The Walking Dead returns...

The Governor is definitely going to make an appearance. Not until next season, but he's going to be there. Casting I think is being done now for shooting in July.

Tonight's episode was exactly what I wanted after the Sophia arc. Action action action action. Followed by more Action.

Shane's decline is most delicious since he's still my favorite character.

Again, avoid pretty much anything labelled spoilers folks on the internet if that's your bag. Nearly every single one I've come across has been spot on.

Only one month left till the end of the season. Buy hey, there's always "Something to Fear" to keep up company until next October.

I feel like this episode was one step forward two steps back for Rick. He does the whole Wild West thing taking out the immediate threat... and then, when their friends show up he explains what happened!

This is right up there with saying YES if someone asks you if you're a god... if you've killed some people, and their friends come around asking where they are, you HIDE or LIE!

Then we have the jumper. With a swarm of Walkers descending, the best thing you can do for that guy is put him down quick, and move on... bringing him back to the farm is insanity, albeit ethical insanity.

Contrast this with Shane, who instantly and convincingly lies to Lori to get her back to the farm. If he wasn't in love with another man's wife, he'd make a great leader!

Who wants to bet Hershel was a Vietnam war veteran?

Is it me or did it get dark awful quick relative to last episode?

Vietnam? Maybe. I would almost say a Korean vet, but that might be a bit too old. It's really hard to judge people's age, IMO, when they get to be white-haired.

If you are talking physically dark, like night time, I don't think so. That previous day was awfully eventful and full of stuff that happened. Between the barn, digging the graves, hauling the meatsacks out, etc., a lot of time could've been eaten up. Depending upon what time of the year it is, it could be plausible. Definitely not as bad as say X-Men 3 when it goes from midnight-ish to daylight in the space of five minutes.

Yes I mean sun setting. I thought it was still bright in the bar during last weeks encounter with the two guys. Suddenly it's dark outside and they are hiding. Why hang around the place after wasting those two long enough so their friends show up after dark?

Lori hit the walker in broad daylight, which doesn't really do a whole lot to the walker, but now it's dark and the walker was polite enough not to attack until Lori was on the verge of waking up, long enough to get dark?

Yeah, I noticed the time change as well. Maybe the brightness in the bar was due to a setting sun, coming in the windows? I don't know, it did seem weird.

And I found the case of Randall to be a little strange. First, Rick does in the two guys to protect him and his own, but then it's okay to bring one who's wounded back to the farm? It's a little contradictory, especially considering that Randall had been shooting at them just a few minutes earlier. So, his excuse for why he killed the other two seems a little flimsy with his treatment of Randall. Maybe it's the right thing to do, but it seemed a weird time to feel conscientious about it.

As for Herschel's daughter, either she has the slowest case of zombie-ism on the planet, or it's something else. I was thinking of something that can cause fevers and the like, and I came across another possible solution: Is she pregnant? Shock plus being pregnant could have caused her to collapse. Just a thought...

Something I forgot to mention last week. I'm not sure if it was a local commercial or a national one but during The Walking Dead first showing I saw an ad for this.

The last two episodes have done more to snap the mood and pacing of the story back in line than I could have expected. Very nice.

And things make some sense now in terms of pacing and what not. We get to experence Shane's descent, Rick's inner conflict, see Carl get colder to make certain decisions... My confidence in the program has grown and I am looking forward to more.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mental_Giant Then we have the jumper. With a swarm of Walkers descending, the best thing you can do for that guy is put him down quick, and move on... bringing him back to the farm is insanity, albeit ethical insanity.

That's always been Rick's issue... ethical insanity and the conflict of making the right decision when there isn't one...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mental_Giant Contrast this with Shane, who instantly and convincingly lies to Lori to get her back to the farm. If he wasn't in love with another man's wife, he'd make a great leader!

Smilely aside... Leader? Ah, heck no. I'm with Dale. Shane isn't a leader, and if he didn't have the prospect of Lori there prompting his inner pscycho I think he'd collapse.

And wasn't there one time when it was clearly night at the bar and clearly day at the farm?

Time travelin' zombies!

Or we've gone from zombie apocalypse to zombie apocalypse eclipse!

Yep the inconsistencies about what seems to attract the zombies is definitely one bit of silliness this show seems to suffer from. But the time jumps in this last two episode were just borderline insanity.

First of all we see Glenn and Rick drive "a few miles" into town to find Hershel at the bar. They get to the bar where it's very obviously midday sunny outside, talk to Hershel for a few minutes, then the two other guys show up. Rick kills them then somehow at the start of the next episode suddenly time has jumped forward perhaps 6-8 hours so that it's totally dark outside.

OK, maybe somehow we can dismiss that obvious continuity mistake once we see some cool zombie action and leg impaling. But no, the show's not done being stupid because once again as soon as Rick and company rescue the Randal guy it somehow takes them like 12 more hours to drive "a few miles" back to the farm where it's now midday of the next day already. What?!?

I understand that dramatically speaking it was more scary for it to be dark when they were running around in the town with all the zombies walking around. But in order to get that setting they had to somehow hand-wave a huge amount of time TWICE just to get that scenario. For me it was totally mood-breaking having to accept that the writers don't seem to care about the logical passage of time. Even the Lori car crash was contrived because while it's certainly possible for someone in a crash to be knocked out for a number of hours it was way too convenient that the zombie she hit would -also- not get up and try to eat her for all those hours until she woke up.

The lack of adequate time management of this show is starting to get fairly annoying to say the least.

On Talking Dead I believe they did confirm that the second zombie was the one she hit with the car.

I didn't have a problem with Rick and Company returning the next morning for all the reasons Dark mentioned. Its just the seemingly sudden nightfall in both Rick's and Lori's plots.

When they showed the truck returning after the sun had come up, I honestly expected them to have stopped somewhere to amputate the new guy's leg. However, I didn't find that transition as jarring as the sudden day-to-night transition in the bar.

After all, we don't know how long the bar stand-off went on. It appeared to take place pretty much in real time, but they honestly could've been hunkered down for hours after the other guys arrived.

Anyway, all that aside, the most puzzling thing to me was, why would they patch the kid up and then send him on his way? Not only is he likely to get eaten on his own with a gimpy leg, but they just saved his life after he tried to kill them. He'd have to be pretty evil, or pretty stupid to not be eternally grateful to them for not A) shooting him in the face, or B) leaving him to become walker chow.

Why not just nurse him back to health and absorb him into the group? Sure there's a possibility that he could turn (not zombie turn, turncoat) on them, but he wouldn't have much hope against such a large, heavily armed group.

And who says his buddies would come looking for him? Would they really assume that he survived and the people they were trying to kill and vice-versa would save his life and take him with them? Remember, those guys weren't in the bar talking to Rick, Glenn and Herschel, so they don't have even have reason to suspect that they were part of a larger, nearby group. For all they knew, Rick et. al., were just passing through and stopped for supplies.

Sorry, didn't mean to kill the thread with a short agreement comment. For folks who saw this last week's episode, did anyone get the impression TV-carol might be headed down a route somewhat parallel to comic-Carol? If not in her approach, but in the underlying festering pool of crazy?