The Walking Dead
Spoiler Review
I LOVED the first episode. It was well-made and genuinely freaky. The second episode was exciting but I have a few major problems. The premise of the show is zombies want to eat the living, pretty simple concept. And the viewer is meant to go along with the living, cheering them on whenever the dead come to eat them. This is not something you need to pump up with needless plot devices. Let the concept BE! We are sufficiently puckered up as a given with the zombies, and that's enough! I am so sick of writers adding elements that they think add drama. They don't add drama, they add frustration. Here's what happened.
Some plot frustrations from episodes 1 and 2 are in bold: One of the main characters is a white sheriff, who was shot and in the hospital when the zombies took over the world. He wakes up (I can tell you what the show is by naming 2 movies: The Mist meets 28 Days Later) and finds that zombies now walk the streets, craving flesh. He is dumbfounded and freaked, but kind of reacts like this isn't such a surprise. Anyway, he goes home to find his wife and daughter missing. But then he figures they fled. He meets a black father and his son who are hold up in a house, hiding from the zombies. They fight some off, but the zombies are attracted to noise, so gunshots only draw more to them. Oops! Finally they make it to the sheriff's office where the sheriff stock-piles all the weapons and sets off to find people in the big city (Atlanta). The father and son tell him that there is a safe camp there, perhaps. So Sheriff sets off with all these weapons and the father and son stay behind (Why? I didn't understand why). First off, there are no silencers in the sheriff's department? None? Okay, fine. So he drives and then in the city of course he is chased by thousands of zombies it seems and he hides in a tank. The army no longer exists, I guess, because no one in the army leaves a tank behind on purpose. So in the tank someone comes over the radio. Sheriff listens to the guy on the other end and makes a run for it. The fact that he didn't think to try to drive the tank is really annoying. Sheriff makes it to the other guy, an asian guy, all while shooting lots of loud bullets into zombie heads. When he gets into a building he meets up with other people who are angry for him creating all this zombie attention towards them. One white woman holds a gun to his head (he's wearing his sheriff's outfit) as if she is going to kill a living person. Are you serious? The zombies want to kill everyone, take one of them out instead if you are going to fire a loud bullet. Of course, she decides not to shoot him in the face. I don't know how many times we are going to have to endure that kind of scene...one person holds a gun or a knife or whatever to another and *DRAMATIC PAUSE HEAVY BREATHING* then decides not to shoot/slice/stab (sometimes they end up hitting them instead).
*SIDE NOTE - A great youtube movie compilation video would have all those kinds of scenes from every movie and TV show and that would be the best compilation ever. It would get over a million hits!! I wonder if it exists?
So, then the Sheriff becomes a bit of a leader, of course, after he redeems himself by taking out a white racist hick bully. The racist hick bully (RHB) is SO overtly racist and hicky that you just want one of them to shoot him. The RHB starts a fight with the black guy and says the N-word. Then punches fly! I think there is at least one of those "I'm going to kill you, I'm not going to kill you" (IGTKYINGTKY) moments and then the RHB is handcuffed to a pipe by the Sheriff. The black guy stays with the RHB while the others (Sheriff, asian guy, black woman, white woman, latino man) set off to find a way to some trucks at a construction site. Since the zombies can smell their living flesh, they decide to slather themselves in zombie guts (careful don't get any zombie blood on your skin as I wail on this corpse with an axe). So there is a great scene where the sheriff and the asian guy make it to the truck (almost ruined by the fact that the writers decide to make it rain at the precise moment they are surrounded by zombies sniffing at them, because yeah, the scene needs more drama, not!) and hotwire a sports car. They race back and rescue the others.
OH! About that. The WORST most frustrating scene. The black guy is up with the RHB on the roof, remember? The RHB tries to convince him, whom he called the N-word, to let him go. The black guy has the key to the cuffs. The others come up to the roof and tell the black guy to hurry, their ride is here. But black guy has a conscience. Black guy goes back for the RHB...but oops he trips on a bag containing a hacksaw (conveniently noticed by RHB in an earlier scene) and he falls to the ground (along with the hacksaw) and the key goes up in the air and lands into a small 2 inch hole in the roof. What bad luck for RHB!! So black guy says oh well (despite knowing about the hacksaw from an earlier scene as well) and leaves. RHB is pissed and yells that they are all going to hell and the viewer is left to think...
FUCK YOU WRITERS!!!!
Why do they think we are so stupid? Is the RHB NOT going to somehow get the hacksaw and free himself and exact revenge on these characters later? Perhaps when the group gets back to their camp (that's another story where the sheriff's wife and son are in a camp and now the wife is fucking her husband's former deputy or something, who is obviously an asshole) they will find the brother of the RHB, who of course attacks the sheriff and YES there is another IGTKYINGTKY moment. I really hate when such manipulation happens. Write the scenes in a genuine way and the viewers will go along with it. Zombies are the underlying and constant threat, build around it. But don't be lazy and expect your viewer to just go along with nonsense. I believe more in their zombies than in their living right now. I'll give them another shot or two, but if people keep making stupid decisions, I'm going think that either Georgians are real idiots, or AMC let some lazy writers ruin a great (if completely unoriginal) premise.
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