Who would like to discuss The Walking Dead TV series?

I have two questions:

Why hasn’t Rick asked anyone what happened to cause people to turn into zombies? That would be one of the first things I asked if I was him.

Wasn’t it insanely stupid for Shane and Lori to have sex? What if she gets pregnant? That would be hard to deal with while on the run from zombies!

I think it’s kind of dumb actually. It is the first instance ever of seeing poorly acted zombies. I didn’t know that was possible until I saw this show. I had higher hopes, especially since there’s never been a similar concept for a series.

@cockswain Why do you think the zombies are poorly acted?

I don’t know how to describe it. I guess if we sat down and watched the first episode together and we looked at the faces they were making I could point it out. A lot of them just didn’t move right, and their expressions looked funny.

@cockswain So, you’re saying you know what a real zombie would look like and how they would act?

Oh, this is going to be rich; I can tell already.

I’m sitting here at work trying not to bust a gut laughing out loud at “poorly acted zombies” because “they just didn’t move right”. Zounds, this is great good fun. I’m not picking on you, @cockswain, but the criticism of ‘poorly acted zombies’ just struck a chord.

Who knows what a zombie acts like? Or rather… “I have so many other examples I could give you,” if that’s a better way of saying it.

oy vey

Yes, I’ve seen zombies…in dozens of movies since Night of the Living Dead!

In all the movies I’ve seen, the zombies shuffled around, groaned, and acted far more intimidating than the ones I saw on this show. Just compared to Zombieland, these zombies in the show don’t nearly have the same zombitude.

Why are you so defensive about these zombies? You asked a question, got an opinion, and now you’re asking me “Oh yeah, have you even ever seen real zombies?” What are you, 12?

@cockswain I was just trying to get to the root of why you thought they were poorly acted, because no one really know exactly how a zombie would act. Every director’s interpretation of a zombie could be different and also how they became a zombie could affect them differently.

Just trying to provoke some thoughtful discussion, if you don’t want to discuss it anymore then don’t.

@cockswain, but that’s like saying that “space aliens would never act like ET did” because they never had before in the movies.

I hope this thread gets legs (so to speak). This could be a mother lode.

@CyanoticWasp Yeah, this would actually serve better as a question on it’s own.

Spin-off question!

I thought it was good… although I did have a bit of nerd rage over a few technicalities:

Be sure your safety is off and you have a round in the chamber…

Glocks don’t have switch safeties….

I have a Beretta and one clip

It’s a magazine… not a clip. There is a difference.

Rick finds a grenade…

The grenade is a training grenade. You can tell because the spoon on it is blue, which signifies that it is inert.

Oh, and did anyone else think the other guy’s zombie wife kind of looks like Michelle Obama?

I was actually impressed with the zombies. Some of them were really good looking. The part at the beginning of the first episode after he wakes up where the zombie sticks its long fingers through the barricaded door was creepy as hell.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Wow, you must have a lot of knowledge about weaponry. Thank you for those technicalities!

@erichw1504, no problem. Guns are just one of my dozens of hobbies.

@erichw1504 Sorry, I may have misinterpreted the tone of what you were saying. That happens in writing sometimes.

@CyanoticWasp You are so trying to goad me. Those aren’t analogous statements because aliens are OK to look like anything imaginable since that is the nature of the alien genre. They can look like predators, blobs, those War of the Worlds things, or, well Aliens. These zombies were trying to look like traditional zombies and let me down with mediocre makeup jobs and some bad acting.

Further this speaks to how talentless some of those actors must be. Acting like a zombie must be the simplest possible form of acting.

I’m not saying all of the zombies I saw looked lame. Just a lot.

Also, when that dude went and got in the tank, why the hell did he open the hatch after just waiting a few minutes? I’d have waited a few hours before carefully taking the tiniest peak. The zombies will lose interest and shamble off.

@cockswain The guy on the radio helped him and told him where the zombies were.

No, I’m talking about when he crawled under the tank, shot the zombie soldier guy (who he wasn’t nearly careful enough in assessing for potential zombieness), and then just waited a couple minutes before opening the hatch. Then he had zombie trouble again, until he closed the hatch. The guy on the radio came after that I think.

@cockswain Ooohh, now I gotchya. Yeah, that was pretty retarded.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot… that specific type of tank doesn’t have a hatch on the bottom….

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Holy crap, you know your stuff. You should consult.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Haha, yeah. Why weren’t you hired for production on the show?

I’d do it for free. It kind of sucks… I can’t watch any movies with vaguely military/weapons or technology-related aspects without finding all kinds of factual errors. Most people would miss them, but they are blatant to someone who has done a lot of research, like me.

were you in the military?

@cockswain, nope, but I’m a history major and I’m specializing in military history. I’m also writing my thesis about the evolution of the US Navy, and target shooting/gun collecting is my second favorite hobby, after writing. Like I said… total nerdage.

No.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard I would not call that total nerdage. Far less nerdy than D&D, Magic:The Gathering, Nickelback, LOTR, or WoW, or LARPing. Comparatively, you aren’t even in nerd territory.

Its simple. BEST. SHOW. ON TELEVISION. That is all

@cockswain, well, wikipedia says that I’m technically a nerd because the stuff I enjoy studying isn’t common knowledge. It also has the added qualifier that nerds pursue their interests in lieu of a social life, which is something I don’t do, so I guess you are right. Awesome :-D

@That0neguy01, agreed. The Walking Dead will be the first tv show I have ever watched religiously as it premiered.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard as for the training grenade thing, he hasn’t actually used it yet, has he? So he may find out when he most needs to use it “for real” that it’s not what he thinks. (But who’s going to explain that, I wonder?) And whether the tank has a bottom hatch or not, I was a bit disappointed that he was ready to blow his brains out before he even took a look at any other options, and then ‘just happened’ to notice a hatch a foot in front of his face.

I was curious what a tank was doing in the middle of Atlanta in the first place, though. I know, I know… ‘zombie attack’ and all that. They still take a while to deploy, and there was only one of them, and it was undamaged, not apparently disabled.

Pretty amazing that everyone seems to lock onto the right radio frequencies… and then can’t hear more than one word in every five. And no one but the main character knows that a helicopter flew overhead. That sound is pretty damn distinctive—and loud.

@cockswain no, I’m not trying to goad you, and the analogy holds. Just because anyone can make “a space alien” anything they want, they can do the same with “a zombie” as they have already done with “a werewolf”, “a vampire”, “a wizard”, “an Orc”, “an elf”, “a Hobbit” ... and on and on. The characters are for any writer or actor (or director, since I guess we have to have some uniformity among zombie presentation over the production) to interpret or invent as he will.

I love the way AMC has opened a contest for a “stagger-on role” as a zombie. That got a laugh.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard By that token, everyone who has progressed beyond general knowledge has then become a nerd? I don’t buy that definition. That would have made Jimi Hendrix a nerd.

@CyanoticWasp Ah, but you didn’t address my point that: These zombies were trying to look like traditional zombies and let me down with mediocre makeup jobs and some bad acting.
They aren’t trying to portray them as a glittering vampire vs a bloodthirsty one. They are trying to portray them as the standard lumbering, flesh eating, dead-looking, zombies that die when you shoot them in the head. Since they are obviously attempting to stick with that portrayal, and not “friendly” talking zombies that do something else, this isn’t a case of artistic interpretation. It’s a case of making lame looking zombies with lame actors playing them.

@cockswain I’ll argue about all kinds of things with you, but I’m not going to argue the intricacies of zombie portrayals in movies and television. You win.

You’re damn right I do. :)

I think for a television series, these are the best looking zombies ever.

Since they have no other competition, you are right.

Exactly.

I have been a little disappointed by it so far. There has been no explanation as to what caused this outbreak of zombi ism and as @erichw1504 pointed out none of the characters seem interested in finding out. I don’t think the characterisation is well done and the atmosphere is all wrong. The world has come to an unimaginably horrible end but nobody seems too upset about it. 28 Days Later was creepier.

@flutherother actually, all we know ‘for sure’ from the show is that parts of Georgia have come to an ugly (not ‘unimaginably’; I imagine this nearly every day in one form or another) end. No word on “the world” yet.

I pretty much look at zombie movies as a metaphor for life in most cities already, anyway. Minus the tanks and horses.

@CyanoticWasp I saw a couple of guys shambling along the road this morning and I thought jeez you could have a zombie outbreak here and they would blend in with the regulars so you would hardly know it had happened.

PS I also wondered what happens to a horse that is bitten by a zombie?

The horse turns into lunch.

@flutherother Well, if the horse was only bitten by a zombie, I’d imagine the disease would probably act differently and the horse would either be in-effected or die.

@cockswain, yeah, well that’s wikipedia for you. I agree with you anyway.

One of the best shows out there, can’t wait for season 2! I still wonder how the zombies took out the whole military since its not airborne in nature. There are lots of places with discussions on on, here’s one.

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