The Walking Dead Season 8 [SPOILERS]

Yeah, fuck this show

Sung to bad bad Leroy brown

Well he's dead dead coral grimes
Deadest kid of the zombie times
deader than Abraham
deader than the pack of wolves that got eaten by the Rick gang when they were starving before they got to alexandria

Ummm, too soon?

So I have actually watched the first three episodes of this season and it has gotten back to being decent. I am going to discuss why so spoilers ahead in the wall of text. Short unspoiled version the good writers are doing it again.

Last half of the season was stupid. Nothing made sense. Now they have started back off by calming down and going back to story. They played a nice bit with the priest who ran with the only medical doctor left (that we knew of) from Negan's main compound when Eugene left the door open and keys out for him. There was a nice dark joke on that asshole which gave him a kick while he was down for being such a smug asshole. The priest is a coward who let his people die and now is getting all smug as he thinks God is looking out for him and is guiding the way and I like what they did to him because he has always been a moron.

They finally killed hippie dippy coral and they are actually having some decent moral questions about who to kill and how long to keep the war going. I hope they stray away from the comic book and kill Negan. Really you cannot reasonably make him an ally like I think he becomes in the comic book. That would be stupid. I did like Negan and Rick fighting with flaming Lucille in the building full of walkers. That was fun and entertaining.

Things are also making sense with the saviors. There was no way Negan was controlling sadistic people like Simon and traitorous people like Dwight so well. Now it shows. Also the junkyard people being such double crossing people should have been shot up because you could not trust them. I thought they were going to pretend Rick would not bring up their slaughter to Negan and expose Simon for being a threat to Negan's leadership, but they only waited until Rick and Negan were in their battle to expose that. It was a good moment to expose it.

Now we have a new group who are not being totally trusted, but you had to do something with them so Maggie is showing her wisdom. Yes, there are clear moral arguments with the keeping of prisoners and what they are going to do with them, and how far they are going to fight the saviors where killing them all off may not be the best idea, but some of them need to die.

Then there was the end of tonight's episode. That is how you end an episode with a good cliff hanger. I swear the better writers are on the spring half.

Well that's gonna shake things up.

Finally!

However...

How's Maggie managing to be pregnant but oh so not pregnant after all this time?

Carl drained her fetus's chronotons.
Now that he's gone, she's gonna shit out a 30 year old with two kids of her own.

The walking dead is a bit unrealistic in things. Gasoline would be useless by this point because it has a shelf life. You have pharmacies every twenty feet stocked with basic antibiotics so you probably would have stashed of them. There are so many gun and pawn shops around you would never have a shortage of pistols and shotguns. We would all be dead from the multiple nuclear meltdowns across America. Every nuclear facility would go into meltdown and they are all storing years of waste. They all rewire a continuous supply of electricity, people, or diesel fuel to keep from going critical with their waste.

There is a bunch of things the series gets entirely wrong.

It's called "suspension of disbelief", and for many fantastical settings, it's required for enjoyment.

• The gas thing - easily ignored. Don't be nitpicking, just go with it. Or assume diesel or hybrid for many of the vehicles.
• Medicines and guns - all looted from the shops when civilization began to break down.
• Nuclear power plants - all have modern failsafe shutdown procedures embedded and automatically initiated

Remember, the point of the show is entertainment, not to make the most realistic zombie doomsday scenario!

Well if it were realistic coral rick and Daryl would have all been raped and killed by the biker gang a few seasons back.

You're right on those three points. The problem is that "suspension of disbelief" is hard to get around when you look the first episode of this season, about halfway in.

Rick and co. have the Saviours completely dead-to-rights and they do nothing.

That's not believable, any way you look at it.

Well it's a show about zombies so realism isn't high on the agenda Here are a few more reasons why the whole thing would fail anyway.

My main suspension of disbelief is: Why the hell are they still roaming around Virginia? Understandable if they had a secure location but since they were moving from place to place I wonder - why not move to the coast, seize a few boats and find a zombie free island. Islands have manageable zombie populations without endless supplies crawling around the woods.

Maybe live on a big ship altogether. Enough ships of all (gun) sizes at Norfolk.

They did the ship thing in Fear The Walking Dead.
I only saw the first season, so don't drill me on it.

I stopped after half a season. Nothing in that show I found even remotely interesting or worth my precious while.

They're stealing Morgan to try to get us to watch.

TWD adds a small bit to the zombie thing. You are still going to have people turn because people die. So just like in the jail with the sick kid you really never escape and get to safety even if you bring the human race back. The vectors of the disease are a little bit off also. Why is it that biting triggers an infection when cutting doesn't? If the disease is already inside of you then if you get an open wound it would be there and grow anyway. In that way the walking dead has really set up an odd set of rules. Other zombie movies you could avoid the contagion as long as you were not effected through specific vectors. If you did in other zombie worlds you don't turn unless infected.

How would that even happen considering fear is a good three years behind present walking dead.

Maybe it's prequel Morgan between season 1 TWD, and when Rick finds him again as a crazy person?

We already know Morgan was with the great pudgy white ninja training his staff skills. There was not much time for him to make a trek to Mexico from Georgia and back again. It would have to be post walking dead if Morgan was to get to the other cast.

Or maybe they got some red anti matter and found a wormhole in spacetime and sent Janeway back through .......

Then I guess FTWD has caught up, and isn't a prequel anymore.

I have tried to analyze the timelines and I would think that where the recent FTWD ended might be around the time the group was on the farm. If you consider the baby being a good timekeeper and not coral. Rick was out for a good six months before he found his family. That would mean he met Morgan six months after this all started. The baby is about two and a half now so you are figuring TWD is three years into this.

FTWD has not even gone through one growing season yet. They are just getting done with one from what I can figure. Unless there was a couple of years skipped somewhere and they did not tell us we really are not that far along. You figure when Rick first had the accident would be about the time FTWD started. So they have gone through about a year maybe. That means that the baby was born so Rick and company would be in the prison just dealing with the governor for the first time.

FTWD had potential and then completely pissed it away.

The network touted it as the series that would show how the zombie outbreak unfolded. It took all of two episodes to show it and then FTWD just became a clone of TWD, except in Mexico.

From the article:

I was put off by the characters. Or rather non-characters. While I find Rick extremely boring and dead Carl rather annoying, the rest of the cast has at least some depth or interesting quirks and/or stories. FTWD? Let the zombies win please, these asshats need to go. I truly hated all of them without exemption from minute 1. And I certainly won't watch a show about survival when I wish the 'heroes' would die with every word they utter.

It won't work--Morgan isn't interesting enough all by himself to make me wanna watch. Maybe if they stole Tara and promised a gruesome death for her a few episodes in... Or if they stole Rosita and promised she'd only wear skimpy outfits...

Then the stupid writing comes back. This is what I hate about this show. They can have fearful well written stress and then all the characters just become dumb as fuck pie for an episode.

So why didn't they just have all the people at hilltop get naked and fuck? I get people do stupid things in horror movies but you know people die from infection and turn when they die. You know you do not have great medical care and some people might pass away in the night from the wounds they were given in battle. You know prisoners try to escape. You know you have a group of hostile that can attack at any time. Why do you have no guards or look out wandering around watching the sick, the prisoners, or just the general compound waiting to ring a alarm to wake people up? I get that you might not be aware Negan tainted his weapons with the blood of the dead, which btw has never caused an infection before despite getting into wounds so why does it do bad things now?

You would have a doctor or nurse or something up at night to watch over the wounded because people die at night too. Maybe you might even keep the wounded in a secure area so if you had one turn you only lose the people in that room. Really, we are also to think that thirty people are being held in all night by chicken wire and don't try to escape? I get that some are trying to be friendly, but some of them still seem loyal to Negan so they just sleep and don't try to do anything?

This is another terrible writing episode after some decent episodes. And really Morgan is seeing people and swinging at the air and he doesn't talk about that and no one notices he is losing it? Could you stop fucking with poor Carol. Give Rambo a fucking break for the sake of Jesus. And what about ninja Jesus? Shouldn't he be Daryl level useful at this point?

God damnit, how can you go from being decent fun and then frustratingly stupid so quick?

^ … yeah, that.

Also, what is it with the tactical thinking in this show (others too of course). They know the Saviors are coming. They know the Saviors are so arrogant as to just roll up to the front gate. They have done this multiple times and the audience has seen it. So yea, let's all stand on the balcony and just watch them. Don't put people into the woods or on vantage points behind their backs. Don't prepare some kind of explosive surprise. Don't dig in a few walkers that would certainly grab anyone who walks over them. No.

Just stand there.

They saw fit to leave tire spikes, how about instead BOMBS?!?!?
If they were dumb enough to roll over spikes, they'd just as well roll over IEDs!!

There was so much stupid in this episode I can't even think about it without losing a few IQ points. Funny enough since the premise was quite OK. If I were a Savior I'd be delighted to know three things (and they probably will when the escapees return):

• Everybody on Hilltop has such sound sleep during the apocalypse that even a zombie falling down the stairs won't wake anyone until the zombie has had an early breakfast.
• Secondly it's good to know the Hilltoppers are prepared when they know an attack is coming but can't be bothered with guards when they don't expect one. How else could a 10 year old grab an assault rifle and free the prisoners?
• The Hilltoppers are such bad marksmen that they can't hit a group out in the open and end them. Guys on the wall, Darryl from somewhere and Rick who strolls in by coincidence at the end and pretty much everybody escapes without a scratch. Should have brought the badass kid from before. Sure he'd have gone full ninja on them.

Bad to know for the Saviors: the Hilltoppers obviously have enough ammunition to just shoot thin air for half an hour. They must have wasted a large military basis' full of ammo.

I'll just put this into the OOPS category and be done with it. Next time should give us some Negan and Weirdass Scrapyard Lady time. Would be so nice if they continued to torture Rick for a bit and take away his kill. Even though I think Negan would be a great replacement for Prince Valium.

I need a magic 8 ball shaped like a zombie head so I can ask it if tonight's episode will be a good one. If I remember the choices right it pretty much had the odds correct.