Lothic

It was certainly hard to make out exactly what the show was trying to tell us with those brief images. I think based on the way the camera focused on Shane's dying face as it jumped back and forth to those chaotic images made me assume that was what was (literally) going on inside Shane's head.

But I guess those images could have been in Rick's mind too, epecially if you buy into the "hive-mind" theory and/or the "everyone's infected" theory.

People have been speculating that Shane was becoming a zombie even -before- he actually died. Based on how erratic and chaotic he was becoming in his last few hours it was possible that the virus was already working its magic on him due to his general mental instability. That could explain not only the mental flashes he was getting as he was dying but could also explain why he turned so fast. It could even go so far as to explain why he had a "death wish" with Rick - maybe the virus was unconsciously forcing him into a situation where he knew Rick would kill him so the virus could take over.

Perhaps we'll find out is that the virus is always on the verge of taking over a body, even a living one. But the only thing that holds it back is the body still being alive. Perhaps how resistant a person is to the virus ultimately determines how long it takes for a person to flip once death occurs.

I think we are being forced to accept something along these lines. It just seems like their "slow on the uptake"-ness is a wee-bit too artificial and contrived to be plausible. Just how in the dark were ALL of these people to begin with? As I said before Rick had the excuse of being in a coma - what's everyone else's excuse for not having a clue?

Right I understand that "perfect news reports" were probably not strictly possible in the final weeks of civilization. But I'm still left with the nagging feeling that the very idea that ANYONE could come back as a zombie would have been so fundamentally sensational that a key nugget of info like that would manage to become fairly common amongst ANYONE left alive. *shrugs*

Actually if we are to believe that Dr. Jenner told Rick the "big secret" about everyone reanimating after death then it makes perfect sense that he'd make sure he head-shoted those guys. On the other hand if we are to assume that he knows then you'd have to ask why he didn't quickly try to pop Shane in the head. Curiouser and curiouser...

Well I'll just put it this way: If I were to have to live through a Zombie Apocalypse I would probably do my best to understand as much about the zombies as possible. Who knows... that info just 'might' be useful to me.

Sure I'm no genetic engineer or Catholic bishop so I might not ever fully understand exactly WHY the Zombie Apocalypse happened. But for something so fundamental as "What makes a dead person rise as a zombie?" I would hope that "We don't know anything other than ANYONE can pop up whether they've been attacked or not" would be established very quickly as the world crumbled around you. As you say our conclusions differ completely because I'd consider it absolutely fundamental to the story (or my survival again assuming it was happening for real) to know something like that.

The idea that either of these sets of survivors (either from the comicbook or especially TV show) don't know something as blatantly obvious as this simply bothers me on a purely logical level. It's like the authors are assuming these people are artificially stupid or unobservant of things going on around them. Did no one commit suicide or have a heart attack while things were circling the drain?

But even if you don't agree with me on this then here's the real kicker: Dr. Jenner. Are we supposed to believe that he wouldn't have been able to tell that the virus = zombie-ism even if the victim hadn't been "attacked" by an active zombie? Surely he knew they were all infected after those blood tests, surely he knew people could reanimate even if there were no scratches or bites and surely (until we learn otherwise) we have to assume what he whispered to Rick was "We're all doomed to become zombies so that's why I'm going to kill myself." Why Rick hasn't spilled the beans on what Jenner whispered to him is probably the REAL mystery left to be told.

I guess it just frustrates me to think that these people would not have the simplest of suspicions or that having at least a working clue is "important" to a situation that involves zombies potentially wiping out humanity. I suppose when the Martians invade Earth the leftover pockets of survivors won't care to learn the aliens' most basic modes of operation either...

The problem at hand is that both in the TV show and the comicbook there was a period of roughly 4-6 weeks between the time Rick went into coma and when we first see him wake up and stumble out of the hospital. It's during this "transitional" period when the world went to hell and something like 95% of everyone either died or became a zombie.

All things being equal I have to believe that during those days when the government was losing control and there was (presumably) widespread panic and death that most of the people who would be considered "survivors" would have had to have learned -something- about what was going on. Sure they might not know what was causing it, but surely they would have seen HOW people were becoming zombies. Certainly during the last couple of days before the news/Internet failed there would've been people saying stuff like "OMG, Grandma just keeled over then woke up as a zombie! How did -that- happen?!?"

Again I'm just incredulous that the group would not know something so fundamental as this. At least in the comicbook they sort of made it pretty clear that's what was going on without dwelling on it. I think the only reason the TV show was playing at the "presumption" that it had to be an attack from a zombie is that this is what the audience expects. Most zombie shows don't offer the idea that EVERYONE automatically becomes a zombie when they die so that novel twist had become the TV show's "big reveal". For the TV show I think they just made it an "artificial mystery" that ultimately doesn't make much sense when you compare that to the knowledge the characters would/should already have.

It still just strikes me as terribly improbable that this key "fact" about how the Zombie Apocalypse works could be kept a secret from all the characters (in either the comicbook or the TV show).

Even if you can make the case that comicbook Rick was the only one who didn't know then why didn't anyone bother to mention that tiny bit of info to him while Shane was being buried? You'd think someone would ask him "Hey Rick, did you make sure to crush Shane's head before you buried him first?"

Again there's a difference between having a mystery for the audience to be kept in the dark about versus what the characters in the story would know - I think during the weeks that all hell was breaking loose that how people become zombies would have become very general knowledge to any survivor who lived through the chaos of that.

I'm not even really going to comment on Carl's roaming around other than to say that it's simply "convenient" that he seems to show up wherever he needs to for the purposes of the story. Beyond that it really doesn't make any sense.

I'm not against adding reasonable safeguards to this, but you have to consider the ramifications of how hard it would be for the Devs to keep track of all this membership information over time.

I think the system should be able to easily generate an automated email to all current members of a SG the moment the Super Leader activates a SG rename token. This email would have all that info you mentioned (character name, global name, time of SG rename and the old and new SG names) so that everyone knows exactly who's involved and what happened when.

But I'm not so sure you really need a "pre name-change" wait period involved with this. What would you really be able to do, as a non Super Leader, if you had to wait like a week or month -before- your SG's name was getting changed? No, basically when I talked about a month cooldown period this would be -after- a name change so that a particular SG's name can't be changed any more frequently than once a month regardless of who has the Super Leader rank. This would stop someone from switching the name every five minutes to exploit the system.

Again there's nothing that's going to stop a truly devoted person from doing bad things regardless if we have SG rename tokens or not. All the system should do is prevent people from being able to get away with it anonymously - your email idea would help with that. In addition to the month cooldown I would also make SG rename tokens be arbitrarily expensive - say like $20 worth. This would also reduce the chance that people would bother to use them for whimsically negative reasons.

*** Standard comicbook spolier warning ***

I think you're right that the first time we (the readers of the comicbook) see a person "pop" back up as a zombie like that was Tyreese's daughter.

But when that happened there was no shock about it - Tyreese just "handled" it like he knew it was going to happen. In fact the whole way Tyreese's daughter and boyfriend were planning on committing suicide was to take that into account and make sure that each of them -couldn't- come back as zombies.

I'm reasonably sure that the comicbook used Rick's encounter with Morgan and Duane Jones right after he woke up from his coma as the opportunity to educate Rick (as well as the comicbook reader) about how the zombies worked in this world. There was never any "shock" or "mystery" about it, and that's likely why the comicbook didn't need a trip to the CDC to have a Dr. Jenner whisper to Rick about it either.

Wow I don't even quite remember there being a NPC to deal with in that mission anyway. I've only done it once so far, but I don't remember cutting it -too- close on time and I got the badge regardless. Admittedly running those "time critical" badge missions at -1/1 difficulty does help to some degree.

Well that turned out to be an interesting twist compared to the comic...

*** Comicbook spoilers ahead ***

In the comic there was a similar confrontation between Rick and Shane out in the woods that lead to Carl finding them fighting and having Carl shoot Shane. But the critical difference in the comic is that Carl kills Shane while he was still alive, as a sort of pseudo self-defense murder to protect Rick. The group ends up burying Shane and it wasn't until later that Rick comes back, unburies Shane, and kills him the second time as a zombie. In effect the TV show reversed the order that Rick and Carl killed Shane.

I figure they decided to do it that way because it'd be less questionable to have Carl "kill" Shane as a zombie instead of the way he did it in the comic. Having a little boy be responsible for a questionable murder of a live person would probably be relatively hard to get away with on TV like that.

T-Dog also got two funny "Easter Eggs" from the comicbook as well. The first was his use of a hammer against one of the zombies - that was one of Tyreese's favorite zombie-killing weapons. The other was his line of dialogue just as he was opening the barn they were keeping Randall in where he joked about "the Governor" granting a reprieve.

Yeah that was kind of my point to begin with.

With having over 1,350 plus names for badges I can understand if they accidentally think of a duplicate name here and there when they first come up with a NEW badge. But there really is no excuse for not running that new name up against the existing list just to double-check that it hasn't been used before. That kind of check can be accomplished in mere seconds.

Like I said before it's sort of OK that they might have made this kind of mistake a couple of times in the past. But they've now literally done this roughly a dozen times over the years. It's definitely wandered into the "stupid" zone at this point.

My vote would be for something like "Barrier Breaker" because they already used the word 'Smasher' in the Sentinel Smasher badge. Regardless they should just come up with something that can be used for both red and blue side just to keep it simple.

Offhand I'd figure most guys, if they had god-like superpowers like that, would rather just make their 'package' become totally invulnerable instead of making it disappear like a Ken doll.

Yeah I'm not too sure about directly applying the "casting couch" cliche to Roddenberry either. But it is well known that he was a "ladies man" and had a number of affairs sprinkled around during his two marriages. According to the wikipage on him he got divorced from his first wife of 27 years and married Majel Barrett in 1969 after Star Trek finished its run so its always possible any affairs we was having during Star Trek led to his divorce. *shrugs*

I'm certainly not going to try to argue that Gene Roddenberry was a saint by any means. But I hardly think he was all that much worse than the average Hollywood writer/producer type of the 1960's.

Eh, I figure if they were already going to make the leap of having all these characters together in high school then it's not really that much of a big deal having Batgirl be the same basic age as everyone else.

For what it's worth there was also going to be a Buffy the Animated Series that had a vaguely similar look/feel to this Batman idea.

Well that's certainly one way to describe it. To me it was more like the Titanic: Here you had a show that was full of hype and majesty which, for all appearances, should have been unsinkable. Everyone had high hopes for it and it had all kinds of budget and talent behind it.

But despite all the expectations it suffered from fundamental story and plot weaknesses. It was as if they had the hubris to think they could get away tossing anything at us and we wouldn't mind the icebergs of poor dialogue and annoying characters that made the show a literal chore to watch.

For what it's worth I hope the show does get a chance to get a "corrective lens" (in the form of a massive restructuring in another venue like Netflix) because it was clear that what Fox had going was simply doomed to sink.

It's not really a "problem" that's going to break the game but it is still something the Devs probably could have put a little more thought into.

For example in just the last few weeks I've had a few characters who have already gotten 2 or 3 of these as drops in iTrials. At that rate they'll probably have the other 3 or 4 they will -ever- need in another few weeks. After that they'll just keep racking up more which will be completely useless to them.

It almost seems semi-pointless for this to be a new "currency" that you only will ever need 6 units of and then never need again. *shrugs*

I'd agree that them taking a perfectly good and unique badge name and then, for some unclear reason, changing it to match a preexisting badge is a new wrinkle in the long saga of screwing up various badge names.

Still, that doesn't change the fact that there have been at least 10 or 12 different cases where the Devs couldn't be bothered to check to see if a name has been used already. You'd think after making that mistake 2 or 3 times that'd be enough to learn their lesson.

Besides as unsavory as this deal by Roddenberry seems I'm willing to bet this kind of thing happens ALL the time in Hollywood. I'm not saying that makes it completely fine and ethical, I'm just saying there's no point in thinking that Roddenberry was especially unusual or remarkably naughty in this area. I'm quite sure people like George Lucas have done 100x worse than this in their time.