The Walking Dead returns...

All I can say to this is that if an author becomes more interested in telling his story than accounting for how an audience might react to it then he might find himself with a story that no audience will care about. I'm not suggesting that authors must focus exculsively on pandering to or "entertaining" any potential audience. I'm just saying if he ends up writing a "never-ending story" that meanders off into the weeds then he's bound to lose the interest of -any- potential audience in the long run.

A story about "Carl and Rick in Zombieland" will only remain novel and cute for so long...

We may disagree, fundamentally, on this point. The story only ever needs to be what the author wants to to be... But, you are right that while the author need not pander to entertain, it is beholden on the author to keep the story engaging if he wants to keep an audience.

Oh, believe me. It is not 'cute'... at all...
(My personal sub-title is "No One Gets to Be Happy".)
((edit: while not at that level... the movie The Road, comes to mind, as a comparison.))

Related to this, I think the TV producers have stumbled some in this post-Lost world of TV with some of the changes in pacing and plot line introduction (CDC/Jenner & Sophia as the prime examples). It feels like they may be getting it back in order with what I have seen the last 4 episodes.



And, as an aside, it occurred to me that TV Andrea is going to be particularly upset about Shane coming right on the heels of Dale like that...

It's funny that someone took the "bait" of my indirect Lost reference. I suppose I can now shock you by admitting that I never bothered to watch even a single episode of that show.

But yes I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of The Walking Dead: This story has tried to distance itself from something like Lost by focusing overwhelmingly on the "human" part of the story instead of the "mystery" part of it. The problem with that approach is that the "human" side of this story is far from perfect and it lacks much of the gravitas to fully carry a show like this.

What we're left with is a show that's relying too much on the human side of the equation and not enough on the "mystery", especially considering that the human side here is far from perfect. The net effect is a show that continues to be just a tad "out of balance". I believe if they let a little more of the zombie stuff become more important it could balance out the relatively weak human-drama aspects.

Bottomline in their attempt to avoid becoming a "Lost clone" they've over-corrected here and relied too much on characterization aspects that aren't quite strong enough to carry a show like this on its own.

It's somewhat depressing to just watch a single episode of Lost on Netflix and see how superior the acting and handling of an ensemble cast are compare to The Walking Dead.

The Chekhov's gun concept can also be taken to mean "do not include any unnecessary elements in a story". If all you need is a "random vague threat" that does not need to be completely defined to make a group of people react like this then they could have replaced the zombies with sharks with "freakin" laser guns on their heads.

The idea of zombies as a vague, undefined boogeyman will only last so long until eventually you have to stop ignoring the elephant in the room and ask "Hey, by the way, what's your deal anyway?"

All Chekhov said was if you have a gun on the wall it needs to be fired by the end of the story. Nowhere does he mention we need to know how it got there. And yes they could have used sharks with lasers on their heads. Then people would want to know if they are gas lasers or chemical lasers and they'd pick that to pieces, meanwhile there is a story going on.


I get that you want answers and if that's what it takes for you to enjoy the show, that's cool. But I personally don't see Chekhov's gun fitting here as a method of critique.

I only want "answers" here in as much as I'm curious why this show, as presented, even bothered to use zombies as a means to set up a "post apocalyptic" world in the first place.

Frankly I'm personally more scared of things like an extinction-level asteroid impact or the Yellowstone super-volcano going off. Either one of those things could destroy civilization as we know it and leave a small group of survivors trapped on a Georgia farm trying to deal with their situation. But The Walking Dead has nothing to do with asteroids or volcanoes. Its "vector" is zombies, and sooner or later (in this case for me sooner) as I start to get bored by the lack of fully satisfying characters that are left alive I'm inexorably finding myself wanting to know a little more about the zombie backstory. Sorry if that makes me weird or something.

If the zombies aren't important enough to understand then why are they in this story to begin with?

Well even the lowly, faceless stormtroopers from Star Wars finally got an "origin story" in Attack of the Clones.
Maybe our favorite Walkers will be lucky enough to get the same treatment some 20+ years from now.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

...and any die hard Star Wars fan will tell you what a colossal mistake that particular 'origin story' was.

Also this:

Kirkman's response:

Source.

If Kirkman is not planning to write about the origin of the zombie outbreak or fully explain why the unbitten dead turn zombie for the comics series, why would he want to write it specifically for the TV series?

Don't let it bug you -- Daryl saw the tracks but Shane was intentionally trying to throw everyone off by pointing and suggesting a different direction. They split into pairs and around nightfall, Glen and Daryl return to the starting spot, to which Glen states as much. Daryl's response is to the effect of "Might as well do it the right way", meaning following the tracks.

So, now my question for the group. The shot was fuzzy, but was the zombie that attacked Glen and Daryl actually a zombi-fied Randall? I couldn't tell and then the next shot of them is Daryl kneeling over the corpse stating it looks like he died of a broken neck only.

If that's the case, then we can create another hypothesis for turning without a bite-- it's passed through blood. Randall had cut up his wrists trying to escape the cuffs and then we have Shane bloodying/breaking his own nose, thereafter wiping at it. This would explain why we don't necessarily see every person who died from a non-bite simply popping up as well as the accelerated ressurrection.

Making Shane the Leader right yet again, and Rick the Leader wrong (as opposed to delusional Shane the man).

As a general rule, TV only watchers are less forgiving and patient than comic book readers. Comic book readers already expect stories to last months to years on end, with only information being given once a month. TV watchers expect answers every week.

Also, the average person wants neat and tidy endings; hence, the proliferation of happy endings in most media formats. Good guys win, bad guys go to jail or are killed, and the hero always gets the girl/guy. Most importantly, we always learn the plot and how to thwart it; I expect the TV series (if it lasts long enough) to give us answers in what happened and how it works. For example, we know more in the TV series from Dr. Jenner than we ever learned in the comic books. Is it important information? Not really, but it is answers, and probably predicts a trend. (I refer to the fact that we see that the brain itself reactivates after death, something never specified in the comic books.)

Myself? I am okay with ambiguous endings, as that's how life sometimes works. I, however, have come to realize that most people aren't like this, and that they would be dissatisfied if the show never gave any answers.

The first 2 or 3 seasons of lost were actually quite enjoyable, beautifully shot, relatively well-acted, and simply entertaining. The big problem with the overall series was that the producers didn't really have a story laid out very well, but went from episode to episode seeing where the story (and characters) took them. This led to many of the unexplained/unanswered questions by the series finale. (Note: Battlestar Galactica operated the same way, thereby resulting in a similiarly dissatisfying ending for some).

I'm hoping that the Walking Dead, although the comic series is still ongoing, will have a more fleshed out plot line with a definitive ending, much like Breaking Bad has an ending set for its final season (season 5 starting soon!).

That's probably a very good thing. Considering how that show dragged out its mysteries and how many of them it left unresolved, or vaugely resolved, I think you would've really disliked it.



I'm only guessing here, but it might be because there are zombies in the comic book?

I'm not sure if you can call me a Star Wars "fan" but I've seen all 6 movies (especially the first 3) dozens of times over the last 30+ years. Even saw Episode IV in the theaters when it first came out back in late 70s a couple of times.

While I would certainly agree that Attack of the Clones is arguably one of the worst of the 6 movies in general I never had any problem whatsoever with seeing the "origin story" for the Stormtroopers in it. The Stormtrooper origin story didn't make that movie bad in and of itself - the movie had plenty of other better reasons for being lackluster on its own.

To be clear I probably could have gone to my grave without ever seeing an origin defined for the stormtroopers, but now that it's happened I don't consider it a bad thing in the grand scheme of things. I honestly don't think The Walking Dead would suffer that much if we ever got a supplemental side story which explained the origins of the zombies. It could be completely separate from the current group of characters and really having nothing to do with them at all. Basically it could be handled just like The Animatrix dealt with those things for the Matrix story. *shrugs*

Just because Kirkman plans to keep his zombies as a vaguely defined "phantom menace" for his books doesn't mean the TV show will follow that path. It's already been established several times that the comic book is not and never will be considered as "strict canon" for the TV show. Besides we've all seen enough of the TV show to realize that they are not following the comic book incredibly closely anyway. I suspect the TV show will handle things completely independently in the long run.

I'm not fishing to get a full explaination of the zombies just because I want a "happy TV ending". I agree that most TV viewers want/expect that kind of thing. But actually I wouldn't mind if the TV tried to stick as closely to the comic book as possible in this regard. I actually think it's cool that there is -some- mystery to the zombies and I really don't need TV Rick and company to know everything.

Just to refocus here the main problem I had that lead to this discussion is that I simply feel that the TV characters should already know the practical idea that "people can become zombies even if they aren't attacked by other zombies". I don't expect them to know WHY that happens or HOW to stop it, but I just have a hard time accepting that that nugget of knowledge is something that is apparently taking them months to figure out.

Let me put it like this: Let's say the world got overrun by millions of wolves that suddenly appeared and somehow, for the sake of argument, caused the end of civilization. Now don't you think that any survivors of the "wolf apocalypse" would almost instantly become aware that wolves like to hunt in packs? I think that very basic fact of how they operate would become common knowledge amongst anyone left alive in that world. Likewise if a zombie apocalypse like this story ever happened I think it would become a trivially obvious rule of thumb to ANYONE left alive that people could become zombies even without being attacked. That should not be a "mystery" to ANYONE.

I believe the TV show decided to make that core fact of how zombies work a mystery to the audience for dramatic purposes, but in so doing they had to make that very same knowledge a mystery to the characters as well which makes absolutely no sense to me. It forces these characters to seem that much more idiotic than I think they're already supposed to be. As a member of the audience I don't mind if I'm kept in the dark about how the world works until the story decides to reveal itself, but there's no reasonable way these survivors would or could have been ignorant of this at the same time.

Basically what I'm saying is the TV show's attempt to make a "mystery" out of how zombies work fell flat because it required that the characters of the show to be ignorant of something there's almost no way they could have ever been ignorant about.

Right but according to what people have been saying here it could have been a swarm of rabid flying squirrels that destroyed the world just as easily as zombies. The zombies were clearly just the means to Kirkman's ends to tell a story.

But (and this is the key) since The Walking Dead doesn't have anything to do with rabid flying squirrels I don't want to KNOW anything about them. I'd rather know something about what's in THIS story... which happens to be zombies. Faceless vague threats work well enough for a while but unless an author eventually tells us WHY we should care about the faceless vague threats they eventually cease to serve their purpose in the ongoing story.

Normally, I'd agree with this thought process, but I think the problem is that the story, or rather the theme, of the show isn't really about zombies. It's about survival. If zombies were the driving point of the show, I'd want to know more about their origin. But they're not. They provide something to survive, and that's all.

Another reason I find an origin to be inconsequential, is that if this were to happen in the real world, you'd probably never find out what caused it. Look at the 1918 flue pandemic. There's still no established origin for it. Crazy s*** just happens sometimes, and you don't get to know why. I would imagine a zombie plague that wipes out almost all of civilization would provide even fewer answers.

So long story short, I find a lack of origin to be more realistic.

I'd agree that the -characters- never knowing how or why the zombies got started is a fairly realistic approach to the story. But since I'm not a character in the story I don't see why I can't know how it happened.

Again I'll cite The Animatrix as a perfect example of a way to tell the "origin story" of a franchise without actually involving the main characters in things they would have no way of knowing for themselves.

Yeah I heard about the "spoiler" about the Jenner whisper reveal a couple of days ago. It actually makes some sense that they would drop that bomb in a season-ending episode.

I suppose we'll just have to see how it's handled and what effect it might have for where the TV show will go next season.

I agree that it would be nice to know how it all started, but it isn't necessary for the story. In fact, there has already been a precedent of webisodes for more back story, so it's very well possible that we will eventually get more information.

As for my other response, it wasn't aimed towards you; I mostly was saying that Kirkman's quote isn't a be-all, end-all answer for the TV series. Ratings are different beasts between comics and TV; Kirkman has to throw a bone to TV viewers to keep them watching. I'm sure that AMC is putting some pressure on in terms of keeping viewers happy.