The Walking Dead - AMC

Yeah.

^worst page-break ever!

^Agrees.

So they left Merle up there on the roof to get eaten by zombies. He thinks he's about to get attacked, manages to get ahold of the hacksaw and.... Does he cut through the handcuff chain? Nope. Cut through the pipe he's attached to? Nope. He decides that the best option is to cut off his hand. His own hand. Not the handcuffs, not the pipe. His hand. Really? Really??? Come on.

Grrarrgh said:

So they left Merle up there on the roof to get eaten by zombies. He thinks he's about to get attacked, manages to get ahold of the hacksaw and.... Does he cut through the handcuff chain? Nope. Cut through the pipe he's attached to? Nope. He decides that the best option is to cut off his hand. His own hand. Not the handcuffs, not the pipe. His hand. Really? Really??? Come on.

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I was confused too, so I asked my husband, "Woudn't that hacksaw have cut through the handcuffs?" And he told me probaby, but it wouldn't have been as gross.

I am going to chalk it up to him being dehydrated and deusional from being out in the elements for a couple of days with no food and water. He clearly wasn't thinking straight.

There is a line in the original Mad Max that it would take, if I recall, 20 minutes to cut through the high-tensile steel that handcuffs are made of. But, if you're lucky, you could cut through your wrist in 10.

Is there a time-factor?

Bmwhtly said:

There is a line in the original Mad Max that it would take, if I recall, 20 minutes to cut through the high-tensile steel that handcuffs are made of. But, if you're lucky, you could cut through your wrist in 10.

Is there a time-factor?

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The zombies couldn't get through the chains on the door, so he was never in any immediate danger. I'm sure he was panicking, but I have a really hard time believing that someone not in immediate danger would start hacking through their own wrist with a saw without even trying an alternative.
I would also think that if you're in a zombie attack, 20 minutes vs. 10 minutes is half a dozen of one, six of the other. You're either about to be eaten, or you're not. You have time to hack through something or you don't.

The zombies couldn't get through the chains on the door, so he was never in any immediate danger.

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But he didn't know that, plus as was mentioned he was a bit crazy from dehydration etc. But yeah, totally brainless move. Can you imagine what he was thinking? Yeah I'm free! Oh cr@p. bleeding to death...

Satori1977 said:

I was confused too, so I asked my husband, "Woudn't that hacksaw have cut through the handcuffs?" And he tod me probaby, but it wouldnt have been as gross.

I am going to chalk it up to him being dehydrated and deusional from being out in the elements for a couple of days with no food and water. He clearly wasn't thinking straight.

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Now that you bring it up I understand the whole five minutes in the beginning now. I think they were trying to clearly establish that he was losing it. However, wouldn't there be more blood? And if he did cut it off, and the zombies sense humans by smell, wouldn't the smell of freshly spewing blood put them in to an even bigger frenzy? (I'm wondering why the mob of zombies wasnt there when the rescue team arrived.)

I hope since there are only three more episodes left they really crank up the happenings.

Handcuffs are hardened steel, hard to get through -- but he was cuffed to a half-inch rod. Piece of cake. So, no, it makes no sense.

A bigger question -- where the hell did Merle go? The door to the roof was still chained and locked from the inside.

Note: the Dixon brothers are original to the tv show -- not in the comics.

(And there's nothing wrong with being redneck -- but do you have to name your kids Merle and Darryl?)

Sydneyd said:

Now that you bring it up I understand the whole five minutes in the beginning now. I think they were trying to clearly establish that he was losing it. However, wouldn't there be more blood? And if he did cut it off, and the zombies sense humans by smell, wouldn't the smell of freshly spewing blood put them in to an even bigger frenzy? (I'm wondering why the mob of zombies wasnt there when the rescue team arrived.)

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I questioned where all the zombies by the door had gone, too. My best guess is that wherever Merle went, they smelled his blood and followed him. Which is even more reason to hack through the pipe instead of your own wrist.

Manuel Royal said:

A bigger question -- where the hell did Merle go? The door to the roof was still chained and locked from the inside.

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This, however, I couldn't tell. I highly doubt he jumped off of the building, and there couldn't have been another door back into the building, or the zombies would have been attacking there, too. Maybe the buildings are close enough together that he was able to jump to the next roof??? I've never spent any time in downtown Atlanta, so I don't know if that's feasible.

Manuel Royal said:

Note: the Dixon brothers are original to the tv show -- not in the comics.

(And there's nothing wrong with being redneck -- but do you have to name your kids Merle and Darryl?)

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And of course, it was all good and well to have white supremacists cast as hateful characters as opposed to, say, a couple of Bloods or Crips.

Noah Body said:

And of course, it was all good and well to have white supremacists cast as hateful characters as opposed to, say, a couple of Bloods or Crips.

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There are a lot more racist white crackers in rural Georgia than there are Bloods or Crips. (Even though Merle was encountered in Atlanta, I'm pretty sure he and his brother are rural rednecks; and really, you don't have to drive far from the city to feel like you've gone back in time, at least once you get off the interstate.)

For gangs in Atlanta, I think there may be more Latino or Asian members than black. (Though presumably the drug traffic in College Park, East Point and around there is controlled by black gangs.)

Maybe so, I just feel that in this circumstance, the producers elected to make a "safe" choice for introducing artificially-contrived conflict.

I'm no fan of Robert Kirkman's writing or Tony Moore's art but I've read enough of them to wonder how faithfully the show will follow the comic book.

I enjoyed the premiere episode, but I don't think I'm going to follow the shop faithfully. I finally watched the fast zombies of the British mini-series, Dead Set and those are much more frightening than the slow-ass, shuffling undead of The Walking Dead.

By the way, you do realize "The Walking Dead" refers to the living surviors and not the undead legions, right?

Bmwhtly said:

There is a line in the original Mad Max that it would take, if I recall, 20 minutes to cut through the high-tensile steel that handcuffs are made of. But, if you're lucky, you could cut through your wrist in 10.

Is there a time-factor?

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Can you cut through it in ten minutes? It took Hiker-guy an hour, though he wasn't trying to cut through his wrist.

nighttimer said:

I enjoyed the premiere episode, but I don't think I'm going to follow the shop faithfully. I finally watched the fast zombies of the British mini-series, Dead Set and those are much more frightening than the slow-ass, shuffling undead of The Walking Dead.

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Here we come to a philosophical divide that I think is based on different uses of the terms "frightening" or "scary".

Fast zombies are "scary" in the sense that a large, fierce dog attacking you is scary; this is an instinctive reaction to being attacked or chased, and has little to do with "horror" as it's used artistically. The Olympic-sprinter zombies of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake or Dead Set are menacing but not interesting. They might as well be rabid animals.

Slow zombies are frightening on a much deeper level. They carry a weight of grotesque pathos and, like a Danse Macabre, give us time to recognize ourselves in them, and to mourn the fate of blameless corpses that should be moldering peacefully but are instead compelled to lurch at the living in a horrific parody of human actions.

nighttimer said:

By the way, you do realize "The Walking Dead" refers to the living surviors and not the undead legions, right?

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I did not know that!
(Haven't read the comic).

GVChamp said:

Can you cut through it in ten minutes? It took Hiker-guy an hour, though he wasn't trying to cut through his wrist.

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I remember reading about that guy. Think the show I Shouldn't Be Alive, did an episode on him.

Maybe the mystery helicopter rescued Merle from the roof. As for where the camp is, they mentioned walkers "coming up the mountain," so maybe it's somewhere on Stone Mountain?

http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1458008113014550874zZxdyc

GregB said:

Maybe the mystery helicopter rescued Merle from the roof. As for where the camp is, they mentioned walkers "coming up the mountain," so maybe it's somewhere on Stone Mountain?

http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1458008113014550874zZxdyc

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Well, it can't be Stone Mountain; I can tell from glimpses of the buildings that it's to the west of downtown. Maybe northwest. And not that far -- I think it's inside the Perimeter.

In fact -- I'm thinking the camp must be at Bellwood Quarry. The city of Atlanta bought it from Vulcan Materials a few years back. (Note that I'm just talking about the filming location, which may not correspond to the geography of the story.)

I'm not sure why they felt they had to create two trouble-making peckerwoods who weren't in the comic. They just seem to be slowing the story down.

Not having read the comic, it does make me wonder as well. Was there not enough personal conflict in the comic? Hollywood does things that probably sound smart in meetings with the devo people, but the end results don't always prove out the benefits of Group Think.

I thought the stench attack at the end of last night's episode to be far more compelling than anything that had gone on in the previous 40 minutes.

Noah Body said:

Not having read the comic, it does make me wonder as well. Was there not enough personal conflict in the comic?

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Oh, boy. Personal conflict is pretty much the default condition for the characters in the comic. When they're not bitching and whining at each other, they're shouting, accusing, theatening, or actually duking it out.

Ever since Romero's movie Night of the Living Dead, a continuing theme of zombie stories has been that the survivors are more dangerous to each other than the zombies are, and that they fail because they can't put their differences aside and support each other, or else because the collapse of law and order allow people to exercise their worst natures. In the Walking Dead comic, we're shown that over and over, and often with some pretty awkward dialogue.

It gets to where you want to tell our small group of heroes to pull their heads out and stop trying to self-destruct. It's not as if they don't have enough external threats.

Reminds me -- I've got last night's episode on tape. Better check that out.

On tape? Guy, that's so 20th Century.

I'm new to this thread. So pardon my party crashing. Here's my 2 cents:

1) I first saw the ads for this new and yet-to-be-broadcast show about 5 months ago and thought it looked WAY cool.

2) I really wanted to try and watch it, but life got in the way so it never happened.

3) I feel like I kinda cheated myself by never having seen a single episode.

4) But then ........ I found out something that kinda pissed me off. Let me explain ....

As background to my pissed-offedness, I am an avid fan of the writings of James Howard Kunstler, a man most famous for his 2005 non-fiction book The Long Emergency where he details the soon-coming reality of our experienceing a partial collapse of Western civilization due to the permanent decline of global energy availability. Then in 2008, he published a work of speculative fiction called World Made by Hand where he shows us fictional characters living through his own vision of this bleak future, set in the decade of the 2020's. (As a side note, he was one of the book guests on The Colbert Report back in 2008 when his novel was first published.) Since then he has published a sequel to that novel, called The Witch of Hebron. In all he intends to have 4 books total in what is now being called the "World Made By Hand" series.

Anyway ... about a year ago, Kunstler was in talks with AMC for a TV series deal based upon the books. AMC's executives ALMOST sealed the deal. But then they decided to make "a zombie series" instead. And guess what the name of that zombie series is, guys.

So yeah, I'm a little pissed.

Meanwhile, it STILL looks like an awesome TV show. But it's been kinda ruined for me now on an entirely personal level.

Wow. All I can say is, someone needs a Fresca.