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Well the episodes are continuing to be a bit slow. I actually kind of liked this episode, the character interactions are pretty believable, although they are beating the “father” angle to death. The farm sets looked pretty good as did the zombie in the well.

Probably the only thing I really didn’t like about this episode was lowering Glenn into the well to rope the zombie in the well. That was pretty ridiculous, that they would risk someone’s life to get a single zombie free from a well. I mean it’s not like they have an over abundance of people hanging around. Also it’s not really their well, and they don’t know how long they are staying there, and on top of that they did say they have three wells to choose from.

The scenes with the rose and Daryl was actually ok, as was Glenn hooking up with Maggie. The scenes with Hershel and Rick kind of dragged a bit and it kind of looked like they green screened in the mountains. It just didn’t look quite right. Anyways I guess it was a nice character development episode and even though there wasn’t much action I still thought it was ok.

Ok watched episode three last night, apparently I need to get on these posts quicker if I am going to keep up with the surge of traffic right after the show. This episode was ok but still has not really blown me away. The idea of shooting through the deer is dumb. In the comic Otis just accidentally shot Carl thinking he was a zombie. All this deer stuff and conversations about the deer are pretty whack really. What did Rick say? “Carl needs to live because he talked about THE DEER!” or something to that effect, that was just corny. Again they seem to want to make long conversation scenes between characters, which fall flat.

It also seemed kind of dumb for Daryl to leave his arrow in that hanging zombie, when he could just cut it down and get it back. They also did not raid that dead guy’s camp, in that scene. The conversations between Andrea and Daryl seem to flow much better then the other dialogue in the show. Don’t know if it’s written better or if they are better actors. Daryl is turning out to be one of the more entertaining characters and he didn’t appear in the comic.

The contrast between Dale in the comic and Dale in the show is pretty extreme. In the comic he was actually Andrea’s lover. I wonder if a relationship between a 60 year old man and a girl in her late twenties would have played out well in a television show.

Finally there was Otis in the end, which I thought was good. Part of what I liked about the comic was it kind of showed a sort of evolution in mankind where the most vicious people who are willing to do anything to survive come out on top. In the same note other survivors can be even worse than the walking dead, in terms of being a threat and only a few scenes in the show have captured any of that. Primarily I would say Merle cutting off his own hand, and Shane beating down Ed, and now Shane sacrificing Otis so he could make his escape. I hope there is more stuff like this in future shows and less scenes of Rick and Laurie discussing deer.

Just got back from vacation and was able to watch the first two episodes of season 2. This site never really got the following of my falling-skies site unfortunately so I doubt there is people waiting for my updates.

Anyways, watching the first two episodes they were not bad but they did not blow me away. The seem to be going into this scenes with way too much dialogue basically saying the same thing over and over again. They are messing up the Andrea character changing her too much from the comic in my opinion.

The scene with her arguing with Dale over having the gun went on way too long, as did the scene with Rick and Shane in the farm house in the second episode. There was too much dialogue not really saying anything and just eating time. The longer the dialogue goes on the weaker it sounds, in my opinion.

The zombies look great, I think they did a great job in casting the extras for their parts. The makeup looks great. The casting for Herschel is great as well.

I still wish they kept with the comic book story line more but there is probably a million fan boys saying the same thing right now.

I liked when they pulled up on the traffic jam and and Dale said they didn’t have enough gas to turn around, and some pointed out they could take gas out of all the broken down cars. The thought when through my head at the same time. So far I didn’t really see any groan inducing WTF moments but at the same time nothing really blew me away.

Looks like its got the Herschel farm at the end.

Well the finale of season one was kind of a dud in my opinion. Not a lot happened, and most of it didn’t really move the story along. The idea that all the world’s governments are gone and that the vatos and this group are still running around is kind of laughable. They don’t have bomb shelters in Washington, where the most powerful people in the country would be hunkered down?

The scientist, as I feared turned out to be threatening, threatening in a logical “for the greater good” sort of way, which was very predictable. We learned that they have no idea what causes the people to become zombies, and that there is no hope of rescue.

In the end I was wondering what was the whole point of the CDC being added to the story.  I mean they are exactly as they were before they went minus one black lady character. This whole episode was not in the comics at all.  In the comics Shane would be dead by now and they would be on their way to Herschell’s farm.  Personally I think the show would be way better if they just stuck right to the comic story line, since most of the stuff they have added has been pretty weak.

Well we watched “wildfire” last night, and personally I think the episodes are actually getting better and better. Quickly scanning online I discovered that a lot disagree with me, but whatever.  I thought the scenes with Andrea and Amy were well done.  Reading online I found many complaints about these scenes such as Amy wasn’t developed enough to care about or the scene was too long. The scene was kind of long but I thought it was more about developing Andrea then anything else. Is there a rule that says that if a character has a death scene then everyone involved must be very well developed in order for it to be entertaining?  In the comic book Amy’s death was pretty much an intro to Andrea, so I don’t really see what all the fuss is about,  a main character having a seven minute scene.

I think that the groan-inducing “WTF” moments are decreasing with each episode, which is good. The scene with Carol hammering her husband’s head away was kind of cliche and overdone, but the shear amount of gore made up for it.  In the comic Jim was the one who freaked out and mashed the fallen bodies of the zombies. I also don’t think he is psychic.  He had a nightmare about people dying and so he delusion-ally dug some graves, and then some people died.  Of course people are dying all the time so that’s not much of a prediction.

I like how the conflict with Shane panned out in the comic.   It’s been ok in the show, but not as good as the comic.  The CDC story arc has me worried though. The scene that showed the group going to the CDC which was surrounded by hundreds of fallen bodies was great.  It’s the lone, possible mad scientist that is worrisome.  It really seems like lone scientist with questionable motives  has been done to death in horror and sci-fi.  If he invited them in and then secretly tries to do some nasty experiments on them, it would be pretty weak. Although not surprising given the weak points in the show so far.

This week’s episode Vatos I think was the best so far. I know I don’t really summarize the episode which maybe I should, but frankly I prefer just reflecting on the good and bad of the episode in my opinion rather then documenting exactly what happened.

In this episode there were more divergences from the comic.  I have actually dug up my comics so I could be more accurate on those points. For one, in the Comic there is no Merle and Daryl (the redneck brothers) so the only purpose for the trip back to the city with Glen and Rick was to secure more guns. Also in the Comic, they go to the gun store to get guns.  In the show, they get guns from the bag that Rick dropped when he fled the tank after Glen spotted him for the first time.

The introduction to the Vatos was also not in the comic.  Now a lot of people didn’t like this story arc. I didn’t mind it, that much. I think the reason some people think that it’s so unbelievable is that they really don’t see that “gangbangers” are just people. As someone who lived in neighborhoods with “vatos”, I can say that a pretty big majority of them are relatively normal people.  Sure they may look tough, and maybe they are tough, but they all have families, moms and pops etc.  They may or may not be involved with criminal activities normally, but in the Walking Dead world, all that is gone. There is no police force or crime really now, they are just surviving.  Also, in most Hispanic cultures family is extremely important, so the idea of younger men protecting their old relatives is not unrealistic. This is not to say that there are not some psychopathic murderous violent gang members out there, it’s just not that everyone with some tattoos is like that.

What happened after that is probably the only thing in the episode that was disappointing. They jogged back to camp? What, seriously? Why? and how? It seemed to me the camp was a fair number of miles from the city. I mean at least 8-10 miles and that’s a long way to walk.  Was there a shortage of cars laying around?

Anyway, the zombie attack at the end was decent, although there was no explanation on how the zombies got past the warning system of the cans on strings.  Of course this show sometimes leaves the explanation of things for the next episode. Like when they found Merle’s hand on the roof, the idea that the saw could not cut through the cuffs was brought up in the next episode. Maybe Merle lead the the Zombies there? Maybe Merle cut the warning system to get revenge?

In the comic book when Rick and Glen return from the city with the guns they have a big target practice session where people including Carl learn to shoot.  I think the noise from the target practice is what drew the zombies to their camp in the book, but in show it might be Merle.

I'll Beat you to death, Ed

Well episode 3 was pretty good, better than the second episode even if it waded into a lot of screen time with just Rick and Lori getting back together. But to be fair the acting was decent. At least those two characters are pretty believable, although kind of boring. It was well done, in my opinion.

Wandering around on the internet I noticed that some people were bothered by the idea of two parents having sex right next to their sleeping kid. Although that seems strange in modern times, I think it’s a relatively recent thing for people other then the rich to have a lot of privacy. A hundred years ago if you were in the lower income bracket you most likely shared your living space pretty closely with others.

One thing that has not made sense to me is that the survivors are stripping cars for parts, fixing cars etc. It would seem to me any area that had people, there would be an abundance of free cars and vehicles lying around. Seems like it would make more sense to just grab a new car/truck as needed. Also it does not make much sense to go into Atlanta to get supplies are there not dozens of convenience stores and hundreds of houses to raid along the way, without having to be trapped on foot so far from vehicles? This hole was in the comics too, I guess it could be assumed that they need some sort of specialty supplies they cannot find in the suburbs but it’s not apparent that this is the case.

They introduced Daryl, Merle Dixon’s not quite as cliché and stereotypical redneck brother. He showed to have hunting skills perhaps making him more useful to the group. They introduced another stereotypical character with the wife beater. He doesn’t have much development except showing he is an abusive asshole, who is also lazy. I guess when you have a television show that is going to be marketed to a broad market it needs to have easily definable bad guys. Part of what makes the comic so great is that there is only a couple of bad guys and everyone else is a mix of good/bad.

My girlfriend thought the scene with all the women washing clothes was kind of contrived. I am just wondering why they are bothering to wash clothes in the first place. When you can just kick a door in on any house and take anything you want, it seems like it would be easier to just grab some new clothes as needed.

I really liked the ending with Shane losing control and beating the wife beater (Ed), basically taking his anger with Lori out on this dumb hump, and the others finding Merle’s hand on the roof.  Those scenes set to music, really captured the violent hopelessness of the comic. Although my girlfriend pointed out the music kind sounds like a ripoff the 28 days later music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0RX02SeQw