Fear the Walking Dead

[Onkel Neal]

I wanted to like the original WD series, but after the first few episodes, it became a strained bore. I still watch it, mainly for laughs.

Now they have a new series, based on the same events but starting earlier in the timeline, in LA. So I'm going to give it a try. Fear the Walking Dead, first two episodes are out. Episode one, setting us up with the main characters, a typically awful, self-absorbed bunch. Husband has a shrill ex, petulant kid, and a new wife, with two really annoying step kids. The son is all of 19 and has a serious drug problem. Daughter pouts. Man, I feel for this guy, and the zombies haven't even shown up yet.

But they will. And that's the part that attracts me; the gradual realization that the would is coming to an awful end. How they portray that in the series will determine how much interest I have. So far, they are doing ok. Episode two

gives is a glimpse of how law enforcement will handle zombies, and how the street crowds react. I can see how the zombie outbreak will go wide, with all the rioters, looters, and idiot anarchists rampaging, who will slow down the zombie infection? No one.

I would love it if the show had some prepper characters in it, but so far, it's mostly just this one extended family, who are very seriously not the best candidates to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Stay tuned for episode 3 next week.

[Oberon]

Going to try and pick this one up tonight, big fan of TWD so hopefully will enjoy this. :yep:

[Eichhörnchen]

We got to the end of series four, I think, then decided it had lost its way. Will give this a go, however; my wife is a diehard zombie fan.

[Onkel Neal]

Let me know what you think after you get through ep2 :cool:

[Herr-Berbunch]

I got really bored after a couple of episodes of the last series (actually a season or two before but I stuck at it) but started watching Fear last night, got halfway through and was tired, and bored again, but I'll stick with it for a while longer.

At least there's no Rick and son.

[Stealhead]

If you ask me Zombies work in a B movie such as Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead. I guess I was ahead of the trend I and my brother and a few friends we liked those movies when they where on VHS. It was interesting while at the same time not being pretentious.

Now you have "zombie family" stickers in other words zombies are too main stream.Zombies would go hungry not many good brains left to eat.

[Oberon]

I wanted to like the original WD series, but after the first few episodes, it became a strained bore. I still watch it, mainly for laughs.

Now they have a new series, based on the same events but starting earlier in the timeline, in LA. So I'm going to give it a try. Fear the Walking Dead, first two episodes are out. Episode one, setting us up with the main characters, a typically awful, self-absorbed bunch. Husband has a shrill ex, petulant kid, and a new wife, with two really annoying step kids. The son is all of 19 and has a serious drug problem. Daughter pouts. Man, I feel for this guy, and the zombies haven't even shown up yet.

Yeah, they made sure they checked all the boxes there for the LA scene. :haha:

But they will. And that's the part that attracts me; the gradual realization that the would is coming to an awful end. How they portray that in the series will determine how much interest I have. So far, they are doing ok. Episode two

I must admit, that gradual decline into chaos is probably one of the best parts of this genre, the threads that bind society slowing coming apart as the protagonist struggles to come to terms with the new status quo.

gives is a glimpse of how law enforcement will handle zombies, and how the street crowds react. I can see how the zombie outbreak will go wide, with all the rioters, looters, and idiot anarchists rampaging, who will slow down the zombie infection? No one.


Looting is a given in this kind of situation, let's face it in a suburban US setting it doesn't take much for looters to come out. :haha: The rioters and anarchists will quickly clear up when they realise what the police are really after.


I would love it if the show had some prepper characters in it, but so far, it's mostly just this one extended family, who are very seriously not the best candidates to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Stay tuned for episode 3 next week.

That would probably make for very boring television, they'd bug out at the earliest opportunity and probably wouldn't see a zombie until a few months into the infection, and by that time you're into TWD territory.



My take on the two episodes so far.


Good, the gradual decline is handled quite well, although there appears to be a disturbing lack of people watching televisions and the national media outlets seem to be slow to pick up on the spate of shootings, considering how quickly Ferguson flooded the airways.
The kid at the school was probably the most accurate of todays interconnected society, he saw it coming and wanted to prepare. If anything he was perhaps the closest to a 'prepper' so far. Unfortunately, I suspect that we will not see him again, except perhaps as a roving corpse. Prepping is one thing, surviving is quite another.
The ignorance before the storm is a nice touch though, and something that hasn't really changed in over a hundred years. When Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, he commented on how the area around the initial landing point was completely oblivious to the fact that a hundred odd people had been burnt to death by a deadly alien weapon during the night.
The cast are...well they tick the demographic boxes, but I can see them beginning to grate a little, Lori style. I guess this will make it all the more satisfying when one of them gets shot or eaten...because let's face it, you know it'll happen.
It's an interesting choice to put a drug addict in the middle of it, that's a bit of maintenance that you've got to upkeep in making sure he goes through the withdrawal process authentically. They might just get fed up of this and get him eaten at some point.

The problem I think that this series will face is that at some point they're going to end up treading the same path as TWD. TWD opened a few weeks into the event, with a couple of flashbacks to it. At some point, FTWD is going to reach that time-zone and it'll either continue as a separate series to TWD, or stop. I guess it depends on what focus they want to make it, of the downfall of mankind, or another zombie survival genre.

Also...just one last thing. LA was sure hesitant to get in the National Guard, weren't they? I was expecting to see more Apache and Cobra gunships in the air, not to mention Chinooks and Huey evacuation teams for hospitals and the like. Maybe that'll come next episode.
Would be nice if they pulled out all the stops and gave us an LA version of 'Yonkers' (http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers).

[Betonov]

I'm a fan of survival so it's strange I havent' seen the both series yet :hmmm:
I should get into it.

[Catfish]

What do you mean, fear the walking dead?
It took 10 minutes until the 'screen' came up (in my bath mirror, this morning), and i sure looked dead, but no one has to fear me :O:

[mako88sb]

As popular as zombies are these days, they could keep coming up with all kinds of prequels for years. Different cities, countries, military bases, returning carriers and subs. Even something along the lines of crime organizations vs zombies. I wasn't really into it much before but must admit I'm hooked now.

[Betonov]

Mafia vs zombies :haha:

You may want to patent that becasue I'm honestly convicned that would be the most bad ass series ever :)

[Jimbuna]

Now you have "zombie family" stickers in other words zombies are too main stream.Zombies would go hungry not many good brains left to eat.

CLASSIC!! :)

[Torplexed]

Who needs fake zombies when the world is full of real ones shambling about?

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/PtU0T_X3eaY/maxresdefault.jpg

https://russellnoble.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/people-using-their-smartphones.jpg

http://pix.echtlustig.com/d/1405/was-ist-nur-los-mit-unserer-generation-generation-smartphone_4.jpg

https://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1396/45/1396459522623.jpg

[limkol]

@ Torplexed:

You got that right:)

[ikalugin]

Knowing how our security/law enforcement works (that and how all commieblock appartment buildings are zombie proof with added tendency of population to sit in those commieblock appartments) I think that we would just slide into totalitarism.

After all, we had gopnick appocalypse and somehow we are still here.

[Oberon]

Knowing how our security/law enforcement works (that and how all commieblock appartment buildings are zombie proof with added tendency of population to sit in those commieblock appartments) I think that we would just slide into totalitarism.

After all, we had gopnick appocalypse and somehow we are still here.

In World War Z, Russia...well, I'll take it from the zombie wiki:

Russia was badly affected by the zombie outbreak. Owing to the country's size, the Russians were forced to contend with roaming zombie hordes from Eastern Europe, China, and the countries of Central Asia. The Russian military, despite being a significant military power in the world, fared little better than the U.S. and Chinese militaries, and eventually it erupted into rebellion, in response to which the Ministry of Defense instituted a policy of Decimation. The Russian military retreated to a Safe Zone in Siberia, abandoning their territory west of the Ural Mountains, which due to its high population was heavily infected (combined with bordering the zombie hordes from other populous countries in Western Europe). The only real advantage Russia had was the mountains of weapons and ammunition left over from the Soviet Union. While this meant that the Russian military could continue to function even after most of their industrial base for producing new weapons was overwhelmed, it also meant that many units were sent into battle with nothing but WWII-vintage Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles . Such primitive weapons and the sheer size of Russian territory made it impossible to use the tactics employed in many other parts of the world, particularly luring zombie hordes toward reinforced squares. Instead, the fighting was characterized as a close-quarters brawl with massive casualties. Russia did have a second "advantage" of a sort in its old ally "General Winter": even the massive zombie hordes pressing north from China would be slowed by the colder temperatures of Siberia. Even so, after their massive losses in the first year of the war, the Russians had to resort to walling off their remaining cities so they coulld be cleared incrementally. The Russian population was so drastically reduced that even within the small remaining population, only a tiny handful of fertile women managed to survive through the end of the war, without succumbing to combat, malnutrition, abuse, drugs, or sexually transmitted diseases. With fertile women now considered a precious and finite resource, many volunteered for government breeding programs to serve as broodmares to attempt to make up for the drastic population loss. Ironically, while Siberia served as Russia's Safe Zone during the war - while zombie hordes from Western Europe battered the mountain passes in the Urals - Siberia itself was never fully cleared of zombies. Inherently, isolated zombies that froze solid in the vast unguarded wastes of Sibera would go unnoticed for years, so it is still technically a "White Zone" even a decade after the official end of the war. The United States and international task force offered to help clear Siberia, as it was doing in other parts of the world such as Canada and Finland, but the Russians refused to let foreign troops inside of its borders.



Russia was eventually replaced by an expansionist theocracy known as the Holy Russian Empire. It is mentioned that they have regained several ex-Soviet states through conquest, including Belarus (though many of them had been so depopulated by the zombies that the Russians simply "liberated" them from the undead).

[ikalugin]

I have read WWZ, thanks. And (more or less) every point they make is wrong.

[mako88sb]

Mafia vs zombies :haha:

You may want to patent that because I'm honestly convinced that would be the most bad ass series ever :)

I would be very surprised to find out somebody hasn't thought about combining 2 hits like The Sopranos and The Walking Dead.

[Betonov]

I would be very surprised to find out somebody hasn't thought about combining 2 hits like The Sopranos and The Walking Dead.

The Sopranos did when Christopher wrote a script for a movie when a mobster comes back to life as a zombie and starts killing those that betrayed him.

[Betonov]

Oh, some reading for you all
http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html

[ikalugin]

Yes, when discussing zombies one has to answer those questions:
- are they biodegradable?
- what is their animation source?

The first one is farily straight forward. If zombies are biodegradable (and or edible), then depending on the enviroment it takes a very short period of time for them to die out naturally, though such process, should we assume that zombie appocalypse did occur, would lead to spread of regular deseases in affected areas.

The second one is less obvious. For example - how is zombie mobility affected by broken bones and/or tissue loss? How is their situational awareness affected by the loss of sensory organs? Obviously an immobile and sensory deprived zombie is not a threat.

The general problem with zombie scenarios is that their zombies (WWZ included) ignore (known) laws of nature selectively. Ie they can move endlessly without any energy inputs, while animative power goes out if their central nerveous system is taken out. Which is why I prefer 28 days/weeks later zombies, as they sort of make sense (the only problem I have with those is the small ammount of time required for infection to take over).

[Onkel Neal]

My take on the two episodes so far.


Good, the gradual decline is handled quite well, although there appears to be a disturbing lack of people watching televisions and the national media outlets seem to be slow to pick up on the spate of shootings, considering how quickly Ferguson flooded the airways.
The kid at the school was probably the most accurate of todays interconnected society, he saw it coming and wanted to prepare. If anything he was perhaps the closest to a 'prepper' so far. Unfortunately, I suspect that we will not see him again, except perhaps as a roving corpse. Prepping is one thing, surviving is quite another.
The ignorance before the storm is a nice touch though, and something that hasn't really changed in over a hundred years. When Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, he commented on how the area around the initial landing point was completely oblivious to the fact that a hundred odd people had been burnt to death by a deadly alien weapon during the night.
The cast are...well they tick the demographic boxes, but I can see them beginning to grate a little, Lori style. I guess this will make it all the more satisfying when one of them gets shot or eaten...because let's face it, you know it'll happen.
It's an interesting choice to put a drug addict in the middle of it, that's a bit of maintenance that you've got to upkeep in making sure he goes through the withdrawal process authentically. They might just get fed up of this and get him eaten at some point.

The problem I think that this series will face is that at some point they're going to end up treading the same path as TWD. TWD opened a few weeks into the event, with a couple of flashbacks to it. At some point, FTWD is going to reach that time-zone and it'll either continue as a separate series to TWD, or stop. I guess it depends on what focus they want to make it, of the downfall of mankind, or another zombie survival genre.

Also...just one last thing. LA was sure hesitant to get in the National Guard, weren't they? I was expecting to see more Apache and Cobra gunships in the air, not to mention Chinooks and Huey evacuation teams for hospitals and the like. Maybe that'll come next episode.
Would be nice if they pulled out all the stops and gave us an LA version of 'Yonkers' (http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers).


Good summary. :up: I hope you are right about the upcoming episodes featuring

military engagement. I don't know what the budget for this show is, but it would be awesome to have tanks and Apaches engaging like you said. :yep:

What do you mean, fear the walking dead?
It took 10 minutes until the 'screen' came up (in my bath mirror, this morning), and i sure looked dead, but no one has to fear me :O:
:har:

A screen cap from my favorite scene in ep2, imaging being caught in that traffic as the zombie hordes hit

[Eichhörnchen]

This is a great comedy with Woody Harrelson, but if you want a taste of what it might really be like to walk among the living dead (apart from visiting one of the country's many Spa Towns) then there are bags of games featuring the peckish undead you can play on PC, such as Left 4 Dead, STALKER, Shade and Hell Forces, to name a few. There can be no guilt in blowing a zombie's head off, but a good game will allow you to get in on the action without any danger of being eaten alive yourself.

http://i.imgur.com/miiqiq1.png "Hell Forces"... meet your chums for num-nums

[Onkel Neal]

Episode 3 tonight. I won't be able to watch it until tomorrow afternoon, but feel free to discuss. I won't peek until tomorrow.:timeout:

[STEED]

Not my cup of tea, as pointed out on here zombies work in B-Movies but a series..Nah.


Years ago I watched the BBC series Survivors about a outbreak of a bio flu virus that near on wiped out the human race. Set in England tells the story how the very few survivors struggle to remain alive, series one was good and so was the start of series two but the series fell in to decline. As for the final third....:/\\!!

BBC Survivors intro 1975
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPKk204nOTk

Survivors (1975 TV series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series)


The BBC tried to revamp the series with a updated 2008 version which lasted only two seasons and was cancelled due to low ratings.

Survivors (2008 TV series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(2008_TV_series)


Just to throw one more in the mix..Day of the Triffids.

[Onkel Neal]

:cry: Blast, no episode last night.

[Oberon]

:cry: Blast, no episode last night.

Here's me searching my usual location for watching this to no avail. What's the deal with holding back on us like that? It's not as if it's a very long first season. :O:

[Onkel Neal]

I know, man. And one would think they would want to keep the momentum up. Skipping a week after the first two episodes? :o

[Betonov]

You had labor day.

[Onkel Neal]

Episode 3, finally got time to watch it. Not bad, I like the twist at the end,
Do you really want to spoil this? :hmmm:
where they were set to leave,
then saw the neighbor husband returning home to the zombified wife. Ok, so they have to stop and...whoop, the National Guard in on the scene. I guess next week we will have a few NG as characters. That's fine, I just hope they don't repeat the lame Walking Dead trope of fighting for control of the group, constantly saying "I can keep you safe".

Have you ever seen so many helpless people in one family. They have to steal a shotgun from the neighbor, fumbling the shells all over the place. Good grief. Can't there be one character in a TV show like this who knows a little about handing himself? Where's that kid with the steak knife? I bet by the time the show comes back to him, he'll be the leader of a band of survivors.

[Oberon]

Episode 3, finally got time to watch it. Not bad, I like the twist at the end,
Do you really want to spoil this? :hmmm:
where they were set to leave,
then saw the neighbor husband returning home to the zombified wife. Ok, so they have to stop and...whoop, the National Guard in on the scene. I guess next week we will have a few NG as characters. That's fine, I just hope they don't repeat the lame Walking Dead trope of fighting for control of the group, constantly saying "I can keep you safe".

Have you ever seen so many helpless people in one family. They have to steal a shotgun from the neighbor, fumbling the shells all over the place. Good grief. Can't there be one character in a TV show like this who knows a little about handing himself? Where's that kid with the steak knife? I bet by the time the show comes back to him, he'll be the leader of a band of survivors.

I dunno, you've got

the El Salvadoran guy, he seems to know his stuff. I suspect he spent his time in the civil war. Therefore he knows not to fully put his trust in the military as they can be there one day and gone the next.

I must admit


It took long enough for the NG to get on the scene, I mean this is LA, there's got to be a NG depot nearby, they could have at least got gunships into the area, a few Apaches could mess up an infected crowd with their chainguns. Of course, at this point there's probably no major hordes actually assembled. I'd wager that this will come within the next two episodes when the military start to lose control of the inner urban population.
It's also entirely possible that the military actually keep some semblance of control, TWD is set on the other side of the US, so it could be that something survives in the western US, but honestly in a situation like this, a city is the worse place to try and keep clean. In this situation, I'd be considering heading north on I5 and turning off at the farmstead area, sort of Corcoran area. Trying to set something up there.
The desert is an idea, but you can't grow much out there, but I guess these people aren't exactly thinking long term, and after all, why should they? They don't realise this is going to get out of control, and now the soldiers have arrived, they're sure that the good old US army will triumph and we'll all live happily ever after. The villagers of Woking thought the same when the artillerymen of the British army marched through on the way to Horsell Common in The War of the Worlds, and look how crispy they turned out to be. :O:

Still, reaction times aside I found this episode to be rather slow, but that's the problem when you set it during the crisis period, they rarely start out fast, real crisis's start slow, and people think they've got it under control, and then the rug gets pulled and things snowball. Europes refugee/migrant crisis for example. :03:

Hopefully, in the next episode the NG will start going all in and we'll see something a bit more potent than a Chinook. Seriously guys, AH-64s, you don't even need the fancy Longbow radar, even Cobras will do. Get a Huey in there with some loudspeakers, blast some Wagner, get the zed-heads out onto the streets and give them some M230 loving. Heck, even the chainguns on the side of the Huey will help, ok, you're probably going to miss the head most of the time, but get this before the horde grows and you might just keep LA. Arsenal of freedom, use it. :O:

By this point in the UK we'd probably have run out of ammo for the armed forces and be switching to claymores...and I don't mean the mines! :haha:

[Oberon]

You know one film that did it right, for me at least, with the military response.

Cloverfield.

Ok, they only had one city to respond to, but the response time was rapid, force was used, ranging from an SPG (masquerading as a tank) to a B2 (ok, the B2 was perhaps the wrong thing for the job, but it's a recognisable shape for the cinema audience). And it had the right amount of quiet group time to crazy shooty monster time, and that balance of group and crowd reaction between the two. Just a shame that its style of filming left it unwatchable to so many people. :dead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WEAVsNkIps

[Onkel Neal]

Good analysis. :up: I'm thinking the outbreak since ep1 has been a couple of days elapsed, so it's probably within the realm of possibility that the NG would be on the scene after that. One thing they have to be careful of is collateral damage. After reading your comments, I got an awesome mental picture of a helo pilot flying over the LA city, seeing various scenes of disaster, outbreak, struggle, rioting, zombies chasing and catching people...man, this show has potential. Hope the don't squander it.

[Oberon]

I feel cheated, I didn't get my gunship battle. :nope:

Instead we've switched to a sort of season two Jericho-esque army run 'safe zone'. You know, it's starting to become routine that the military are not the good guys in programs like these, pretty soon the shock factor will be when the military actually does turn out to be the good guys! :haha:

So, yes, we're playing heavily to the 'Government going to put us in FEMA death camps' mentality here, but to be fair it's not implausible in a situation like this, and honestly it's good practice to move the weak, wounded and liabilities away from the healthy workers in any survival zone situation. Of course, this never actually works out right in reality because you're not dealing with robots or animals but human beings.
My theory is that this military group is acting on its own, that contact with command was lost not long after they moved into the city and so they're just doing what they can to clear the local city and start up their own local military run government. Naturally the leader of this government will be the head army chap, and it will be a form of military dictatorship thinly disguised as a democracy. We've seen this done in other shows many times before.
This whole 'hospital' thing likely is actually a medical center, they wouldn't have taken the first wife with them if there wasn't an air of legitimacy about it, but chances are there will be strict rules in regards to who gets to live and who doesn't, and I'm willing to bet that the Salvadorian wife will not survive. In regards to Narco-Nick, he might be considered not worth spending resources on and retired permanently.
Obviously though, the family will have broken into the hospital zone by then to bust Nick out, the first wife will probably either die or have to be left behind. The daughter, she's in trouble because she's given herself a home-made tattoo and those things never work out right without an infection. Chances are that when she gets carted off that's when the dramatic rescue will happen, the military will probably have done some other morally dubious stuff by that point to ram home the fact that what they're staying in is probably just as dangerous as what's outside it.
So the family will bust into the hospital, rescue Nick and the daughter who will probably be given a course of antibiotics since she'll be on the useful list, and then they'll drive off into the desert dodging zombies.

I hope I'm proven wrong since that's pretty cliché.

Besides, they're probably better on the move, since that safe zone is only going to last until the first horde shows up and then those fences are coming down.

Again, pretty disappointing that nothing was shown of the fight in the city, nor even mentioned. I mean, they would have had a great view of the helicopters, aircraft, bombing runs and so on. Instead the great military might of the US armed forces seems to have folded up like a wet newspaper. Goddammit I wanted my Yonkers!! :nope:

[Onkel Neal]

Instead we've switched to a sort of season two Jericho-esque army run 'safe zone'. You know, it's starting to become routine that the military are not the good guys in programs like these, pretty soon the shock factor will be when the military actually does turn out to be the good guys!

Yeah, exactly. Which is ok for an episode or two, but I hope they don't carry this theme out till the end of the season. Man, the military is EEVIL, that's never been done before. :dead:

Right now the biggest adversary for the main characters is themselves. They are so soft, so silly, so absorbed with themselves it makes me cringe. I certainly did enjoy watching the druggie get slapped around. I know addiction is the cause for his atrocious behavior, but man, what he did to the old man who was dying... awful. Just watch, he will kick his addiction and rise to the occasion next season and be the hero. :shifty:

I was disappointed too, about the abrupt transition from Apocalypse to internment. I guess there's no $$ in the budget, although the Walking Dead is the most popular show on TV. You would think they have the budget for a lot of melee and action sequences. Who knows, with 2 episodes to go, maybe this is being saved for the finale...

[Onkel Neal]

Episode 5, Doug, you need to man up...well, too late for you, Doug.:haha:

Oh man, I was pretty stoked.
When Salazar set up to work over the captured soldier, I did an eye roll, cuz I thought that was a little over the top. However, when it was revealed that Salazar was not the victim of his former govt, but the hand of the govt torture squads, I had a sweet flash of Lost. :D Nicely done, FTWD.


Thought they goofed when Salazar went in the kitchen to wash up and there was still running water. Apocalypse, people, no essential services.



So, one episode left. Not sure what the motivation for the ending sequence will be. Why would Salazar open that door?

[Oberon]

Ha, well that wasn't too bad an episode as they go.


The reveal of Salazar being part of the government torture squad as opposed to the victim that we thought he was, that was a very nicely done reveal and a good character twist. The fact that Maddie was ok with it as long as she didn't have to do it or witness it is perhaps a little jab at the wests attitude towards the use of torture to gather information.
Chris and Alicia raiding and then trashing that house was another good scene, it's a sort of watershed for the teenage characters in discovering that the rigid society that they were born into and grew up with has disappeared, right about the time when they're still rebellious enough to exploit it fully rather than to ponder the moral issue of it like their parents would (and are).
The military continue to be rather woefully incompetent, there seems to have been no major attempt to clear the city other than sending out foot patrols to get eaten. Furthermore, in a scenario like this with most of the city abandoned and with no rain shown for a while there would be mass fires and no-one around to stop them until half the city had burnt down. Look at Kobe in 1995, how quickly fires erupted and spread through the rupture of gas mains and electricity supplies. Now there's no earthquake in this scenario, but all it takes is a stray bullet ricochet near a gas station or a gas leak and away we go.
In regards to the running water, that wasn't so much a goof as I think they've been able to keep the electricity going between certain times, so there is still something of an infrastructure operating, but at a much reduced rate and now the military are bugging out then it will fail shortly afterwards.
That stadium of Z's though...yeah, that's emptying next episode, and probably the military will do it or something like that. I guess that makes it a Chekovs stadium? :hmmm:

[Onkel Neal]

Yeah, I forgot about the periodic electricity.

Hopefully they are saving the fires, hordes of zombies charging down the streets, and total collapse for this last episode. So far, for a zombie apocalypse, things have been too low key. The looting and riots a few episodes were well done and that should have triggered the chaos necessary for the zombie eruption, but they moved away from that and switched to suburbia. Typically, they depict the military as incompetent, yet they somehow erected miles of chain link fence in a week. I think the show runners set themselves up for fail a long time ago when they went with really slow, feeble zombies in Walking Dead. Now, how are they going to have them overrun US Army? It would have to be sheer massive numbers, and they really have not set up the waves of infected going about biting others...but I'm still liking the show.

[Oberon]

I think the horde situation will happen when

the doors to the stadium are somehow opened.

But yes, such a thing should definitely have happened earlier than now, I mean unless there are a LOT more soldiers in the area than has been shown then there should have been at least one horde created by now and they would be heading towards any form of noise...such as convoys of humvees and trucks... :hmmm:

[Oberon]

Well


We got the horde, and a fantastic tactical use of it too. Loved the whole "I'd save your ammunition." from Salazar. The fight between the military and the horde was standard fare, not as high budget as I'd hope they'd go but I guess that they didn't want to CGI it up too much, which is commendable.
The ash piles were a somber moment, and done well.
The vistas of LA with out of control fires was what I was expecting from much earlier in this show, and I'm surprised that more fires didn't reach their old encampment before the military left.
I wondered if they'd off one of the characters, and in fact I'm surprised that they only killed a couple in total, in fact I'd say just one essential character really since Salazars missus was a side character more than a main one. I like Strand but he's going to be the token 'can we trust him' character that Salazar initially was before we got to know more about him. I also question the wisdom of fleeing to sea, because in the long term supplies are going to become a problem. A small island off the coast would be a better option, close enough to the mainland to forage for supplies but far enough that a barrier of water divides you and the infected mainland. Clear the island and maintain routine patrols to mop up any infected that come ashore and you've got a reasonable chance given the circumstances.
At least, though, they've broken the love triangle. That would have been a constant source of irritation as they go into season two. Nick is still going to be an annoying character (Although I did love his little epiphany at how he's never known where he's going and now everyone is catching up to him) but I think, as you've already said, that he's going to reform over the next season, and form a bond of sorts with Strand since they've both lied their way into situations and out of them again.
At least Travis is adjusting, it's going to take him a while to reboot after shooting his ex-wife (insert ex-wife joke here) and it will be played for tension between him and Chris for the start of the next season, but he seems to be realising that in this new world you're going to have to lose a bit of the humanity that you've always loved and nurtured. I think though he will continue to remain the shows moral compass since the rest of the ensemble would not think twice about stooping low to accomplish certain goals, with the possible exception of Ophelia.

So...my conclusion? Well, it was a passable series, ticked the right boxes but lacked the dramatic punch that the spiralling end of the world is meant to have. Only in the last episode did it deliver some of what it promised in its premise and even then it was a limited military engagement, not the full hog. We saw tanks in The Walking Dead, but not even APCs make an appearance in FTWD. From a military buff standpoint it does let the side down a bit, but I can understand how getting these sorts of things to film would be expensive and difficult.
The family plotlines did get in the way a little bit, but they seemed to pan out alright as it got to the conclusion and some of them were a nice insight into the human mentality at the end of civilization as we know it. Between the cast they managed a fairly good slice of the good and bad of mankind in a difficult situation. Nicks drug problem seems to be a bit on and off as the plot demands, but that's something that happens in nearly any television series with a character that has a reoccurring problem, sometimes the plot leaves it behind by accident and has to run back to pick it up later.

All in all, I quite enjoyed it, the characters might not have been as well polished as those in TWD, but they've had longer to do it. We've only had six episodes of this cast, so we'll see how the second, fuller, season works out.

Now, onward to the return of The Walking Dead....

THE WALKING DEAD, CORAL!!

[Onkel Neal]

Finally got time to watch the finale. Your recap was spot on. I especially enjoyed the scenes where the black guy and the drug kid were trapped in the hall, I thought they were going to punch his ticket, but he was saved by an intermittently working swipe card at the last second.And yeah, the way the druggie kid phrased how the end of the world was sort of the norm for him. Reminds me of the freaking great movie Melancholia and that theme, where people with serious issues that overwhelm their lives are used to disaster.


I see they found a sensible excuse for loosing the zombies from the arena; Salazar was revealed to be ruthless to get what he wants the episode before, so it makes sense he would be ok with using that in order to get into the military compound. A bit surprising that the rest would go along with that, but ok.

I hated seeing the Exner doc go, she seemed like a really cool character.

So, the black guy is slick and rich, and he says he was prepared, so that could be a cool element in the next season. Honestly, that's the problem I have with Walking Dumb, no one seems interested in setting themselves up to survive, it's always clearing more houses and moving on. And no one ever seems to be short of ammo, which if this really happened, would be the single most important thing in the world. Ammo. Got to have it or the weapons won't work. And it's really hard to make it from scratch, nearly impossible unless you can create centerfire primers.





I cannot improve any of your observations, that's pretty much how I felt about the series. Overall, I give the show a B. It did a decent job of setting up normal life as the zombie apocalypse was taking over, I am onboard with the character development, and even though there were a few of decent chaos set pieces, like you said, there could have been much more. Maybe next season.

[Oberon]

Finally got time to watch the finale. Your recap was spot on. I especially enjoyed the scenes where the black guy and the drug kid were trapped in the hall, I thought they were going to punch his ticket, but he was saved by an intermittently working swipe card at the last second.And yeah, the way the druggie kid phrased how the end of the world was sort of the norm for him. Reminds me of the freaking great movie Melancholia and that theme, where people with serious issues that overwhelm their lives are used to disaster.


I see they found a sensible excuse for loosing the zombies from the arena; Salazar was revealed to be ruthless to get what he wants the episode before, so it makes sense he would be ok with using that in order to get into the military compound. A bit surprising that the rest would go along with that, but ok.

I hated seeing the Exner doc go, she seemed like a really cool character.

So, the black guy is slick and rich, and he says he was prepared, so that could be a cool element in the next season. Honestly, that's the problem I have with Walking Dumb, no one seems interested in setting themselves up to survive, it's always clearing more houses and moving on. And no one ever seems to be short of ammo, which if this really happened, would be the single most important thing in the world. Ammo. Got to have it or the weapons won't work. And it's really hard to make it from scratch, nearly impossible unless you can create centerfire primers.





I cannot improve any of your observations, that's pretty much how I felt about the series. Overall, I give the show a B. It did a decent job of setting up normal life as the zombie apocalypse was taking over, I am onboard with the character development, and even though there were a few of decent chaos set pieces, like you said, there could have been much more. Maybe next season.

Yeah

I was sorry to see the Doc go too, but I guess you have to have the captain going down with their ship scene in the great fall. The military leader was a scumbag so it wouldn't have had the same affect if you'd have seen him get overwhelmed, so it had to be a sympathetic character.
In regards to Salazars plan, I imagine that Travis probably whimpered a bit but was beaten into submission by his new wife because she wanted Nick back. It was a ballsy plan, could have gone very very wrong, but it did well.

In regards to the whole nomad style that TWD has taken, you can understand it a little bit in the fact that they have to keep away from the various hordes which have sprung up in random places. Finding a good place in which to hold out is tricky. The prison was a good one but the fence wasn't strong enough at the end of the day, and then the Guv'nor showed up with a tank and broke everything. The problem with the US is that you don't have much in the way of old fortifications like Europe does.
That's one of the things that World War Z (the book) brought up is that we had the advantage of fixed fortifications which no matter how many zombies press up against the thick stone walls, they will not give way.
A chain link fence with barb wire on the top will not hold that much of a horde and then when it goes you get an entire sea of the shuffling sods falling into your home.
The place they've found in the latest season seems to be the best of what they've got so far, the walls are well anchored, it has self sustaining power and water supplies, it is, in essence, a 21st century fort town and that's the kind of thing you need if you want to settle down and start stockpiling stuff, especially if you've got more than a couple of people in your group.

[ikalugin]

Which is why we all love appartment buildings, especially commie block kind, as they are as zombie proof as a castle is.

[Oberon]

Which is why we all love appartment buildings, especially commie block kind, as they are as zombie proof as a castle is.

If you destroy the stairs on the lower floor. You've got to watch out for fires spreading between blocks though. But otherwise, yes, they are pretty good.
I recall in 28 days later the girl and her father took refuge in one and blocked up the lower staircase with all kinds of rubbish.

[ikalugin]

Why would you do that if you have double steel door airlock on the entrance? A single commie block offers you multiple exits, often on different sides. The main issue is heating in winter (done via cental heating), short building life (wont last you for hundreds of years).

The advantage/disadvantage is high density, which allows 24/7 adequate garrison (with patrols) but makes sustainability difficult food wise.

[XabbaRus]

Ah yes, while I was staying at my in-laws apartment I was on the balcony overlooking the park and wondering how effective it could be to be zombie proof.

Also the Soviet apartment building they live in, and I'm not sure how common this is to all designs, but when you get to their floor you come out the lift into a corridor and there is another set of doors. Granted not strong but could be reinforced. Also off this corridor is the access to the stairs.

Also like many blocks, the ground floor is a shop or something, apartments start on the 1st floor (second to my european and US friends) so once it is sealed, you could clear the first floor apartments, and then have a ladder for access to the roof and the outside. The trouble would be getting to the food shops. Also there is a huge park opposite which would be teeming with the walking dead, but again it is surrounded by 8ft steel fences and gates. Maybe with a bit of smart working a group could sanitise the park.

I also was working out how to make the Dacha zombie proof. iKalugin, you know about the "Dachas" on the Zvnigorod shosse out west that have the 16ft high fences. I think they could be defensible and the compounds converted to growing food.

[ikalugin]

Out country house is closer to the US suburban stuff I guess, as there is only a perimiter wall around the whole compound, rather than high walls around the individual properties.