Knights & Knaves Alehouse

JasonZavoda wrote:I'd like a zombie show that featured zombies rather than man's inhumanity to man.

Even Romero's movies were all about man's inhumanity to man. The zombies were there just to make it look cool. The difference is, a movie gets its point across in a couple of hours. A hundred one-hour episodes is really going to drive that message home that there ain't ever going to be a pot of gold on the other side of Shit Rainbow. Instead of Romero's expeditious deadly disease (I'll be writing that spell up for my game, Rohero's Expeditious Deadly Disease), TWD is that nasty, slow, degenerative fucker that not only takes its victims, but hollows out everyone else around.

JasonZavoda wrote:I'd like a zombie show that featured zombies rather than man's inhumanity to man.

I don't know about that. The humans can be scarier and creepier than the zombies.

benjoshua wrote:

JasonZavoda wrote:I'd like a zombie show that featured zombies rather than man's inhumanity to man.

I don't know about that. The humans can be scarier and creepier than the zombies.

Because the show stacked the deck that way. If they'd managed to do that well it might be a different situation but the writing on walking dead is lazy and stupid. We have to suspend our disbelief for the zombies (which is easier to do if they don't try to explain them) Then we have to believe that they are short on supplies, including guns and ammunition (in the USA, in the south). That food is in short supply when 99%+ of the population has been zombified and forcing the survivors into a 'lifeboat' mentality instead of the more likely living versus dead mentality where people band together because of a common foe. The show could have been exciting survival horror but instead it is dragged down by lazy, stupid writing and ridiculous social commentary.

What I could never understand about Romero's zombie movies was that in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, the zombies weren't the "sprinter" types. They were slow, shambling animated corpses.

Dude, the fucking National Guard in each state would've had those things cleaned up inside of a week.

thedungeondelver wrote:What I could never understand about Romero's zombie movies was that in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, the zombies weren't the "sprinter" types. They were slow, shambling animated corpses.

Dude, the fucking National Guard in each state would've had those things cleaned up inside of a week.

I've said the exact same thing a hundred times (my wife loves zombies and wants to see every movie and TV show, read every book, etc.)

I think the answer to your conundrum is that the people who write these movies/TV shows/books typically appear to be fairly ignorant (both in general, and specifically when it comes to military affairs). They seem to think that military gear consists of a) rifles (which no soldier can use effectively) and b) nukes. This is why the military always "has no choice" but to glass cities after The Platoon That Couldn't Shoot Straight fails to contain the zombies. In reality, of course, the military has grenades, mines, squad support weapons like light mortars and machine guns, armored fighting vehicles, drones, air and artillery support, cluster munitions, napalm... the list goes on.

People say things like, "What if there were a mob of ten thousand zombies? The soldiers couldn't shoot them all in the head!" Well, I imagine they would set up just one of those electric gatling guns and let her rip. The whole mob would be reduced to kibble and bits in a few seconds; "head shots" wouldn't exactly matter at that point.

At the end of the first season of Fear the Walking Dead (which was the only season my wife asked me to watch, since she didn't like it) the military base in L.A. was overrun. How did this happen? Well, it was protected solely by the kind of cheap chain link fence and gate you can buy at Lowe's, and guarded by two soldiers who - and this came as a great shock to me - couldn't shoot straight. This shows the length of contrivance writers have to go to in order to show military forces losing to shambling zombies. (Another example, and probably my favorite, was how the zombies in World War Z were able to get over the giant wall into Israel. They formed themselves in a big pile until they reached the top, and no one stopped them because no one was guarding it.)

Ironically, The Walking Dead undermined its own narrative in this respect with the season 3 opener, which showed Rick and his crew (the majority of whom, at least, lacked military training) efficiently clearing the prison yard of zombies. Of course, actual soldiers would deal with zombies, who don't have much intelligence and who move like stumbling drunks, even more efficiently. It would be akin to an unarmed civilian mob attacking those same soldiers, under circumstances where all rules of engagement and concern for civilian casualties had been discarded - except a civilian mob has the intelligence to seek cover or flee when it suffers excessive losses, while zombies would only mindlessly continue to shamble onward and get blasted into a lingering red mist.

(I actually don't think mindless "fast" zombies could overrun the world either, although they would probably cause more havoc before being contained. About the only scenario I would buy is one where the zombie virus immediately killed about half of the people on Earth, then raised them all as zombies. I could see where that kind of situation might spiral out of control. I've never seen that exact scenario in a zombie movie though.)

Y'all just don't drink, or get high, enough before watching zombie shows.

I tend to agree with these criticisms about the ability of shambling zombies to overrun civilization entirely. For that reason, my favorite (sort of) zombie movie is The Crazies, which features a more sentient/psychotic kind of "zombie."

But to play Devil's advocate a bit:

It's probably easy to overestimate the capabilities of the military to handle situations that don't mimic war. Sure an M60 could reduce a shambling horde pretty quickly, but it would also reduce anything else around; it's not the kind of weapon you'd care to use in an urban setting with civilians present unless you've made a cutthroat decision about collateral damage. That's not a decision that I think we'd be quick to make.

A lot of the military are not in combat arms. They're no great shakes with weapons. I was in intel when I was in ages ago, and I was always last off the qualification range. You're in a fair amount of trouble if you are counting on the likes of me to make head shots with an M16 or a .45 (or anything else for that matter). And based on my experience in the reserves, the level of readiness of part-time troops is highly variable.

We probably are a bit too jaded from endless zombie films to appreciate the psychological trauma of the dead getting back up and attacking. But I suspect there would be a fair amount of panic. There was a funny video a few years back of a guy dressed up as a zombie scaring the pants off folks; a lot of people, including one with a gun, ran away. Good order and discipline could be a problem.

DungeonMonkey wrote:You're in a fair amount of trouble if you are counting on the likes of me to make head shots with an M16 or a .45 (or anything else for that matter).

Right, but as I pointed out, head shots wouldn't really be necessary. There are plenty of man-portable weapons that can reduce several (or many) humans bodies at once to small pieces with very little aim required (and concerns about collateral damage don't prevent them from being used right now). Even if a particular zombie didn't happen to get enough head trauma from one of these weapons to neutralize it (although that's hard to believe, considering that characters in zombie movies routinely kill them by stabbing them in the skull with a pencil), it would present very little continuing threat as a quadruple amputee. And that's not even considering the much heavier weapons (still far short of nukes) which could eliminate an entire zombie "herd" at one push of a button. It's also worth repeating that zombies (as presented in most movies and TWD) aren't smart enough to hide from weapon's fire, which is what hostiles do in real life to drive up collateral damage; zombies just wander around in the streets presenting juicy targets.

I agree with you that it would be a tough situation psychologically, and there would be civilian and military casualties before the military got a handle on things. But I do think troops would adapt to the situation. WW1 trench warfare was like Hell on Earth, to say nothing of most theaters of WW2, but the soldiers learned to deal with it. Mindless enemies who move slowly and can't shoot back might even be a relief.

Well, concerns about collateral damage don't prevent use of standard infantry weapons, but they do constrain their use. Our soldiers operate under some fairly strict rules of engagement in active war zones to prevent collateral damage. Just getting the civilian okay to send the military into a US city in a quasi-combat role would be difficult. I think we'd have to be pretty far gone before you'd get the okay to really turn them loose without rules of engagement limiting their effectiveness.

The military has a variety of weapons of course, but the standard one that most soldiers are going to have is the M16A2. It's not full auto; 3-round burst is its highest rate of fire, and that's less accurate than its regular semi-auto mode. I'm not sure we can have a productive discussion about how many non-kill shots it would take to eliminate the combat effectiveness of a zombie, but probably several. The standard round (5.56) was chosen largely because of its comparative lightness (think encumbrance); my understanding is that we decided that the reduced lethality compared to a larger round was better on net as it would require Soviet Bloc troops to care for a lot of wounded (while the dead impose no such burden). Point being, while I don't want to be shot with an M16A2, it's not the kind of weapon that's going to tear things to shreds (absent concentration of fire from multiple weapons on a single target).

The other thing about the military: we only have so many ground troops available. I can't say that I find the Walking Dead's it-happened-all-at-once-everwhere outbreak scenario plausible. But accepting its dumb tropes for what they are, where do you deploy your limited forces when things quickly go south everywhere simultaneously? Our troops would be stretched thin. I assume a lot would end up in big population centers in an effort to contain the problem where people are most plentiful, but that's exactly where use of force is going to be most problematic.

One of the many things that constantly annoys me about Walking Dead are the numerous head shots and the ability to casually pierce a skull with a knife thrust. Much more dramatic if the zombies were reasonably difficult to stop. The next is the steam-roller of the dead that is missing from the show. Besides real armor that would reduce streets blocked with zombes to broken and mushed flesh, vehicles like ore trucks and snow plows (at least the kind we had in vermont) would cut through crowds of undead and not be disabled.

The problem is that any organized para-military group should have no trouble with the zombies as presented in walking dead and military units would cut down unarmed civilians with ease let alone shambling zombies. The easiest answer would have a disease cut down society first and then the zombies rise. I just get tired of suspending disbelief because of lazy and stupid writing.

Let the survivors have plenty of guns and ammo but make it realistically hard to hit a moving target in the head. Try to keep the zombies the only thing you need to suspend your disbelief upon and the rest of the story as believable as possible. At the very least try to tell a good story.

More jerky editing and inane dialogue with a plot that's hard to follow.

benjoshua wrote:More jerky editing and inane dialogue with a plot that's hard to follow.

Yeah... they didn't do a great job of stringing together action at multiple locations in a way that was easy to follow. Admittedly, I was playing on my phone the whole time, which is typically how I watch The Walking Dead these days.

It was difficult to understand what was going on. Near as I could tell, they were hitting three outposts simultaneously. Rick and Darryl were going after a weapons cache, Carol and the Kingdom got hung up trying to take out a lookout for the outpost they're after, and the Morgan, Jesus and Tara group was re-clearing out the same outpost (satellite dishes) cleared in season 6.

I suppose they figure to lose fewer folk, on both sides, besieging the Sanctuary instead of taking it head on.

EDIT. I forgot the 4th group, Aaron's. That just looked like a generic fire fight at another generic outpost.

If you deliberately make your movie/TV show episode difficult to follow with some kind of weird structure, it had better pay off big time.

I haven't watched the second episode yet, but I'm guessing that didn't happen here.

EDIT: Watched it. Yeah, this was a "stunt" episode, and it didn't pay off IMO. Oh well.

I was fairly disappointed in the second episode. My first thought, after everything up to this point about Rick talking family, community and not being like "the bad guys" was, ok so you're just going in and having your folks kill everyone no questions asked, no clue whether any of the men or women had families or someone they were in a relationship with, just indiscriminate killing....but then suddenly rick finds the baby and it makes him realize what he's doing? Ugh.

Then the cliche' scene with Jesus and Tara and the savior guy in the closet. As soon as he started to speak I was thinking, this guy is full of crap because the writers are going to do what they've done a dozen or more times now, play good then be bad....blah blah blah, boom there it is.

Morgan and the guys standing at the door ready to fire at anyone inside and yet somehow they end up getting shot instead after opening the door, not standing to the side for cover, all three just in the doorway.

The fire fight that lasted how long and no one managed to run out of bullets? They seriously had that much ammo? That was such a waste of time and served no real purpose except to see someone get shot that you could see coming a mile away, again, because it's been done before.

Oh and bad-ass chick realizing the recent dead coming back as zombies just sits there and somehow can't see Mr Walker hobble over and bite her throat? Another cliche' scene done in seasons prior.

Finally Rick and Daryl are looking for heavy weapons to help out their fight? WHY!?! You had Negan point blank in the open last episode waiting for a sniper shot to take him out...why all of that wasted breath just to leave, then attack other outposts to get some more weapons and kill his people, to make it easier to fight Negan and his crew later on.

Just awful writing so far, I may not even make it through this season if it keeps up. It's turning more into a traffic accident that I can't look away from than a show I enjoy watching.