Hasn't it only been a year or so in the show timeline since the outbreak occurred?  I can't imagine that kind of society popping up in such a short period of time.

the kingdom makes sense to a degree, because it would have started as kind of goofy and just stuck.  but i agree that it doesn't seem long enough for the junkies to have gone feral in the way that they're being represented.  a large group isn't going to just lose language that way, especially when your life revolves around reading can labels.  wolves were a better rendering of that kind of thing.

Bro, that last one.

What's Jim Carey doing there? 

Wasn't the Romulan talking about food being scarce?  Canned food going bad or something.   I'd eat seagull.  

They've only been at this for not quite 2 years now.   Canned food going bad and building a survival cult with its own vernacular is a bit more of a stretch than I'd have preferred to see.  Can't figure out if it's more or less of a jump than the Termites, though.

Yet people get into abandoned vehicles and they start right up, dead batteries and stale gas and all.

Incredibly, tires remain inflated as well.

The show has been slowly shedding reality since the beginning, so to try to put logic to the various cabals of cannibals, autistic junkyard denizens, forehead cutting loonies and roving bikers calling dibs is kind of pointless. It is just TV writing in an apocalypse setting, where bad becomes worse and odd becomes insane. I mean, it only took Planet of the Apes two movies to get to melty face mutants worshiping an atom bomb, we should be glad it took seven seasons for TWD to reach Heaven's Gate: The Mad Max Edition.

I think part of the problem lies in the nature of man and the expectations of entertainment. In real life criminals and crazy people are more like us than they are different from us. Show your average man on the street a criminal lineup of four cops and one serial killer all dressed alike and they won't know the difference. But show them four plainclothes cops and one serial killer wearing a dracula cape, spaghetti o's can on his head, and goth makeup on calling himself the Grand Space Hamster and every single person will pick him out of the lineup. It is the laziness of instant recognition. When you don't have the time, the talent or the desire to create a nuanced character you simply make them outlandish in physical appearance or possessing over the top traits and bam, instant "character" who is obviously different than everyone else.

And it is the differences that keep the show moving. If you had a constant flow of nearly identical desperate adversaries who were all just another regular "gang of the week" the threat level of the show would be low. And the common hallmark, and eventual downfall, of serial entertainment is that the threat level must constantly be rising. First you fight one crazy guy, then you fight three, then you fight five, then they have a tank, etc. The stakes must be raised in order for the audience to keep wondering how they heroes will survive... and eventually you reach a point in which you have built your heroes up too much and you find them fighting armies, Godzilla, or some other borderline nonsensical enemy simply because they've been written to the point that they are unstoppable and some sort of crazy, theme breaking enemy must be concocted to provide even the slightest sense of threat. This is a pitfall nearly all serialized shonen anime falls into (like Dragonball).

So where am I going with this? I'm basically saying that TWD has not so much turned a corner into the absurd as much as it has evolved slowly over time, and it will continue to evolve. If the show follows the comics (which it still more or less does, with a lot of improv) then we can expect this trend to continue to the point of absurdity... unless they realize this and already have plans to change future plots or (as I would hope they would) end the show on a high note before it degenerates.

While that is all really deep, I am still wondering why the walkers haven't decomposed.

When is the last time you saw something dead that is not a mere pile of bones after a period of time shorter than the supposed time line of the series so far. Maybe I missed that somewhere in the storyline.??

With that said, I still love TWD and other zombiepocolypse things. I am weirded out a lot more by Negan and his saviors than the Heapsters

I thought the same thing.

It's only been 3-4 years since the outbreak began.  To have a society develop so quickly, isn't likely.  ...and yes, the Kingdom makes some sense.  We have nerbs now who role play, and go to events like Renaissance festivals, and Comic-Cons.   So it's at least plausible that a group of thespians and nerds might start something like the kingdom, and other people going along with it as they joined.    

But the trash people seem different.  

Maybe if the show runs long enough we'll see comic book superheroes join in.

About a year and 9 months, according to the Wiki.  That makes your point extra pointy.

There is an "evolution" presented in the comics (and to a degree in the show) of the zombies.

They begin as a "fresh walker" who is recently turned and possesses a good deal of the recently dead person's ambulatory ability and strength. Once the "fresh ones" have been out and about a while they decompose into the regular "walker" who is pretty putrid but still able to get around and "hunt" so to speak. As this middle life walker goes about it keeps degrading, and as it degrades its senses begin to dull and its ability to move starts to fail. Once it degrades to the point that it can no longer move too well it just lies down and becomes the final stage, the "lurker". These are the zombies you constantly see playing dead that suddenly grab someone as they pass by. It is assumed that once a walker becomes a lurker they will eventually cease to be and rot into nothing. There is a lot of talk in TWD fan circles about the "zombie cause" slowing the decomposition process like it does in the Max Brooks books (solanum), but that is all just fan speculation.

The "truth" if it can be called that simply is that dead people become walkers, and the walkers prey on the living. Things like decomposition, the inability for muscle mass to heal resulting in loss of mobility, the decay of bodily senses resulting in your average zombie going Helen Keller inside of a week, etc. are all pushed out of consideration in order to keep the eminent threat of the undead going. It all gets parked under the tired old car port of "suspension of disbelief".

Edit: And of course there is the more practical, logical reason... makeup. It is far easier to grab an extra, slap some quick makeup or cheap prosthetics on them and call it a day. But creating a very decomposed zombie requires either a very skinny actor in heavy prosthetic, or a puppet... both of which can cost double to even ten times as much as a "guy in basic makeup". Plus you have the added uncanny valley issues with puppets and other animatronic items.  I'm not sure if you remember it as well as I do, but back in season 3 or 4 when the prison fell Michonne was walking with a mini herd of walkers. One of them in the near background was a full on puppet of a heavily decomposed / damaged walker that was near skeletal. And it looked AWFUL. It looked like someone grabbed a biology classroom skeleton, slathered it in gook and was just under the camera's view frame holding it up and making it "walk". It looked like the goofy skeletons from Army of Darkness and it was completely immersion breaking and almost funny to watch. Which is why they relegated it to the background and did their best to avoid focus on it.

This is the problem with horror zombies, and the reason I prefer scifi zombies.  

Horror zombies like Night of the Living Dead and the Walking Dead, absolutely can't happen.  You really have to suspend a lot of disbelief to get into dead zombies.  

With scifi zombies (the infected) like, 28 Days Later, The Crazies, World War Z, and I am Legend (Omega Man), it's at least plausible that some brain killing rabies like virus might turn living people into violent rabid monsters.  

With that said, I enjoy a good horror zombie story just as much as the next guy.  But I think for a long running series like The Walking Dead it would have been better if they chose the scifi zombies.  They could have actually had them evolve over time, instead of just rotting. The virus could start out like rabies but over time it could have changed their DNA producing different physical characteristics and behaviors as the infected live and grow, kind of like it did in I Am Legend.

Holy crap, really?

They haven't explained it and I don't think there is any intent to do so.  Just one of those elements that you have to write off as "it's magic."
I've been more annoyed by the times that they've shown birds, dogs, and maggots working on the walkers.  Either the normal vectors of decomposition should work, or they shouldn't.  I think the writers were just giving in to a tempting camera shot.

Nonsequitor but I'm hearing rumblings that last Sunday's ratings for all TV across the board were pretty bleak, so it will be interesting to see how TWD fares. I was not expecting the size of the uptick it had last week for the mid season premiere so perhaps it will surprise me again this week. I think the full Sunday cable ratings are delayed a day due to the holiday yesterday, but they may drop later today.

http://walkingdead.wikia.com/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_TV_Show_Timeline

It's an approximation, but they've done more research on it than I'm willing to.

The original source material, Z Nation, has different varieties of z's.

TWD's Z's have degraded so that they are mushy and easier to kill. The producers mentioned this in a FTWD interview; in Fear the z's are fresher and thus harder to kill.

Personally I chalk it up to suspension of disbelief. No one in the show knows the true nature of the infection, the last best hope for study died with the CDC.  The more salient question for me revolves around energy - assuming the z virus somehow preserves the host, it still needs energy and must feed in a meaningful fashion.

In any event, a z show where the z's eventually fall apart would need to evolve. I'd like to see a show in which enough society survives to preserve small communities, which learn to cope with z's as another predatory threat.

LOL!

Huh?

Ass kicker aged rapidly as well.  Considering the difficulties and expense of working with kids in TV, can give them a pass on that.

Zombie Apocalypse ages everyone prematurely.

In a land where food is scarce, how does one feed a tiger, a pure carnivore.  In his cage he has a water bowl and food dish the same size as my dog's.  Is there an unlimited supply of Purina Tiger Kibble that has somehow survived?

I'm not sure how correct this is but I once heard that an adult tiger eats 10% of its body weight in meat a day, so that is like what 30 to 40 pounds of meat a day? That is probably enough to feed every human being in the Kingdom for a day... which means that Tiger is costing the Kingdom 100% of its daily meat ration.

That Tiger is the Kingdom's F-35.

What I wanna know is, why the F is it always summer? 

Because they film in Georgia, and quite frankly, it is always summer here.

meat?  I think there's plenty of meat just walking around

Rotten meat, that the storyline has already established as being possibly tainted (Termites fearful from eating Bob's leg, Kingdom feeding walkers to the pigs they give the Saviors).

Although if the TV show follows the comics...

Click To View Spoiler

literally laughed out loud

Jadis sounds like....

But the story has been set to the suburbs of DC, or at least north of where it was in GA. I think it's more simple than that. I think we'd all rather see Maggie's, Rosita's, and Sasha's sweaty cleavage. 

I think someone asked the winter question last season.

The biggest reason, aside from the filming location and schedule, is that filming outdoors in "winter" conditions is very difficult. Not just from a logistical standpoint of keeping everyone warm, but from a continuity standpoint in that wet ground, mud, snow and other environmental conditions can make it very hard to keep the sets "clean". All the equipment and personnel moving around on an active shoot can and does trample the set... and if a set contains snow or mud, it can be a real nightmare for all departments. Wardrobe would have to keep the costumes mud free or dry, continuity would have to spread or rake a ton of areas for footprinting or tire tracks (not to mention snow removal possibly being visible in background shots perhaps), if the temps are not favorable you'd have the actors delivering their lines through visible breath condensation (a plus for reality, a negative for camera lenses and practical effects lexan screens), and on and on and on.

Edit: Also a lot of practical makeup effects don't work very well at lower temperatures. Facial prostetics made from rubber and foam get hard and brittle past a certain temperature, and they also can have a nasty congealing condition if mixed with water or dampness when cold. Plus you need temps above 40 degrees for pyro blood packs to function properly... they won't flow right in the cold, and the stunt performer or actor's body heat usually isn't good enough to keep them warm.

The best "zombie model" in fiction was in the movie The Girl with all the Gifts.

I don't think the movie will be released in the US, and it wasn't particularly good.  But it's concept of the "zombie infected" was quite interesting, and somewhat unique.

Speaking of the different zombie types / styles, I think it would cool if the gang ran across a "Fido" type of community.

It would be good for some laughs, at least.

I know, I know, it's a TV show...but if you look at how (at least seemingly) quickly the move from one location to another (Hilltop, boat, Savior HQ, Savior "outposts", Alexandria, Kingdom, Tuna Town, and now Junkyard) and throw in that all of these groups have been scavenging as far and wide as they dare...it seems incredulous that they never ran into each other until now.

I know, it's a TV show.

I found the King Zeke thing a bit ridiculous.  The Kingdom, meh, but all of the "ye shall make reparations" speak is corny...like the Heapsters.

Im pretty sure they did explain it. The Doc at the Governors place gave an explanation.




.

Relating to the timeline, in either this episode or last, Morgan made reference to something happening three years ago if I remember correctly. I remember thinking that that was how long it's been since the outbreak. Does anyone remember?

Only on episode 4 but for the love of god, can someone cut Carl's hair?  I swear, he's going to transition into a woman named Carol.  

If they were smart and moved North in the winter all the Walkers would freeze and they would be easy pickens.

WWZ was entertaining in book form but ZN is the source for all new zombie canon since Romero popularized the genre.

Yea, whatever happened to them?  Or the ATL Cops?

...so they had no choice but to be lesbians.

This.

With everyone out scavenging in such a small area...not likely no one would run into each other.