The Walking Dead ***With Comic Spoilers***

[Buck]

Sunday Nights at 9pm/8pm (Central) on AMC.

Note from Gonzo:

Spoiler Tag all comic book references please. Anything from episodes that have already aired is fine.

[Deberg_1990]

Originally Posted by NewChief

Yeah. Duh. I guess that makes sense. I guess I was just taking more from the "you'll live to regret it" statement he makes just prior to the whisper. It's like he knows something sinister or bad. Googling reveals that others think he might be telling him 1) location/potential of a cure (seems unlikely sense Jenner had given up hope) or 2) About his wife and other sherriff dude (possible due to potential surveillance in CDC HQ, but doesn't really seem to push things further).

Rick mentions it one time at the beginning of season 2 when hes talking on the radio. All he says is "The scientist told me something...pause.....it doesnt really matter right now"

Or something close to that.

[KcMizzou]

I like this show a lot. (Hey, zombies) but I think it's lacking in character development. I don't feel emotionally attached to any of them.

The end of the last episode was more, "Oh wow, they did that?" than "OH SHIT WTF!?!?"

[NJChiefsFan]

Originally Posted by Buck

When Carl was grabbing the knives off of the dead dude in the truck I was covering my eyes like a little bitch.

Me as well. They did a good job at that part. Classic WTF moment. Just go get an adult for help.

Originally Posted by aturnis

Agreed. Especially the "Rick signing off" at the end. Agree on the praying shit also. It'd be a lot more profound if the person praying were alone, and obviously a ****ing wreck without hope and needing faith to cling to. Instead, these detached moments in front of a crowd. Hell, I would love a moment from Rick like Tom Hanks had in Saving Private Ryan where he breaks down shaking and crying in private as to not show everyone his "weak" side beings they all look to him for leadership and strength.

There are SOOOOOO many things this show has going against it, somehow though, the show as a whole rises above it.

Hard to ask a guy to do a scene that the best actor in the world did. He isn't a very good actor overall. The opening scene was so awkward. Obviously it was a fill in, but it can still be done better by the actor.

I didn't mind the praying scenes because they were atleast going for the character development they didn't get on the first season. Rick questioning himself, but it was still done in a thin manner.

Originally Posted by Brainiac

She (Laurie Holden) was also a semi-regular on The X-Files.

Yeah she was. Thought she was a better actor on that than this so far.

[NJChiefsFan]

Here is a Zombie question? Do they shit? I mention this because of the scene where they check its stomach. Does the stomach just explode after a while or do they just crap themselves unconsciously? Thats gotta stink.

My problem with the bike as mentioned was the noise. The girl was lost because they didn't want to draw attention but he is got a bike. I understand why the did it since it added to the texture of the scenes while they were driving.

Also I like the whole speech about spacing in the woods and they all walked in a giant clump the entire time.

Fun to point stuff out but you have to let it go for a show like this. That being said they are going for quality so I don't think its crazy for us to talk about that stuff.

[blaise]

Originally Posted by NJChiefsFan

Here is a Zombie question? Do they shit? I mention this because of the scene where they check its stomach. Does the stomach just explode after a while or do they just crap themselves unconsciously? Thats gotta stink.

My problem with the bike as mentioned was the noise. The girl was lost because they didn't want to draw attention but he is got a bike. I understand why the did it since it added to the texture of the scenes while they were driving.

Also I like the whole speech about spacing in the woods and they all walked in a giant clump the entire time.

Fun to point stuff out but you have to let it go for a show like this. That being said they are going for quality so I don't think its crazy for us to talk about that stuff.

Yeah, that was kind of funny.

[NJChiefsFan]

The one moment I thought they gave some texture to a character was when Dale talked about pretending the camper was still broke to avoid people saying they should move on. Something a fan would say after the arguement. Nice to see them letting a character think ahead in a show dependant on characters not thinking ahead.

[NewChief]

Salon has been doing some Walking Dead articles. The first I'll post says that the TV series is an improvement on the comics.

http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/..._walking_dead/

Sunday, Oct 16, 2011 7:00 PM CST
How TV improved “The Walking Dead”
AMC's zombie series returns for season two tonight, already more powerful than the long-running comic it's based on
By Simon Abrams

*

The Walking Dead (Season 2)

(L-R) Carol (Melissa Suzanne McBride), Glenn (Steven Yeun), Lori Grimes (Sarah Wayne Callies) and Andrea (Laurie Holden) (Credit: AMC/Gene Page)
Topics:The Walking Dead

Continuity is a double-edged sword in “The Walking Dead.” According to Robert Kirkman, the writer and co-creator of the comic book that AMC’s acclaimed show is based on, the intent of his series was to follow a single character, Rick Grimes, as he survives the Zombie Apocalypse. This has made the comic a consummately ambitious experiment in long-form narrative storytelling — and it creates challenges for the TV version, which begins its second season tonight. Eighty-nine issues into its seemingly indomitable run, Kirkman’s comic is messy, sprawling and often poorly realized. And a big reason why is that we know that Rick can’t die. That’s the series’ hook — and its biggest problem.

This wouldn’t create such a dilemma for the show’s writers if Rick were likable. Unfortunately, he’s not. As originally conceived in Kirkman’s comics, Rick is a fundamentally desperate and needy character. He inserts himself into situations and tries to control events where he is in over his head. He sees himself romantically as a benevolent savior — and he almost always gets his way. After Rick gets his bearings in the show’s pilot, “Days Gone Bye,” he finds a horse, saddles up and rides into a zombie-infested Atlanta with a bag full of guns slung over his shoulder. He has no idea how ill-prepared he is for what awaits him in the city.

In both the comics and the TV show, Rick Grimes is a true-blue hero but, in the comics, he is also intolerably self-righteous. As sketched by Kirkman, he’s got a messiah complex, one that’s not even semi-cured until many story arcs later when he goes a little crazy, loses a hand and starts hearing voices.

But Rick’s character is one of the many things that Frank Darabont, the AMC show’s former show-runner, and Kirkman, as executive producer and a writer, have done better on screen. In AMC’s show, Rick is just a standard bearer for a central rag-tag group of survivors. He’s also much less strident than he used to be in the comics. Darabont and Kirkman have smoothed out some of the bumps in Kirkman’s original vision and delivered something closer to what the original source comic’s epic narrative could have been.

Last season, in “Days Gone Bye,” Darabont established that actions necessarily have consequences. After Rick is attacked by a horde of zombies, he falls off his horse and drops his bag of guns. Once he’s regrouped with a cluster of other survivors, he decides to retrace his steps and retrieve his bag in “Vatos,” the show’s fourth episode. Similarly, after Rick joins a group of survivors in a mall in “Guts,” episode two, they wind up abandoning one of their own and leave him to die. Admittedly, Merle Dixon (Michael Rooker), the guy that they turn their back on, is a bigot and a panicked opportunist, plain and simple. But he’s also a human being so leaving him behind matters.

To be fair, Kirkman and co-creator/original series penciller Tony Moore’s first “Walking Dead” story also managed to show that the only way to stay human in a crisis is to force oneself to consider one’s actions, both past and present. Still, the directness with which Darabont and Kirkman show us this philosophy in action within the span of six scant episodes is very refreshing. It’s great to see that AMC’s first season does not follow in the foot-steps of Kirkman and Moore’s first narrative arc by leaving viewers wondering how Rick’s group will survive after zombies attack and infect a couple of their loved ones and new friends. That happens in “Vatos,” leaving two more episodes in which the character consider what has happened and try to pick up the pieces.

Season one doesn’t even end after Rick and the group discover Edwin Jenner (Noah Emmerich), a scientist that’s struggling to find a cure to the virus, in “Wildfire.” Instead, Darabont and Kirkman wrapped up those episodes in such a way that, while they’ve left room for further travails, they’ve also given viewers a clear thematic resolution.

There are a number of reasons why season one of “The Walking Dead” is more satisfying then Kirkman and Moore’s first story arc, chief among them being how Darabont and Kirkman’s relative directness is a result of the series being adapted from comics to TV. Darabont and his writers had less wiggle-room to work with than Kirkman and Moore did. They had to put all of their cards on the table in six episodes.

Darabont and Kirkman’s need to immediately show and not tell what they had planned for their characters didn’t however make “The Walking Dead’s” first season an across-the-board success. The events of season one are sped-up to a ridiculous, quasi-Benny Hill-level pace, making it necessary for the show’s writers to frequently rely on short-hand storytelling techniques to get the job done. Power dynamics needed to be set up quickly and simply, leaving a lot of room for improvement when it comes to dialogue. In “Guts,” Darabont establishes the macho archetype that he tries to move Rick away from by having Glenn (Steven Yeun), one of the show’s main protagonists, explicitly spell them out. “Nice moves there, Clint Eastwood,” Glenn sarcastically spits out at Rick. “You the new Sheriff? Come riding in, to clean up the town?” Of course, Rick isn’t, but he very well could be. And that’s the problem as we’re meant to simplistically understand it.

Then again, season one is as successful as it is because it delivers a clearly delineated start and finish to the existential melancholy that initially afflicts Rick in “Days Gone Bye” and then subsequently is shown to affect the rest of his group in later episodes. Darabont began the series with scenes of Rick wordlessly exploring a post-civilized world. Bodies are heaped around the hospital Rick wakes up from a coma in and zombies are now everywhere. The sight of a woman with half her face missing, her guts trailing out from behind her and her left leg reduced to a stump makes our stalwart hero realize that he’s facing something indomitably inhuman, something that will inevitably force him to throw up his hands and wonder what the point of going on is.

Rick and his group reach emotional rock bottom in “TS-19,” and they do so with a necessary amount of speed. By this point, the abnormally brisk pace of the rest of the series makes sense. When the group meets Jenner, they suddenly realize just how despondent they’ve become since the world as they knew it ended. Jenner, a man that seems to have everything except the things that he really wants, shows the survivors that they’re all emotionally drained and basically unhappy. Some of them even want to kill themselves just so they don’t have to go through the motions of looking for a sign of hope that they’re convinced doesn’t really exist.

Now, after the events of “TS-19,” Rick and the remaining survivors know that they want to live. They have a newfound sense of resolve, one that the teaser for season two promises will be almost immediately broken. A wordless scene of a now-feral Rick stalking and bashing in the skull of a zombie promises that the fragile sense of peace that he and his crew have found at the end of season one will be dispelled almost immediately.

Still, season two promises to excite if it will probably only cursorily follow the plot of the comics’ second story arc. The TV series seems to be miles ahead of where the comics left off at the end of its first six installments. One wonders whether or not the show’s current developers will have the group discover Wiltshire Estates, a gated community, and later a farm where zombies are kept locked in a protective survivor’s basement. The TV show’s protagonists already know that they need to live with a lot of grief and make tough decisions, especially the necessity of either abandoning newly infected loved ones or shooting them once they’ve been turned into zombies. In that sense, the frantic pace of season one has really paid off. Because even after seven years of Kirkman’s comics, it’s pretty hard to know what will come next in this new and significantly improved “Walking Dead.”

[NewChief]

The second echoes a lot of complaints I've been reading on here of the character being flat:

http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/...lem/singleton/

The Walking Dead’s” niceness problem
Suspense, atmosphere, gore: This series is aces in every department but one -- the characters are obvious and dull
By Matt Zoller Seitz

*

Fresh meat! Andrew Lincoln, Sarah Wayne Callies and Chandler Riggs on AMC's "The Walking Dead." (Credit: AMC.)

Fresh meat! Andrew Lincoln, Sarah Wayne Callies and Chandler Riggs on AMC's "The Walking Dead." (Credit: AMC.)
Topics:The Walking Dead
This article contains spoilers for the season two premiere of "The Walking Dead." Read at your own risk.

“The Walking Dead,” which returned for a second season last night on AMC, is a frustrating show. It has everything it needs to be great: a compelling premise (humans fighting for survival in a ghoul-infested world), expertly constructed suspense scenes, gore that’s horrifying even by the already-inflated standards of the zombie genre, and a knack for exploiting series TV’s greatest strength, its elasticity of time. The sequence in last night’s premiere in which Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his hardy band hid beneath stalled cars on a highway to avoid a herd of zombies shambling through was one of the tensest action scenes I’ve seen on TV; it was all the more impressive because it wasn’t so much about what was happening to the characters, which was already horrifying enough, but what might happen to them. The drawn-out pacing in this sequence — and in others, such as the group’s search for the disappeared little girl Sophia (Madison Lintz), and the gradual walk-up to the church, with its John Donne bell tolling for thee — was a sterling example of old school classical filmmaking. I even like the show’s didactic arguments about ethics and morality, which has always been the zombie genre’s main reason for being anyhow. In a post-apocalyptic world, the phrase “do unto others” takes on a different meaning. The sorts of arguments you see on “Walking Dead” have to happen in zombie stories, just as they had to happen in “The Lord of the Flies” or “The Road” or any disaster narrative — though admittedly they could be a lot more elegantly conceived, so that you don’t see them coming and think, “Now would be a good time to do the dishes.”

No, the show’s main problem is its lack of compelling characters. It isn’t a question of whether or not they’re “likable.” They are likable. If they lived on your block you’d say good morning to them, maybe even invite them to a party. That’s the problem, actually — they’re likable to a fault. More specifically, they’re “relatable,” to use a favorite Hollywood studio executive buzzword that I despise — a word that doesn’t mean “recognizably human, with glaring contradictions and faults,” but something more along the lines of “thoroughly decent but slightly fuzzy characters who would be bloodless ciphers if they weren’t played by professional actors.”

The actors on “Walking Dead” are professional, often very skillful, but as we head into Season 2, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they can’t make these characters interesting, because they’re too thinly conceived. My initial enthusiasm for this show had everything to do with the genre, the concept and the mostly strong execution; in retrospect I was way, way too patient with the characters, maybe because I assumed they were going to show me new and troubling shadings that still haven’t materialized.

Rick; his wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies); and his son, Carl (Chander Riggs); Rick’s former colleague and secret romantic rival Shane (John Bernthal); grey-bearded Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn) with his “On Golden Pond” hat; even burly T-Dog (IronE Singleton), are all just so damned decent, so obviously striving to do the right thing at every possible second, that I’m already kind of tired of them. (They’re mostly TV-pretty and Caucasian, too — a point that the wounded T-Dog addresses in an upcoming episode when he notes, “I’m the only black guy here.”) Click over to Steven Spielberg’s lavishly budgeted sci-fi series “Terra Nova” on Fox — or better yet, don’t — and you’ll see a similar strategy at work.

When a network or studio is spending boatloads of money on a sci-fi or horror or other genre spectacular, there’s great pressure to center the action on characters whom “everyone” can relate to, meaning the upper-middle-class white folks prized by advertisers. That often results in a core cast that would fit right into a sprightly 1940s western about homesteaders, or a 1950s sitcom with a pipe-smoking dad and a mom who vacuums in heels. The heroes are likely to be guys like Rick, who looks like a human action figure and whose worst quality is that he wants so badly to be a hero and rescue everybody that he sometimes makes bad calls, or Shane, who likewise presents as a Rick-like do-gooder. (For some reason, Jon Bernthal’s performance exudes untrustworthiness; I keeping hoping he’ll turn out to be a conniving and selfish character, the kind of guy that the young Burt Lancaster or Kirk Douglas might have played back in the day. The moment where Shane takes aim at the clueless Rick in the woods, then notices Dale watching him and lowers his rifle, suggests that Shane has that potential — but really, does anyone think “The Walking Dead” has the guts to go down that road?) I hope that poor little Carl survives being shot at the end of the premiere not because he’s an interesting character, but because he’s a cute kid.

Yes, I know, “The Walking Dead” takes most of its characters and situations from a graphic novel, as detailed in this Salon piece by Simon Abrams. But adaptation is all about making choices of what to keep and what to change; the source material in this case is hardly “Dune,” or even “Harry Potter”; recently-ousted show-runner Frank Darabont and company could have swapped out most of the main characters, or at least deepened or complicated them or jumped away from them for long stretches, without sparking audience revolt. Anyone who’s watching this show doubtless has prior experience with zombie pictures — or what I call “zombie-by-proxy” pictures, which avoid the undead angle but which are otherwise textbook examples of the genre — so they’re used to seeing genuinely quirky, even off-putting characters navigating a monster-infested universe. I hardly think they’d tune out if the show served up a similarly spicy array of mixed nuts.

The original “Dawn of the Dead” and its 2004 remake, “28 Days Later,” “Day of the Dead,” “Land of the Dead,” both versions of “The Crazies,” “28 Weeks Later,” “Dead Alive,” “Shaun of the Dead,” “Zombieland” — all these films and others offered a more lively array of main characters than “Walking Dead.” Yes, when you watch a zombie film, you’re likely to encounter milquetoast straight-arrow hero-types and generic best buddies and significant others, but also people who were hopelessly deluded, or so paralyzed by grief and fear that they’re no help to anyone including themselves, and comic relief characters, and stalwart average guys like Brendan Gleeson’s burly dad in “28 Days Later,” and even straight-up sociopaths who are secretly thrilled to be living in Hobbes’ State of Nature, and who only pretend to be working on behalf of the group. And what would a zombie picture be without at least one lazy, grousing, hilariously nihilistic dirtbag, like the smug yuppie played by Ty Burrell in the 2004 “Dawn of the Dead”? (“You know, I would love to help,” Steve says, justifying his laziness, “but the captain never works alongside his men.”)

Remember early last season when the main characters encountered that group of gangbangers who were caring for citizens of a nursing home? I loved those characters; why didn’t we see more of them? Late in the season, when the show suddenly jumped away from the main story line to give us an extended flashback of Noah Emmerich’s Centers for Disease Control researcher trying and failing to develop a cure, my heart jumped, not just because Emmerich is a fantastic actor, but because the show was giving me a change of scenery and putting me in the head space of a different character. Emmerich had just one more episode to go, alas.

The only recurring “Walking Dead” characters I find truly interesting are the irascible or alienated ones who harbor socially unacceptable attitudes — the characters who are obviously only there to contrast with Rick and Shane and Lori and Dale and the other Nice Folks and eventually become “civilized” or otherwise “likable.” I’m fascinated by Andrea, who insisted on personally shooting her own kid sister, Amy, when she turned zombie, and who has become withdrawn and faintly self-destructive in the aftermath. (There’s a reason why no one wants her to have a gun.) Laurie Holden, the actress who plays Andrea, enacts grief and anger in a subtle, stingingly real way. She’s off-putting in the way that real trauma survivors are off-putting. I like the way she looks at Rick and Lori and the others, as if she knows they’re posers who are ultimately no more emotionally together than she is — and that if she weren’t in such a vulnerable place, she’d tell them so.

My favorite regular character, though, is Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), the crossbow-toting hillbilly white supremacist whose brother — a vastly more unpleasant redneck psycho played, inevitably, by Michael Rooker — (maybe) bought it in Season 1. Daryl is a walking rebuke to Rick, a Dudley Do-Right type with a cleft chin and trooper hat; he’s the kind of guy that a cop like Shane would enjoy arresting, and who would mysteriously manage to “accidentally” bang his forehead every time he got shoved into the back of a squad car. I don’t know if Daryl would make an altogether better leader than Rick, but when you’re wandering around a landscape populated by flesh-eating ghouls, there’s something to be said for an unsentimental demeanor and a ruthless streak. (The show seems to be softening Daryl, too, though; there’s nothing like a zombie plague to make you reconsider your prejudices.)

Rick’s big speech to the Jesus statue at the end of the Season 2 premiere encapsulated the show’s character problems. It was one of the most awkward and unconvincing moments in the series’ run to date — and not just because the show had already communicated everything Rick (and Sophie’s mother, Carol — played by Melissa Suzanne McBride) had to say about God’s indifference to human suffering and the uselessness of Jesus’ message in zombie-world by rack-focusing from Rick splattering a walker to the Christ statue hanging on the church wall behind him. The church sequence needed to push much, much further than it did; instead of communicating a good man’s despair over not being able to do more good (which already comes through in every scene Rick plays), I wanted to see the self-pitying, martyr side of Rick come flooding out; I wanted to see hints of the deeply screwed-up fury that drove Matthew Fox’s character on “Lost” — selflessness as a manifestation of vanity and fear of worthlessness. When Rick killed two walkers with stones early in the episode, we saw a hint of giddy blood lust in his face, but the episode didn’t follow up on it. Has “Walking Dead” decided not to explore Rick’s latent potential for darkness for fear of making him “unlikable,” or somehow not “relatable”?

Whatever the explanation, there was more complexity and power in Daryl’s tossed-off exit line at the end of the zombie church showdown, when he glared over his shoulder at the Jesus statue and muttered, “You take requests?”

[BbLondon]

excellent! waiting for your new posts friend

[blaise]

I don't find the characters as bad as some, I guess. As far as the one guy's assertion that they're too Caucasian. Whatever. I think it's worse when it looks like they went out of their way to make a diversity poster.

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by blaise

I don't find the characters as bad as some, I guess. As far as the one guy's assertion that they're too Caucasian. Whatever. I think it's worse when it looks like they went out of their way to make a diversity poster.

Yeah, it's salon. They have pretty damned good/interesting cultural takes for the most part, but they always like to get a little political slant in there as well.

I read the hell out of their entertainment/literature/culture section, but their political section has just gotten tiresome for the most part (with Glenn Greenwald and a few others being the occasional exception).

[Fire Me Boy!]

Wow. Just watched the entire first season this evening. Wow.

[Bambi]

Show is kinda starting to suck.

Now all I notice is how badly developed the characters are and how none of them threaten to actually do anything exciting/interesting.

I loved the whole friend ****ing the sheriff's wife plotline from last season.

Now all that shit is gone.... zzzzzzzzzz

[WoodDraw]

Originally Posted by Wickedson

Show is kinda starting to suck.

Now all I notice is how badly developed the characters are and how none of them threaten to actually do anything exciting/interesting.

I loved the whole friend ****ing the sheriff's wife plotline from last season.

Now all that shit is gone.... zzzzzzzzzz

I kind of disagree. Is there anything more cliche than a wife cheating on her husband with his previous best friend. I still dread how that'll turn out,


The problem with these shows is that they play much better when you can watch them episodes back to back and not week to week.

[Bowser]

Originally Posted by Wickedson

Show is kinda starting to suck.

Now all I notice is how badly developed the characters are and how none of them threaten to actually do anything exciting/interesting.

I loved the whole friend ****ing the sheriff's wife plotline from last season.

Now all that shit is gone.... zzzzzzzzzz

How is it that most of your posts are pure fail?

Trust me,that storyline is not over. Stick around a bit, and watch what shakes out.