings on the trees. Gareth and the cannibals put the marks on the trees so they could find their way back to Terminus after dealing with Rick and his crew, with Gareth's talk to Bob being about how pointless it was since Terminus is overrun.
    • Why would they need markings to get back to Terminus? They already marked half the state with maps to Terminus.
    • ^ Because they only marked roads and railways with maps which is the only place we saw them in season 4, while Rick and his group where heading through the woods and away from any roads or landmarks Terminus would have gone through (and we don't see a single sign that the group passes by).
  • Regardless of when and why the Terminus group carved their markings those were just very basic dashes carved into trees. IIRC, the markings we see in the Stinger of S 5 E 1 are of a different design and are more ornate, so they likely weren't made by the Terminus group.
    • We only see one marking by the church, which is within spotting distance of the church. I took it as them being interrupted marking it when Bob came out by himself. But given that Gareth confesses to having marked their way back home and has only ever referred to Terminus as such the simplest answer is that the markings are from them.

• Who was the female walker that almost killed Gabriel? His wife? His girlfriend?
  • We saw a picture of her in the same episode with Gabriel, so I'm fairly certain she was a member of his congregation.
  • She's the church organist.

• I thought Tyreese killed the guy who threatened to kill Judith? I saw another guy that looks just like him at the church with Gareth.
  • He somehow survived Tyreese's beatdown. Perhaps Ty thought he was dead after his beatdown.
  • On The Talking Dead after "Strangers," Tyreese's actor said it was a surprise to him that Martin (said guy) showed up again, implying that Tyreese did think he'd beaten him to death but was mistaken.
  • The annoying thing though is that in episode 3 Martin is incredibly unmarked for a man who was beaten to the point of implied death. I hate to use the words plot hole over something so minor but I honestly cannot think of a better way to describe it - he is just there.
  • Actually if you pay attention, he does seem to have some bruises, they're just hard to make out in the dark lighting. Now they may not be enough for someone who was supposedly beaten to death, but that's the thing; I never got the impression that Tyreese actually killed him, or even intended to. He does seem to be a bit of pacifist (at least in regards to killing humans) and has been shown to be quite forgiving (as he mentions in this episode, and he forgave Carol for killing Karen), not to mention, IIRC he was screaming "I won't be like you!" as he was beating Martin, which implied that he wouldn't kill him. Finally, when he tells Carol not to go in to the shed to finish off Martin, (because he allegedly killed him), he seems to be saying that to protect Martin because Carol would have killed him anyway, regardless of Tyreese's wishes.
  • And now that he's seen how well that works out, hopefully Tyreese will get over it. Letting the psychos go in this world is just asking them to come after you again.
    • It's confirmed in episode eight that Tyreese lied about killing Martin even though he knew he probably should have actually done it.

• How much is generally known about the zombie disease? Our heroes know it's a virus because they made it to the CDC but did Eugene just make a lucky guess?
  • Its been years seen I watched S1 E6 but I'm certain that Jenner stated that he had no clue what was causing the Walkers - it is equally likely to be viral as it is bacterial, magical, act of God or nanomachines at this point in the series (and yes none of that is very likely but I could name you quite a few major franchises that tried to explain away their fantastical plots in equally ridiculous ways.) Seeing as we now know for sure that Eugene was making it up as he went along, we can safely assume that he was just telling a story.
    • Jenner had some clue, he knew it attacked the brain like menigitus. I don't recall if Rick ever 100% confirms it especially since Lori's pregnancy was unknown at the time as well but it seems generally accepted that Jenner whispered "we're all infected" into Rick's ear. He had the necessary equipment so him not knowing if it was a virus, bacterial or in the case of magic just plain we don't know. The thing isn't that Eugene was making it up and found some people who were willing to believe and latch on to him. It's equal parts that he ran into our heroes specifically Rick and Glen who actually know what this thing is for all the good it does them and since he's right they don't call him out on it and that we the audience couldn't call him out from step one because it's not aliens or spores or parasites or Hell. As far as we know he's correct even if he did make it up.

• Where the heck did the Abraham-Rosita relationship come from? It comes out of nowhere. I thought it was a brother and sister type bond they have. There was no hint of romance and flirting. With Glen and Maggie, you knew it was coming. Also, isn't it disrespectful to have sex in front of a guy who doesn't have a girlfriend?
  • Disrespectful to have sex in front of a guy who doesn't have a girlfriend what the hell? They didn't have a choice in the matter, Eugene is a pervert who decided to spy on them. Its not as if he was sitting in the corner quietly reading his book and Abraham and Rosita just suddenly started stripping naked in the middle of the room. And even if they did, what are you suggesting here exactly? that they should hold off on making love until Eugene finds a girlfriend? This is the apocalypse, they could all be dead tomorrow.
  • In regards to your first question; I thought Tara made the idea of a relationship between Abraham and Rosita pretty explicit when she first met and spoke with them. So no, it doesn't come out of nowhere, it was basically confirmed (with the same subtlety as a sledgehammer to the face) when we first met them. True, we didn't see much romance between them, but that's because the plot didn't heavily focus on them until Self-Help.

• So has Daryl actually been in prison "as like.. a prisoner"? I didn't get it.
  • Its not unlikely; if you remember what Daryl was like in season 1 and 2 he was by no measure the badass he is now, Carol put it quite effectively in S5 E6 that he was like a kid. And given how much of a racist, sexist and violent thug Merle was, there is a good chance he ended up doing time for some petty crime that may not have been directly his fault. Assault or burglary would be my guess.
  • I took his response to be offense at the idea. As he pointed out at the beginning of the Prison arc (on whether or not the group should allow the inmates to stay) Daryl purposely draws parallels between them and himself, but points out that "he could've ended up just like them." So I think it's a sore spot for him when he learns that's how Beth sees him—as someone who's done hard time—when in fact he hasn't.
    • Adding to the above, Daryl makes a point of not sleeping in the cells when they first arrive at the prison. I took that as a point of pride for him - that, despite whatever else he'd been, he'd never been a prisoner.
• What was the point of Beth stabbing Dawn with the scissors? It didn't look like it would have killed her, Beth was on her way out anyway, and even if she was doing it to try and protect Noah, there was absolutely zero guarantee that it would have done anything. Considering her character development has ended up with her being smart as well as strong, what role did that action serve other than an excuse for her to get killed for shock value?
  • It's basically Suicide by Cop. Earlier in the Coda Beth mentions that's she felt like Dawn used her. She got the benefit of Beth taking out people she didn't want/couldn't handle around anymore but didn't have to live with the consequences. The fact that Dawn died as well may or may not have been her intent. I'm inclined to believe that it was but either way she most likely intentionally didn't kill Dawn with her own hand.
  • The way I see it is, Beth walks up to Dawn and says something like, "So this is how things work", and then stabs her which forces her hand to shoot Beth accidentally, causing Dawn's death. Beth sacrificed herself not just to save Noah, but to force her group's hand to shoot Dawn. Beth saw earlier that Dawn exploits every situation to make others do her killing for her; Beth uses the same tactic here on Dawn, but in a far more complex way that took her own death to achieve.
  • Emily Kinney said on Talking Dead that Beth got overconfident. Let's not forget that zombie apocalypse or not, she's still a naive 17 year old girl. She was probably running on an emotional high, from being reunited with her group, to being angry with Dawn and the hospital, to wanting to save Noah from going back to the hospital, that she stabbed Dawn and thought she could get away without anything drastic happening (if the stab was non-fatal).
  • The only way I can rationalize Beth's action is if Carol wasn't yet lucid enough to tell her Maggie was alive. I get that she has a sacrificial lamb streak, but when she did it earlier with Noah she had every reason to believe her entire family was dead.
  • I have a problem with the original question; namely that Beth has somehow proven herself to be strong, because to me this last half of the season has repeatedly come off as Character Shilling. If you locked up Rick, Shane or the Governor in this situation, they would have lasted five minutes before they ended up either going on a rampage or used their charisma to take over. Beth on the other hand has spent her entire stay here being used by everyone, insulted by everyone, being effortlessly beaten up and was recaptured within minutes of her escape attempt with trivial ease. And no, I don't count the two cops she killed as an example of her 'strength' due to the fact that she was aided by a walker in the first example and did absolutely nothing against the second apart from push a heavily injured man down an elevator shaft.
    • Well, Beth is not Rick, Shane or the Governor, so that comparison really falls apart. And you clearly have not been paying attention to past seasons if you think Beth has demonstrated no character development in this one: In previous seasons, she usually just follows along with what the others do and doesn't really come up with plans of her own. In her time at the hospital, she devises a plan to break both Noah and herself out, and that succeeds, even if she does get caught. Also, there's more to strength than physical prowess, and her willingness and ability to come up with plans on her own rather than let others do it for her show strength and growth of character (even if those plans don't work, it's still impressive).
    • I didn't say that she has demonstrated no character development, I said that she has not proven that she is strong. You say it is unfair to compare her to the likes of Rick and Shane, OK then lets compare her to some of the other characters. How about Glen who started out as a pizza delivery boy and is now capable of killing a walker whilst tortured and tied to a chair, or Carol who started out as an abused doormat and is now capable of going all-out Rambo against a militia, or Andrea who started out suicidal and ended up as one of the best shots in the group, or Carl who started out as The Load and is now on his way to becoming a mini-Rick, or Hershel who started out as a vet and ended up as the mentor for the entire group. Most of the main cast started out just as weak and/or unremarkable as Beth did, but their character development led them into becoming Badass Normal. Beth's journey on the other hand has led her from suicidal farm girl, to Judith's babysitter, to being slightly more assertive in the hospital. Sorry but no dice.
    • You've kinda proven my point: Beth develops over the course of the series, and in the hospital she shows strength by planning a way to get out for herself and Noah and convincing Dawn to help Carol when the officers just want her dead. That, I believe, is what the OP meant; strength and growth of character, not marksmanship or physical strength. Before, she never really made plans of her own and was forced to rely on others. In the hospital, she slowly becomes more assertive and cunning as she really has no one to rely on but herself. Now, compared to the rest of the group, you're correct: she never got a chance to become a full Badass Normal compared to everyone else (though several episodes before this have shown her in action, so she is relatively capable). My point is that compared to who she was before, Beth has come into her own.
    • I took Beth's strength to be more mental and character strength. Compare her to Dawn. Dawn went from someone who was probably a fairly decent human being and after two years became an abusive control freak who belittled and used anyone who she viewed as weaker. Beth started out as a optimistic, happy 16 year old girl who loves to sing and after two years became....an optimistic 18 year old girl who loves to sing and refuses to give up/can endure hardship that would break most other people. She didn't bend and tell the ones incharge whatever they wanted to hear just to make her life easier, she didn't back down, and she wasn't afraid to tell Dawn exactly what she thought of her. She may not have been busting heads or organizing hosiptal wide riots, but she was a young girl who was thrust into an impossible situation who didn't just sit around and wait to be rescued but tried to save herself. That takes a strength in and of itself.
  • As for why she attacked Dawn, it's really quite simple. Beth was letting Dawn know this shit wasn't going to fly anymore. It was already shown that Dawn's hold on the hospital was waning, Beth being a Spanner in the Works was accelerating that process. Dawn's sudden demand that Rick give back Noah was her way of trying to re-assert her flagging control, to make herself seem badass again. And Beth, a skinny little slip of a teenage girl, saunters up to her and sticks some scissors in her chest, letting her know in no uncertain terms that her days are numbered, and that number is small. When Dawn shoots Beth, that number immediately drops to zero. Basically, Beth was fed up with Dawn's bullshit.

• How was Dawn even an antagonist? The way the captured cops were talking makes her seem like she was this evil scary tyrant. Crazy or not, I can't see these cops letting a little woman push them around. I know she can fight and all, but you mean to tell me these cops couldn't team up and overthrow her? She couldn't take them all at once. The Governor as a tyrant was believable and scary, but Dawn doesn't make this troper run in fear of her.
  • Physical ability to fight is not the only thing that makes people afraid of or respect others as authority. Dawn seems to have dirt or at least an angle on everyone, and that's what she uses, and they know she's willing to kill or send them to their deaths to keep her power.
  • The other cops may also realize that if they were to turn on Dawn, building upon the precedent of how Dawn took out her predecessor, the pattern it'll create will only keep repeating itself. They need to keep up at least the pretense of a chain of command, rather than degenerating into outright Klingon Promotion, because the alternative is to admit they really are just another gang of Marauders with a little medicine-fueled sex slavery going on the side.
  • Dawn's also doing everything she can to keep her cops happy, including supplying them with nubile sex slaves. Every other cop seems to be male, there may be a mutual fear that any man taking over Dawn's role will claim all the Wards for himself (or at least, all the desirable ones) leaving everyone else, eh, shall we say "lonely." While that might seem an incentive to take Dawn down, one could expect his reign to be short because the other men will take him down, fearing exactly that, because it's what they'd do.

• Is "Dawn" a reference to Dawn of the Dead, one of Romero's zombie movies? It seems like a weird name for a woman to have.
  • It isn't a weird name for a woman at all. In fact it's more or less exclusively a girl's name.
    • I agree that Dawn is a perfectly plausible woman's name in America. That said, it may well have been an allusion to Dawn of the Dead. It would hardly be the series' first shout-out to Romero (e.g. the full name of Morgan's son).

• What are the cops going to do with Dawn's dead body? Are they going to throw her down the elevator shaft for the walkers to have? That would be pretty messed up, but I can't picture the cops burying her after everything she put them through.
  • That, bury it, or burn it. The same as anyone does to every single body they have to kill. Why does this have to be asked?
    • This was asked because of how she treated her people. She was a tyrant, but also a fellow cop. This troper is curious as to HOW they will treat her body. Will they show her body some respect or throw her away like trash? If the person is a close friend, they would most likely bury him. If he is an a-hole, they will probably burn him, or leave him to be walker food. I'm not sure about Dawn since she and the cops were once good friends before the ZA.

• Why aren't Allen, Donna, and Ben, and Karen in Tyresse's Dying Dream?
  • Because they're borderline nobodies as far as the viewers go; they had a combined total screen time of an hour max? Beth, the Governor, the kids, Bob and Annoying Guy have a far greater connection to the audience for what is an emotional scene. Besides which, adding close to a dozen people to the scene risks adding a healthy dose of narm, which is not exactly what you want for such a dark moment. And before anyone argues about Karen being a nobody, she is a classic example of a mcguffin. She appeared out of nowhere in S4 E1, had minimal character development beyond love interest and died solely so Tyresse and Carol could have some character development.
    • Karen was actually in season 3 (she's the woman who hides under a corpse during the Governor's rampage and later convinces Tyreese to let Rick's group into Woodbury, and she had a few minor appearances before that) but yeah, she's such a minor character most people would be hard-pressed to remember her.
    • So? She was already referenced in conversation and it wouldn't be hard for Tyreese to just whisper something like "Karen?" when he sees her. The guilt aspect as described below wouldn't apply to her, though.
    • She's still an irrelevant character by season 5 regardless of whether anyone remembers her or not.
    • The friendly characters that appear to Tyreese are the ones whose deaths he feels personally responsible for. Lizzie and Mika, for not noticing the signs of Lizzie's unbalance. Bob, because of the possibility that he might have somehow lived if he'd killed Martin. Beth, because she might have lived if he hadn't suggested the prisoner trade instead of Rick's assault plan.
    • ^That's actually a pretty brilliant theory and it also might explain the appearances of the Governor and Martin: He probably feels guilty for not killing them. Tyreese was with the Governor's group in Woodbury for a fair amount of time, and likely had several opportunities to take him out. As for Martin, well that's fairly self-explanatory. In other words, Tyreese sees the people who's deaths he feels are in some way his fault, and the people he thinks he should have killed when he had the opportunity to do so.

• Was the radio broadcast in Tyresse's head or was it real? Because honestly it seems extremely contrived in my opinion. The bedroom radio clearly wasn't on when they entered the house (and what was it being powered by?), we don't hear it when Rick and co. come and rescue Tyresse, and there is no indication that the car radio was on during their trip to the town. So why would Rick turn it on for their return journey whilst trying to nurse their critically injured friend? In fact, if we are going for the its real argument, this would be the first time I can recall that they ever turned on their car radio. They apparently missed a whole year of Terminus broadcasts when they were living at the prison.
  • Pretty sure those were fake/ all in his mind. It was essentially a zombie POV of how the survivors come across to them, as a travelling marauding band of murderers who slaughter dozens, if not hundreds of their 'people' as they go. Mostly as Tyreese has been having a crisis of conscience lately on what the group and he is doing, and is wondering what they're becoming.
    • Could also be a flashback to listening to the radio with his father considering it's also a pretty accurate report of the Rwandan genocide in the 90s. Comparing real human behavior to that of the walkers' is nothing new with TWD.

• Why can't they go back to the Pecan Grove? The only real problem with it is that it is where the children are buried. Aside from that, you have food constantly coming in from the pecans, security of the fence and forest, and being far enough off the beaten track so as to not be seen by survivors of the zombie apocalypse. And the fence isn't adequate, they can build a better one, by bringing in supplies from a local hardware store.
  • Tyreese asked Carol not to tell everyone what happened to the girls, so they probably didn't tell anyone about the grove either. Now that Tyreese is dead, Carol possibly could tell everyone about it, but they've already gone hundreds of miles from there to try to bring Noah home, and gas is getting much too scarce to undertake such long trips just for a few pecans (which are seasonal BTW, hence not a constant food source at all).

• I just do not see where Deanna's complete ignorance of the apocalypse is coming from. Things like refusing to execute a man for beating his wife is understandable, as even Rick himself would have prevented such actions back in season 2, but such simple basic precautions like a guard in the watchtower or patrols checking the wall skip past standard naivety and straight into absurd territory. She was a congresswoman, she worked in government buildings that employed identical measures so why she thinks that a patrol route would somehow destroy her vision of rebuilding civilization is absurd. She has scouts out in the wasteland such as Aaron so she must have at least some knowledge of the roaming gangs of heavily armed bandits. There also doesn't appear to be any punishment in Alexandria beyond exile. Rick is the sheriff of a town without a jail, he apparently cannot issue fines and Deanna refuses to let him use corporal punishment - so basically he has absolutely no power to do his job properly.
  • Washington D.C., as the now ex-seat of the country, was significantly more well protected during the beginning of the outbreak, so the apocalypse pretty much hit the softest there; that is why Eugene wanted to come there after all. Remember that Deanna and the rest of Alexandria are absolutely safe since the very beginning. Plus, people have a habit of not comprehending danger unless they see it with their very own eyes; an example that comes to mind was how half of Congress in the 1930's simply refused to accept the Dust Bowl's existence until a huge dust storm literally fell over Washington D.C. In addition, we've only so far seen two scouts, who only have combed the area around D.C., which was rather lightly hit. The Wolves, given the large truck of bodies of W's carved on them several episodes earlier, are implied to be a mobile group; they may have just come to D.C. Finally, Rick is not a sheriff, he is a constable. His job isn't to arrest, it's to break up fights, although this is, again, an example of Deanna's passive nature.
  • Not only that, but Alexandria has had very, very few walkers grace its walls. Season 6 makes it abundantly clear that most of the people living there have never had to worry about a zombie invasion. The vast majority of walkers have been stewing in a canyon, with only one or two able to escape the trucks holding them in place. Reg thought his make-shift barricade was safe enough to contain any threats, and as they'd never encountered many problems with wandering dead, Deanna was sure the town was secure. JSS displays just how wrong Deanna and her crew were. Whilst Rick and his gang were surviving in the wild, most of Deanna's people were already safe inside the walls. In short, the Alexandrians got complacent with their cosy life, which left them completely vulnerable to an ambush.
  • As for her not wanting to implement more stringent security measures, there's a difference between someone who signs up for a security-conscious job (like a Congressperson) and the average middle-class person for whom security is a given. Living in a walled camp is bad enough, having armed guards patrolling it day-in and day-out would start to make it feel less like a home and more like a concentration camp, which is exactly the sort of thing Deanna is trying to avoid. And bear in mind, while Deanna is complete ignorant of the threats beyond the wall, she knows she's ignorant, hence why she so desperately wants to make things work with Rick's group. They know what things are like, and Alexandria needs people like that if it's going to survive.

• How come Rick doesn't feel guilty about having feelings for a married woman? Episodes ago, Rick didn't know about Jessie and Pete's "marital problems". Shane, his best friend, was trying to get with Lori even after they find out Rick was alive. Shouldn't that tell him pursuing a man's wife will not end well?
  • Because season 5 Rick is not the same man as season 2 Rick by almost any measurable degree. That's why Morgan gave Rick the titan of all What the Hell, Hero? stares at the end of the last episode, and it is interesting that you bring up Shane as that is essentially who season 5 Rick has become. After all, overthrowing Alexandria is basically the exact same plan Shane had for the farm; he even used similar excuses when explaining it to Andrea and yet Rick was violently opposed to the very thought of it. Looking at Rick that way, is it really any surprise that he would do to Jessie what Shane did to Lori? Minus the attempted sexual assault obviously.
    • Those are some interesting observations. Rick shouldn't made it obvious to Jessie that he has feelings for her. When she asked "why do you care so much?", Rick could have easily lied to her by saying he is a cop who cares about innocent lives. The long pause he did kinda makes him look suspicious. What? A cop can't help a good friend out, or care about the people he's protecting without romantic interest?
    • Rick kind of made it obvious when he kissed her cheek, but Rick wanted her to know that she wasn't just a part of the job.
  • How come Rick doesn't feel guilty about having feelings for a married woman? How do we know that he doesn't feel guilty for having feelings towards a married woman? We don't exactly see inside his mind, so it's impossible to tell for sure. As for not knowing about Pete and Jessie's marital problems, I think Rick probably had some suspicions about that, considering Pete's very first interaction with Rick was rather hostile (in a passive-aggressive form, but still). His feelings for Jessie were a driving force behind his actions, there's no question about that, and he has gotten more ruthless with each passing Season, but I don't think that the darker Rick of Season 5 can be quite compared to Shane.
  • Big difference between "having feelings" and "acting on them." Sure, he likes Jessie more than he should, but he's not seriously making a play for her or trying to break up her marriage. Even him going after Pete is much less "Murder the Hypotenuse" and more "you're an asshole who beats your wife and I don't put up with that." And, to be perfectly fair, Jessie's sending him signals telling him his interest isn't entirely unwelcome.

• Why did Morgan spared that crazy guy and his friend? He could have left them to be walker food, but he saves them.
  • Because, as he said, "All life is precious."
  • We'll see if he feels like that when they inevitably kill a bunch more people.
    • Depends on your point of view doesn't it? I'm not saying I agree any more with his decision than you do, but just because someone is a murderer doesn't automatically mean that their life is any less precious. That is one of the reasons why countries that have banned the death penalty now far out way those that do.
    • That's a poor analogy. Countries without death penalties (which generally have a lower crime rate than the US, I should add) have a prison system in place that prevents violent offenders from harming other people. People in a post-apocalyptic world have no such luxury. Execution is in many cases their only way of stopping a killer from killing again.
    • I have a headscratcher about this. Isn't this a repeat of Tyreese's mistake? The whole "sparing the killer" thing has been done already. Why go through this again with Morgan?
    • Prove that it's a mistake. Humans are not machines, 100% of killers will not run off to kill again.
    • But these two did. They kill another person before the episode is even over.
    • Pre-cog's a different franchise. In this one, if they kill people for something they haven't done yet, they're no better than the walkers.
  • Kill them for people they've already killed then, and for how he expresses every intention to Morgan to kill him. He outright says that he's killed others, and clearly intends to continue killing others.

• Why didn't the revolving door Glenn, Noah and Nicholas were stuck in fold in? I know for a fact that most revolving doors are equipped with hinges so that people stuck in emergencies can escape through them. While they were looking around in them, wouldn't they have seen hinges which would allow them to fold the doors in and escape?

• Why do freshly turned zombies, in either the show or comic, still cause sickness and kill people? Kirkman insisted that the zombie virus isn't like the usual apoc story virus; rather than the virus itself causing infection, it's the bacteria from the walkers' rotting mouths that cause general ickiness symptoms which lead to death, right? So why are the super fresh zombies still dangerous? Like, why did Andrea kill herself from being bit by Milton? His mouth shouldn't have been any more dangerous than a living persons.
  • Human mouths are surprisingly toxic. If a healthy, living, breathing human being bit you and broke the skin, even that could give you a fatal infection if you don't get medical attention. Also of note: The characters don't know what we know.
  • You answered your own question. No it doesn't make any sense. Especially when you consider that it's been made very clear (within both tv shows at least, my memory of the comic is not as good) that there IS something special about a zombie bite. Heck, (spoilers for FTWD) even Liza in FTWD says in Ep 6 that a zombie bite always results in death. This is coming from a woman who spent the last few days working in a military medical facility, where they would have been administering antibiotics left, right and centre. In this case, Kirkman's assertion is outright contradicted by everything that has been shown in the TV continuity.
  • Maybe the Walker Virus is deadly, but only after you die, the virus basically activates after death, because if what happens in the comics comes to pass then it is shown that The zombie fluid on the saviors' blades' causes you to get an infection and turn

The TV show 6

• I Live in an urban area so this might be a stupid question. But can the sound of a truck horn really travel that far? At the end of ep1 it sounds pretty loud and pretty close. But then in ep3 it's shown that they're like an hours walk away. I don't understand how they can be hearing it from that far away, without the people who are stood right next to the horn having their ear drums blown out.
  • When you cut out the noise-pollution of modern, everyday life, yes. And an hour's walk through rough terrain isn't actually that far — at the pace they were going (including stopping repeatedly for various reasons), it's probably a mile, two at the most. Note that Morgan, who just ran straight there, got there within 15 minutes and still had enough endurance to kick the crap out of a dozen people after he arrived without so much as looking winded.

• At the end of episode 3, why did Nicholas thank Glen before committing suicide? I don't get it. And seriously dude, a bit of warning perhaps? You don't seem very thankful considering what that action ultimately led to.
  • For giving him another chance. Also, why do you expect him to act rationally when he was clearly not thinking rationally?
  • So far as Nicholas could tell, Glen was going to be just as dead as he would within the next few minutes. He said "Thank you" as a final gesture before they both got eaten, probably expecting Glen to pick up the gun and do the same so he wouldn't be eaten alive or reanimate.
  • It could be interpreted (it's been said before somewhere on this wiki) that Nicholas was thanking Glenn for showing him mercy by not killing him and forgiving him for his past actions.

• Why are the walls of Alexandria braced on the outside rather than on the inside? Was it originally meant as a sort of prison to keep people inside?
  • I might be mistaken but I think that they are braced on the inside in a few places? It seems kind of inconsistent. It's probably just whatever was easiest for filming at any given time.
  • The wall was probably put up in some haste, without much consideration for how well it would keep humans in or out at all. They put the bracings wherever it was convenient at the time, which usually meant on the outside because that way they wouldn't need to haul all the building materials into peoples' backyards.
  • From a structural engineering standpoint, if the bracings are weighted and anchored properly it's the more secure option. But from the zombie apocalypse common sense side of things, it's totally lacking because that makes it too easy for something outside the wall to tamper with the bracings and compromise its structural integrity. Just because the bracings might be anchored properly, doesn't mean you couldn't knock them down with a hit from the side in a big truck.

• Rick's entire plan to deal with the megaherd is dumb on multiple levels. Rick's group clearly knows how to direct, avoid, and handle herds with minimum risk and chance of a plan going awry. It only partially fails because of the Wolves' attack on Alexandria, and the semi's air horn distracting the back half of the megaherd. His plan involves intentionally releasing the herd so it can be directed away from Alexandria, using the herds' "tactics" against it; the only difference in Rick's plan, and the way it went down, was they didn't have a choice in when to release the megaherd. Between moving the cars to form barriers to direct the herd, hauling steel to construct barriers, and the act of directing the herd itself, they clearly had ample fuel reserves. And if all that wasn't enough, they were near a farm machinery store with heavy equipment that could have been used to reinforce the semi barriers, and/or be employed to thin the herd; Glenn, Heath, and Nicholas literally run past tractors with bush hogs, disc plows, and tillers on them, any of which could have been weaponized to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of walkers before needing maintenance or even a quick hose-down. Literally any other plan, including setting up an air horn on the high side of the quarry (the one Ron nearly nose dove off) to lure the walkers and fire bomb the walkers to kill or immobilize them, would have been better.

• Why didn't Michonne put poor David out of his misery? The guy was being eaten alive by walkers, and they just stood there. She has her sword on her back. You would think Michonne would have pulled out her sword and stab him in the head (through the fence).
  • This bothered me also. Considering also that the main characters have had no problem mercy killing people before. This is an extra bad example too, as the guy was screaming in pain and obviously there was zero chance of him escaping from that. The other characters didn't mercy kill him either, but that is kind of understandable as they seem like noobs. Michonne has no excuse and it seems that she didn't kill him because she didn't want to spoil the gruesome scene for the audience.
    • I'm not sure the characters have had "no problem mercy killing people before" - one of the most consistently irritating (and somewhat horrifying) aspects of the show is that they almost never (I don't remember any examples) shoot their friends in the head rather than watch/listen to them get slowly eaten alive. It just doesn't seem to be what they do.

• This question is about eating animals. In a post-apocalyptic world where you are starving in the woods, is it safe to eat a raw animal without cooking it? I don't know much about survival in the wilderness. We see the girl pick up a turtle and eat it.
  • Its idiotic; pure and simple. It is a near-perfect way to kill and/or dangerously weaken yourself from food poisoning which is why Daryl always cooks his prey. And remember that in this setting dangerously weaken yourself means being unable to run away or fight off being eaten by walkers or murdered/raped/eaten/mugged by bandits. As for the need to do it to save yourself from starvation there is of course an argument for needs justify the ends; but seeing as an ordinary human can survive for 35-40 days without eating and an above-ordinary human can live 40-60 days albeit with extreme degradation I don't think that she has that excuse. She looks far too healthy for someone who is genuinely starving as opposed to uncomfortably hungry.
  • Her looking healthy is because they're not going to make a teenage girl starve for a TV show. We don't know how long she was out there. Also, she's, again, a teenage girl who probably doesn't have all that survival knowledge. She was hungry, she saw something she could eat, and she ate it not knowing any better.
  • She may not have had the means to make a fire and cook the thing, even if she'd wanted to.

• This is a problem I've noticed in the comics, but it's a lot more prominent in the show. By this point, pretty much everyone in the series understands the importance of saving bullets. Far better to take out a walker without shooting it, right? But they also know that getting close to one gives them chance to bite or scratch you. So why do so many of the main characters typically only carry knives? I'm not saying a good knife isn't useful, but wouldn't it make sense to carry a melee weapon with longer reach? So many times they've had to stab a walker in the brain and they come ''so' close to be being scratched! I get that not everyone is going to find a sword like Michonne did, but would it be that hard to make a staff or a club? Just find a long stick or snap the head off a broom and bam, you're set. What's stranger is we often see characters acquire something bigger, like a fire axe or a baseball bat and use them just fine against walkers, yet they never seem to keep them for more than an episode or two.
  • Knives are small and easily portable, fitting either into a pocket or some kind of readily-available sheath that clips onto a belt. Staves you have to carry in a hand, ditto most things like fire axes. They carry knives because you can have a knife on you at all times without worrying or thinking about it. Speaking as someone who regularly hikes (and cosplays) with staves and walking sticks, it gets inconvenient to juggle them around when you need both hands for something, and in a zombie apocalypse, seconds count.
  • Some kind of club, spear or even sword is also easily portable. It seems they would have time to make some kind of holster or sheath. Swords were once considered effective weapons in environments with much quicker enemies than walkers, so I don't see why a second here or there is such a big consideration (especially if you then say it's inconvenient to carry a weapon, suggesting convenience is more important than having it quickly to hand). I think the answer to this one cannot be found in fridge logic so much as "the writers thought it would be cooler" or perhaps "the writers didn't think about it".
    • Swords were effective because you normally had them drawn before getting into combat and weren't trying to pull the entire blade out when your enemy was right next to you. A second in the walking dead can be the difference between killing a walker or having a bite taken out of you, and a sword will take longer than one second to unsheathe. Swords require practice to be good at it, can get caught in a walker if it goes in the wrong way, and if you miss you have committed more into the swing than with a knife. A club is only handy if you do enough brain damage in a single strike, otherwise the walker is right on you. A hammer is more useful than a club due to it's smaller size, and if you have a tool belt it's simple to carry around and use in a hurry.
  • Tangentially related, this troper always wondered why no one ever considered the use of throwing weapons. While yes, they aren't as accurate as guns (and are probably hard to find) a set of decent throwing knives and some practice (literally all that's needed is a tree) would make for a fairly good range weapon once you get good enough. Not only that, they're relatively silent and are strong enough to pierce a Walker's brain (at least as much as a normal knife apparently can) and similar to Daryl's crossbow they're reusable, save losing some due to unforeseen circumstances. Not saying the cast should turn into ninjas or anything, but even a throwing hatchet would be a better alternative to just knifing a walker as it comes to kill you and hoping you don't get bit.

• Do real-life American soldiers actually use RPG's? I always thought that the M72 LAW and the AT-4 were our weapons of choice when it came to man-portable anti-tank weaponry.
  • There are American manufactured clones of the RPG, usually used for training purposes. It's not impossible to have one looted from a military armory somewhere.
  • That particular RPG is an Airtronic RPG-7, an American made clone used (or at least tested, not 100% sure) by the US military. So yes, entirely plausible to find it in military stockpiles.

• In a similar vein to Michonne's walkers on a leash from season 3, if walker guts are that effective at rendering you invisible to them, why isn't this the go-to method of evasion in an emergency? Doesn't this threaten to render the show's plot absurd if safety is a mere knife-slice away? And they learned about this defence all the way back in season 1 and it was just as effective then so its not as if this is some brand new revelation. Sheets and towels etc are not difficult to keep in a bag for just such an occasion or to procure on site if you are anywhere near a building with a bathroom, bedroom or shopping department. Just to clarify, i'm not saying that they should go around 24/7 like this, i'm saying that when the proverbial has hit the fan and they are forced to take shelter somewhere, there is always a corpse or two within reach so there is absolutely no excuse for ever trying to shoot your way out or running away at full speed with twenty walkers hot on your tail when you have your own portable cloaking device lying five feet away from you.
  • Someone asked Kirkman this on The Talking Dead. He confirmed what people speculated after "Clear": Using the guts like that runs a very high risk of getting you sick. Plus, you'd keep needing fresh guts every time you wanted to do it.
    • They know it has worked. But they know it can also work to just avoid or fight the walkers. Presumably it would feel very much like a last resort to put themselves in such a position, surrounded by walkers. And it would only take one to realise you're a nice, tasty human. You would have to be very confident, wouldn't you?
  • And as "No Way Out" demonstrated, it's not a perfect tactic. If you're not careful, there's a chance walkers can see through the camouflage.
  • It's probably also very psychologically draining.
  • Daryl proved why this isn't a foolproof idea back in Season 2 in "Chupacabra". Taking the time to determine if every walker you run into is really a person in camouflage is a quick way to get either you bitten or him shot.
    Survivor: Hey guys, I made it bac-
    Other Survivors: "Walker!" "Shoot it!" *Bang*
  • Besides, at this point half the time they can successfully shove single waslkers out of the way. They are so used to dealing with them, only the larger groups present any real threat. Andrea showed this when she was a Woodsbury and hoped over the fence to melee a walker. Not only that, but she ENJOYED it.

• Why didn't Rick, or anyone in his group, train Deanna? Notice how lousy she was at killing walkers.
  • Well, it has been a little busy. Besides that, Deanna was more pouring out frustration and rage than actually trying to kill it.
  • Deanna has self admitted that she is not a fighter, and as Alexandria's leader, logically should never be in a position where she'd actually have to fight. Plus, Rick's group were only just beginning to get the other residents trained and were having limited success.

• In season 6, ep 13 I don't understand why Carol has suddenly gained a reluctance of killing people. This has come completely out of left field especially since she is easily the most kill-crazy woman we have had in this show so far. Sometimes she even puts Rick to shame with her eagerness to blow someone away, and now, in a self-defence situation, she is asking her captor to run away and jumps when Rick shoots a man cleanly through the head? And this was almost a case of Too Dumb to Live considering that she strolled so close to her enemy that she allowed her gun to be knocked out of her hand. I'm sorry but who is this woman and what has she done with Carol? (And as an aside, where has that prayer necklace suddenly come from? She seemed just as intolerant of Gabriel as everyone else).
  • Things are catching up to her and she's worried about what she's become. She may not know, but she probably suspects that her attitude toward Sam contributed to his death. Her zeal to kill the Wolf gave him the opportunity to kidnap Denise. She seemed to have realized that the Wolf was changing when she shot him. As for the rosary, it falls off the first zombie that Paula kills and is dragging out. Carol snags it on her boot and puts it in her pocket when they're left alone for a minute.
  • I suspect it has to do with Sam's death. There seems to be a running theme that Carol tries to keep children in the group safe but keeps failing. First she loses her own daughter, but that causes her to toughen up. We see her act a lot tougher around Lizzie and Mika, presumably hoping that this will help them learn to survive, but it still doesn't work. After being forced to execute Lizzie, Carol acts extremely cold around Sam, clearly not wanting to get close to a child again. And yet her actions still get him (as well as his family) killed. So she's tried being nice, she's tried being active and she's even tried being mean, but none of it works. It wouldn't surprise me if it's causing her a nervous breakdown. Also, in Twice as Far, the episode starts by showing Morgan regularly practicing his Ai-Kido and Carol sitting on a bench. At the end of the episode, when Carol has left, we saw Morgan practicing again and we learn that Morgan's practice area was right across from said bench. meaning that Carol was watching him the whole time. We saw back in Here's Not Here that learning Ai-Kido brought Morgan a sense of peace. Now Carol's been watching him and is probably quite envious, or even inspired by him.
  • It doesn't come out of left field at all. She's always been affected by the things she's had to do. In "Isolation," Carol breaks down crying and kicks the water barrel over because she killed Karen and David. In "The Grove," she's completely broken because she has to kill Lizzie. In "No Sanctuary," she tells Mary "You're not here, and neither am I" before killing her. In "JSS," she breaks down crying yet again after killing numerous Wolves. She clearly has second thoughts after seeing Owen sacrifice his life to save Denise after Carol fatally wounded him in "No Way Out." Carol has never been comfortable with the violence. She's not a psychopath, she's just a survivor who's done hard things to stay alive and keep her people safe, and those things have been building on her for quite some time now.
  • Carol never kills to save only her life. All of her kills, while pragmatic, are in the defense of someone else. Killing Karen and David > Protect the prison from infection. Killing Lizzie > Saving Judith. Destroying Terminus > Saving her friends. Killing the Wolves > Protecting Alexandria. Killing Owen > Protecting Alexandria/Saving Denise. Carol doesn't like killing, but she will kill to protect the people she loves. She doesn't fight against the Saviors who abduct her and Maggie until it becomes clear that they have no intention of resolving things peacefully and very likely whatever they do will result in the deaths of many of her friends. Even when she leaves Alexandria and runs into the Saviors, she only kills them when it becomes absolutely clear that her only other option is to be taken prisoner and forced to bring them to Alexandria, which would result in more deaths. The contrast between her and Morgan is that Morgan not only hates killing, he refuses to do so under any circumstances (initially) while Carol doesn't like killing, but knows that if some people aren't killed it will only result in her losing more people. It eventually takes Morgan's non-violence policy getting someone he cares about killed that ends up snapping him out of his pacifist nature and become willing to kill again, bringing him closer in line with Carol Hence the reason why Carol left. She isn't necessarily a death seeker, but if the only person she has to protect is herself, she'll never have to kill again.

• In s6 ep15 During his and Rick's search for Carol, Morgan manages to kills several walkers with ease by conking them on the head with his stick. Not smashing around the head, or knocking their heads off, or stabbing their heads; biffing them moderately on the top of their heads. Since when has that been possible? Before now, the only way to kill a walker was an object through the brain or decapitation. I don't recall such mild blunt trauma ever killing walkers before now. Considering that in season 1 we see in the CDC that a walker only uses the lower brain functions, I don't even see how that can be hand waved anyway.
  • He's not hitting them on the top of the heads — he's basically snapping their necks by hitting them across the face. At least one of the walkers, you even hear the snap.
    • Broken necks don't stop walkers. Shane snaps Randall's neck in S2 and he still manages to walk around. It's possible that whatever actually kills zombies happens from a sufficiently hard blow.
  • It may depend on the condition of the walker. If it's been decomposing for many months, the cranial sutures may be weak enough for a solid thwack on the noggin to cause deep depressed fractures that crush the brain stem down into the foramen magnum. As that's the only part of the zombie brain that's working, that could be enough to drop it.

• How did that bullet that Ron fired during "No Way Out" not kill Carl? The eye is soft material, a 9mm bullet (it was from a Glock) would not be impeded much by it and would have kept going straight into the brain. It was a direct shot, not a graze.
  • He simply did. In real life there are cases of people surviving all sorts of incredible things. So what happened with Carl is improbable, not impossible.
  • You have a classic case of Reality Is Unrealistic in my opinion as the effects of bullets in real life tend to be overly exaggerated in fiction. For the record it is actually possible to live a perfectly ordinary life with a bullet lodged in your brain depending on where exactly it ends up.
  • Original question asker here. I don't doubt that at all, but this is an apocalypse, where adequate medical care isn't always available. I feel like a bullet lodged in the brain would cause some lasting pain or brain damage, since removing it would be a very difficult task that Denise would not be capable of, yet Carl shows no symptoms of having any lasting damage.
  • The bullet isn't lodged in his brain. It hit his eye and deflected off the eye socket.
    • It's also worth noting there are no pain receptors on/in the actual brain. They do brain surgery while people are still conscious for that reason so once the eye itself healed he wouldn't feel the bullet even if it was in there.
  • The eye has a pad of fat behind it, and the sphenoid bone behind that. The bullet, if it didn't deflect off the orbital rim, is probably lodged in the latter.
  • In the Comics (yes, I know there is a difference) Carl becomes much more cold and emotionally distant, it's specualted that the bullet did mentally affect him alot more than it shows in the TV series.
  • To answer the original question the bullet didn't go through his eye and into his brain, it came in at an angle that tore or ruptured his eye and went through the side of his face before leaving. If you look at both the comic and the show scenes where the injury is revealed you can see where the bullet left his head.

• How come Washington, DC is never brought up at all? They arrive in Alexandria, which is literally a stone's throw from DC (and is not rural roads and farms, but that's another question) and not once does any character say "hey, maybe DC has supplies or people, lets head there". The baffling thing is, they see the city when approaching Alexandria, and its perfectly intact, as if the apocalypse never happened. No fires, no damage, nothing.
  • Deanna did claim the whole region had been evacuated very early on. And just because the Washington Monument was still standing doesn't mean the residential parts of the District haven't been trashed and burned, since.

• Is it really possible for Negan to have over a hundred people working for him? This Negan guy would make the Governor blush with his many followers. He makes Governor look like a neighborhood bully. I can buy Governor having followers since they were vulnerable townspeople, but it seems farfatched for Negan to have murderers, thieves, cut-throats, and bikers on his side, and staying loyal to him.
  • Yes? Actual cults grow to even more than that. So do huge gangs. Or even entire countries. There's nothing unbelievable or far fetched about this.
  • If anything, it's more plausible for Negan to have an army of cutthroats than the Governor to have a town full of non-fighters. Negan's men, after all, can pull their weight and scavenge or pillage for what they need. The Governor's dependents made it harder to provide his own troops with enough food and perks to keep them loyal, because he had a whole town of civilians to feed along with his soldiers. Negan's men don't have to hand most of what they find or extort over to a bunch of non-contributing townsfolk.

• How do some couples have sex in this show without condoms (Lily, Governor, Rick, Michonne, Andrea, Shane)? I doubt Michonne and Rick had birth control and condoms in their house. They didn't know they were going to sleep together that night.
  • Personally, I think that contraceptives would be high on the list of any scavenging team that is foraging for sanitary products (along with tampons, toilet paper and soap). And really, during the apocalypse, where a bandit could rape you at any moment, the lack of medication for STD's and the fact that before modern medical care childbirth was frequently lethal; would it really be that unlikely for someone to have a supply close to hand?
  • They could pull out. Risky, but a common method. Alternatively, some could just not care about birth control. Clearly, Lori/Shane and Lori/Rick didn't.

The TV show 7

• So Negan throws Rick's axe out of the R.V and tells Rick to go and get it. To avoid the walkers, Rick climbs on top of the vehicle, and we see the axe there on the roof. Rick ignores it and, after getting a second wind, jumps back down to the ground and finds the axe on the ground which he brings back to Negan. So what was up with the axe on the roof? Did there just happen to be another one there? Was Rick hallucinating? What narrative purpose did it serve? Was it meant to be a Hope Spot? If it was a hallucination, why didn't Rick react to it? Its placement just seemed really random...
  • Negan threw it on the roof, even though the way it's shot makes it look a lot like he threw it out into the open. Rick didn't ignore it — he just grabbed it probably during one of the Imagine Spot cutaways or close-ups, then drops it when the hanging zombie's head pops off (you can see it fall if you look close).

• So what's the point of the Sanctuary's "Walker wall"? Rule of Cool aside, it seems like it would be Awesome, but Impractical as it requires constant work to maintain, has probably killed more of Negan's own men than actual enemies (one of the Walkers gets loose and nearly bites Daryl in episode 7, and stuff like that is probably a regular occurrence, whereas the Sanctuary presumably doesn't come under siege very often) and doesn't really do anything to defer an attack that simple reinforcement of the fences/more mundane defense measures (spikes on the fences, an electric current, etc.) wouldn't do just as well.
  • You answered your own question with the killed more of Negan's own men part.
  • Additionally as bad as Negan is we don't know how long he's been located at the Sanctuary nor what other groups were living nearby originally. It's heavily implied that he didn't attack the Kingdom because at least at the time the risk wasn't worth the reward. That isn't saying he would lose for sure, it might just have crippled him. Either way it might have served a defensive purpose original. Season 6 and Fear the Walking Dead have both made solid cases that walkers aren't entirely poor defensive measures.
  • Unless I'm mistaken the one that almost bit Daryl didn't get loose from the wall, Daryl got distracted by Carl's appearance and got too close to one. As for it's purpose the walkers are there to stop intruders from getting to the fence and cutting through undetected. The saviors can't be looking at every point of the fence all the time and chainlink isn't hard to cut through, but there are enough walkers around that anyone looking to get in that way will have to kill at least a handful to get to the fence safely, which combined with walkers making a lot of noise when they spot something they want to eat should be enough to get somebody's attention.

• When asked "who made the bullet", why didn't Rosita just say it was either Abraham or Glenn who made it? Both of them are dead and were killed by Negan himself so she could say he already punish the person who made the bullet.
  • Because they were killed before Negan took all the guns and ammo from Alexandria. The log presumably included how much ammunition they had, given how valuable bullets are keeping track of them would likely have been in the ledger.
  • Also, Negan probably wouldn't have bought it, just like he didn't buy it when Rosita said she made them. He's not stupid, and the possibility of the Alexandrians being able to rearm themselves is not something he's going to give them the benefit of the doubt on. Note that he only becomes satisfied he's got the right man when Eugene begins describing the process to him. Had she tried some other convenient excuse -or worse, that had actually been the case- he probably would have started killing/torturing people until he was 100% sure what she was saying was the truth.

• How is Dwight less replaceable than Dr. Carson? He's a doctor. He keeps Negan's people alive. Even assuming he's not the only one at the Sanctuary (and Negan seems to imply Eugene is going to be taking over for him, so there probably aren't any other actual M.D.s) medics aren't really something you can ever have too many of, especially in an apocalyptic world like the one in Walking Dead. Dwight, on the other hand, is just some thug. Negan's got dozens, if not hundreds of other thugs. Even if he's a exceptionally effective thug (and he doesn't have a particularly impressive resume from what we've seen on-screen) it still seems like he wouldn't be as valuable as a doctor like Carson.
  • From what I saw, it was Eugene making that claim; Negan was in it purely for revenge. But that aside, your assessment is correct. In real life, anyone can learn to fire a gun to a reasonable standard, but the value of doctors, scientists and engineers in a post-modern education world simply cannot be overestimated for they are irreplaceable.
  • Negan suggests that the Dr. Carson from Hilltop is going to be their new doctor. Their "spare Dr. Carson". Since it's implied he took the original from Hilltop after turning the place into one of their servant colonies, it's not too much of a stretch to think he saw him as an easy replacement. That is why he viewed Carson as expendable enough to give him a full punishment. It's not a matter of Dwight being considered more valuable, it's a matter of him believing him. There's his testimony, the "proof" they found, and finally, when pressed on the issue, Carson "confesses". It's nothing that would ever hold up in a court of law, but it's enough for Negan and more importantly it would convince other people as well. It's clear from watching how he interacts with the Saviors that he keeps people in line by threatening them with draconian punishments. If he publicly lets it get out that he was soft on someone in his community breaking the rules when he didn't need to be, people will start thinking that they can get away with stuff. He can't let that happen or his system falls apart. He outright murdered Carson because releasing a prisoner was bad enough, but then said prisoner killed one of them as he was escaping. Not to mention trying to get with Sherry and causing her to run off would have earned him an iron all on its own. As a side note, while Dwight might not be the best thug out there, he serves as an example to the rest of the Saviors that A) Negan will break you if you try to double-cross him, and B) if you get on board and do your part, you can still make a name for yourself and live a good life. It's better for his PR in general if it doesn't get out that Dwight still had some rebellion left in him, or that he was actively trying to help someone escape.
  • Negan can't afford to let anyone under his rule believe they're too valuable to be punished or killed if they violate his dictates. If he spares the doctor because of his medical skills, he'd be inviting other specially-skilled followers to think they're exempt from his wrath. It's a lot easier for him to conscript a new doctor from one of the Saviors' subjugated communities than to repair the damage that making an exception for someone's expertise would do to his authority.
  • Wasn't the whole point of Pete from a few seasons before is that even if you're a skilled surgeon or doctor makes you immune to capital punishment? Like from what Negan knows Carson just betrayed him and let a prisoner who knows the Sanctuary location get away, all the lives Carson could save are outweighed by the ones he potentially doomed.

• How did Sherry get out of the Sanctuary after Daryl's escape? Presumably the place has constant guards on patrol and I doubt people, especially one of Negan's wives, are just allowed to wander outside.
  • It might have been during the point where they discovered Joey's body, or when they were out looking for Daryl. I don't remember if the episode specifically established when exactly she ran off, but it could have been during those times when the people on patrol were distracted or occupied.

• So in the season finale ... how did Shiva know who to maul and who not to maul?
  • How well can you train a tiger? Because if it is anywhere close to a dog then the King was probably just off screen giving her orders.
  • It takes about two years to train a tiger to perform basic tricks and even then you need to keep careful watch on them as they can get irritated quickly and attack their owner without realizing what a minor swipe with those huge paws are capable of doing.
    • Don't forget that Shiva is completely loyal to Ezekiel, she isn't just "trained" or "tamed". Training an animal to do something is far more difficult than an animal acting to protect their beloved owner.
    • Except that tigers don't form that sort of bond. Even disregarding that, there is little chance Ezekiel would be able to control her once she was unleashed. She might not have attacked him, or the other Kingdom members, but she didn't know the vast majority of Hilltop or Alexandria survivors and there is no way he could have distinguished them for her.
    • But many animals in real life have formed bonds with humans very different from how they normally would Shiva is such a rarity.
  • If it was acting on orders, why didn't he sic it on Negan himself?

• Did Negan ever confiscate Michonne's sword? If he did, I'm wondering when did she ever get it back or why he let her keep it.
  • As we saw before the season 8 mid-season break, Negan is a psychopath but he's not stupid. He recognises the fact that the settlements working for him require defence from walkers and bandits and thus he allows them to keep their hand-to-hand weapons. There is only one winner in real life between a gun and a sword so he has nothing to fear by her keeping it.

The TV Show 8

• This is a minor one, but where did Rick get that Polaroid instant camera from in episode 3? They don't make them anymore and the film is rare, they're obsolete collectors pieces. The likelihood of him finding one complete with film seems less likely than being able to jury-rig some kind of power source to a printer and cellphone. Heck, give me a Radio Shack and a car battery and I could probably do it myself.
  • Back in the season 7 opening we see a savour taking a photo of the bodies, so I assume that Negan has a few of his saviours with cameras handy in case he ends up introducing someone to Lucille. With all the saviours who have been dying lately they could have picked it up from one of the fallen.
  • I buy my film at my local CVS. The film isn't that hard to come by.
  • This must be Hilarious in Hindsight because Polaroids have been making a comeback.
  • Meh. They are making a comeback in the same way that vinyl made a comeback. Increased sales but still a drop in the ocean compared to digital cameras and music downloads.
• I think we all know Shiva would have torn through those walkers like a lawnmower.
  • Why? Tigers are ambush predators that mostly hunt at evenings and night, they don't take on multiple enemies at close range in broad daylight. In addition, a tiger's stamina and speed evolved to be unleashed in short devastating bursts, they really are not very good at prolonged confrontations. Go and watch a decent nature documentary and you will witness the tiger giving up very quickly if the prey animal in question manages to outrun it. Shiva pouncing one or two walkers from the shadows and then promptly getting eaten herself is quite a realistic outcome.
  • Consider also that Shiva would be 'killing' the SAME walkers over and over, to no avail. She might have gotten lucky with a couple, crushing their skulls, but mostly she wouldn't know HOW to kill them. She'd be doing what tigers do - using her claws to disembowel and tearing out throats. She wouldn't make any serious dent in the walkers before she wore herself out. Which is some serious Fridge Horror right there. Poor Shiva. She didn't stand a chance.
  • I'm not buying that. A tiger still has an incredible amount of strength, and walkers are Made of Plasticine. She might not *kill* the walkers in one hit, but they won't be much of a threat when they've been severed at the waist.
  • What's really odd is how Shiva has been mauling armed mook after armed mook and coming out out unscathed in pitched gun battles, yet is ultimately taken down by a dozen emaciated swamp corpses.
• Obviously we currently know nothing about that helicopter that Rick saw in episode 5, but would I be wrong in saying that it could potentially be the one from season 1 and 2 that accidentally destroyed Hershel's farm? I ask because it very much looks the same, but I can't remember if we ever did get an answer as to where that one came from (or see it crash) as eight seasons is a lot of material to cover.
  • I think that helicopter belonged to the Governor, didn't it? Wasn't it the one we saw crash at the start of S3, as Laurie and Michonne watched from hiding until Merle caught them?
    • So many things wrong with these two posts. Firstly, the helicopter had nothing to do with Hershel's farm being destroyed. Secondly, it's Andrea, not Laurie (who is the actress). Thirdly, it was indeed the same helicopter, but it was piloted by military soldiers, and after it crashed, the Governor and his men dealt with the survivors. So overall it's not the same helicopter.
  • What do you mean that the helicopter had nothing to do with destroying the farm? It created a walker herd that followed it.
• Wait, hold the presses here: At the end of episode 16 Jesus is conspiring to kill Negan and potentially start a civil war with Rick? Really? After EVERY pacifistic speech he has made and egalitarian action he has taken including in this very episode, he ends it by sitting in a darkened room nodding evilly as Maggie and Daryl plot away. And no, I don't believe for a second that evilly is an exaggeration. Go back and look at his face: I have never seen that expression on that man's face throughout his entire run. I'm calling Conflict Ball on this one.
  • There's a difference between wanting to kill one man who has killed innocent people and spearheaded a destructive conflict, and not wanting to kill dozens of unarmed prisoners who merely chose to side with the wrong people. Maggie's coalition isn't planning to go to war, they just want Negan dead, which theoretically would be a very simple task. People who think that Jesus wouldn't ally with Maggie and Daryl because he doesn't want anyone at all to die are just strawmanning.
  • Jesus is in on it because he saw the Saviors beat a 16 year old to death and according to his actor, Negan is the one guy Jesus wouldn't mind being dead. And yes 'evilly' is an exaggeration.
• Why is Rick's plan so perfect and the best way to deal with the Saviors? It almost failed (with the Saviors using speakers to lure the walkers away from the Sanctuary) and was bound to happen with Eugene testing a way to lure the walkers away.
  • Who said it was "so perfect"? And they had contingencies for it, like having snipers set all around the place and watching it. Also, how should Rick know that Eugene is testing a way to lure away walkers?
  • Well, by the way the fandom talks about it and how none of the characters pointed out the obvious flaws. They only had 1 contingency plan: one group of four (maybe five) snipers. Yea, they were helpful, but they're not really going to care of everything that could go wrong. No one thought about the possibility that there are Saviors outside they Sanctuary that might try to help the Saviors get out. The only reason that Zira and that other Savior were discovered was because Rosita and Michonne just happened to hear it. And it's not like they were sent out as a patrol team, they were out there to see if the plan worked. It is painfully obvious that Zira's plan would've worked and gotten the Saviors out. They don't need to drive so close to the Sanctuary to be shot by the snipers and they probably already know about them. Besides, the whole 'control a horde of walkers' plan has failed before and at this point, the characters should know it doesn't work unless you stop the possibility of loud noises, such as the truck horn in "First Time Again".
  • This page is for problems within the work, not with how fans see things. And yes, those are flaws. Any plan is going to have some flaws, and the characters are not omniscient, nor are they working with hindsight. They had a plan, they thought it was a good plan, and then it ran into complications they hadn't foreseen. That kind of thing happens.

  • "How should Rick know that Eugene is testing a way to lure away walkers?" Because Rick isn't stupid and knows 1) Eugene is smart and 2) that Eugene is with Negan and helps the Saviors. Of course, Rick didn't know exactly what Eugene was going to, but he should've known Eugene was going to do something. It's not that hard to figure out honestly. Rick's plan was doomed to fail just because of the fact Eugene is there. All Rick would've had to have done was have everyone shooting at Negan, he was literally in plain view on the balcony. Most of them are skilled shooters at this point and with how many people shooting, someone would've shot him. The war would've been over just like that.
  • Eugene was also with Rick when Alexandria was under threat by thousands of Walkers and he apparently didn't contribute then. Rick does not know Eugene as some supergenius who is guaranteed to come up with a fool-proof plan to get the Saviors out — for that matter, neither does anyone else. You're kind of overselling how much Rick would have thought of Eugene.
• Eugene has been with Rick & co. since the latter half of Season 4, you really going to tell me that not one single person knows how smart Eugene is? I’m sorry, but that is just unbelievable. He’s shown he’s quite capable of being a genus plenty of times in front of pretty much everyone at this point. “Eugene was also with Rick when Alexandria was under threat by thousands of walkers and he apparently didn’t contribute then.” He was a bit of a coward at that point and probably didn’t have the same exact supplies to build the same music airplane thing to lure the walkers away. Besides, he did step up and continued to do so afterwards. The situation at Alexandria and the Sanctuary are two completely different things. With the one in Alexandria, practicality everyone there was fighting the horde of walkers and there was a huge possibility of them winning and less time for a plan like the one he used at the Sanctuary. There was plenty of time and need to come up with one during the siege of the Sanctuary (there’s only a few people able to fight the walkers). But that still doesn’t even excuse the lack of more (and better) contingency plans and the fact that there were plenty of better less fool-proof options.
  • They know he's smart. They do not know or suspect that he is guaranteed to come up with a plan to get rid of the Walkers around the Sanctuary. Also, remember that you're talking about a handful of people who are doing this largely out of desperation. They are not a group of military strategists, so expecting them to come up with contingency plan after contingency plans when a couple years ago most of them were plain suburbanites is just not being realistic.
  • But they know that Eugene will do whatever it takes to keep himself alive and (at that time) stay in Negan’s favor. If Eugene came up with a plan to save him don’t you think that will look good to Negan? I’m not expecting them to be military strategists, I’m expecting them to think with just a scrap of logic, such as making sure that there aren’t other saviors out there who will help the ones inside the sanctuary out and to know that you have to careful when trying to control a zombie horde (the same plan that has failed before). It’s not unrealistic for me to expect that they can come up with a better plan because they’ve been coming up plans for pretty much the entire series and they have experience. But you don’t have to be a military strategist to come up with a better plan (ie just shooting negan while he was in plain view of the balcony. I’m not a military strategist and I came up with that.) If they are so desperate, why aren’t they going for a easier, less complex plan?

The Webisodes

• In Chase's story, Cold Storage, it takes place in Atlanta. But, BJ tells him he can take clothes from a locker that "belonged to a cop" (which is implied to be where BJ found his M16), which we then find out is Rick, via photo albums and department photos of Rick, Shane, Don and Leon. But, this also retcons Rick's home town from (fictional) King's County, Georgia, back to Cynthiana, Kentucky, as it is in the books, since it's implied he's Hannah the Bicycle Girl's brother. How does Rick, a sheriff in Kentucky, have a storage locker in Atlanta? Even if he did live in Georgia, it still doesn't make sense that he would have a locker in Atlanta.
  • Didn't Rick have family in Atlanta? Perhaps business took him to Atlanta and he had to leave some things behind, so he used one of his families' lockers and BJ just assumed it belonged to Rick himself.
  • Or it might have belonged to a cop who used to be a deputy working for Rick: one who moved to Atlanta and brought some photos along from his old job.

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