The Walking Dead (TV series)/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

 * At first, I gave the title "Walking Dead no second look. It's a pretty common name for a zombie, or any type of ghoul really. But then I realized the book isn't really about zombies. They're more or less cannon fodder, and in the worst cases, the equivalent of a natural disaster; which is bad, yes, and scary, yes. But worst and scarier are the human, living characters. The book isn't just about a group of survivors dealing with zombies. It's more than that; its about survivors dealing with other survivors. And more people have been killed from the other human characters than that have died because of a zombie. The zombies are endless and faceless, and they will be around for the duration of the series. Some characters, as the book has shown, will not. After understanding all of this, I realized that "The Walking Dead" doesn't refer to the zombies, at least, not exclusively. "The Walking Dead" are the human beings. "The Walking Dead" are the heroes. Which, given what this implies, makes the whole series even more grim.

Fridge Horror

 * Issue 48: during the Governor's assault of the prison, Lori and Judith were killed.
 * Consider: the fatal shot hit Lori. Her brain was not damaged. If she's lucky, the zombies devoured her corpse. If not, there might be half a reanimated Lori crawling around.
 * And then there was Judith. We saw the shot killing her mother, but there was no absolute indication that it killed the baby. If she's lucky, she was also killed by the gunshot. If not--and if Lori didn't get to reanimate--she and her mother would be devoured by the swarm of zombies. And yes, it can get worse: just imagine what would happen if Lori reanimated but Judith didn't. And yes, it can get further worse. If the gunshot killed but didn't destroy Judith's cranium, we just might have ourselves a zombie baby and its half-corpse zombie mum there in the prison...
 * Actually, the woman who shot Lori clearly yells at the Governor "You made me kill a fucking baby!" Most likely Judith was crushed under her mother's corpse, since she was barely a month old and babies are very brittle.
 * Something that hasn't been addressed yet in the comics. Consider, whatever it is that reanimates the dead is possibly airborne, and everyone has it: thus, even if one dies of other causes he/she will still reanimate. Consider, the chance of miscarriages is that much higher in that world, due to (relative) lack of medical care, stress, etc. Now imagine if a baby is stillborn, or dies during childbirth...
 * And one more thing. Again, recall that everyone can/will reanimate upon death, unless the brain is destroyed. Now imagine that a lot of people are scared and barely barricaded themselves against hordes of undead. Then, in the middle of the night, someone has a heart attack and dies. Bam! Suddenly there is a zombie right next to you. All it takes is a sudden sickness, or lack of medicine (e.g. diabetics), or just old age to claim someone, and suddenly your crammed safezone is breached--from within. Quite possibly, this contributes to many 'contained area' or 'safezones' to be overrun.
 * And do recall that, in the TV series, there was the gang protecting the retirement home, with old and possibly medically-dependent people. While (as far as I know) this hadn't happened, it was and still is a very real possibility.
 * In the show, apparently the only way to become a zombie is to be bitten by another one.
 * Not anymore.
 * The Walking Dead contains lots of Nightmare Fuel already, but The Governor takes the cake in this category. Among the many nasty things he does, he collects the severed heads of those he's killed to feed his "biters" and sticks them in tanks, then sits and watches them complaining "there's nothing on TV these days." Nasty, right? Then you remember that anyone killed, bitten or not, rises as a zombie... and even after decapitation, the head is still animate unless the brain is destroyed...
 * And then there's the scene with zombies in the basement at the house at Wiltshire Estates. One wonders how the zombies got down there in the first place. Then, later, it's revealed that it's not the bite that turns people... any death will turn you into a zombie. So it's quite likely that those were the original owners of the house, who hid in the basement for safety and died of starvation. *shiver*

Fridge Logic

 * So, why exactly does everyone have such a hard time keeping track of the time since Z-day? Rick couldn't have been in a coma too long (any longer and he'd have been dead, not to mention that at the beginning, he's shown with a kind of two- or three- weeks scruff going on, not a months-old beard), so why the hell does everyone forget the time and/or date? Did the initial panic cause everyone to destroy every single clock and calendar around in their efforts to survive?
 * If you take people out of their normal routine, they very easily lose track of time and days. Think about when you go on vacation for two weeks, and you're doing something entirely out of the ordinary. It's disorienting for most people, and you'll wake up forgetting what day it is. Pair that with our reliance on mechanical and electronic time-keeping, and you've got people whose world is turned on its head, they're not doing anything remotely like their normal routine, and all those digital time displays--computers, banks, etc.--are no longer working.
 * I've owned digital watches with a calender function in them before that had battery life of well over a year and a half. Of all the survivors they've run into, not one of them has something like that?

Fridge Brilliance

 * In episode 2, as the being to chop up the walker to smear his flesh on themselves to avoid detection, Glenn points out that on the man's ID it says he was an organ donor. This is a funny line but as the brilliance sets in (which takes a while as we're treated to the Squick of chopping), the man being an organ donor means he's essentially given them permission to use his body parts to save lives - in this case, their own.
 * In episode 4, during the large fish dinner at the camp, Dale is asked of why he bothers to wind up his watch everyday and his concern with time when it seems irrelevant in the current situation of the world. This lengthy discussion seems to just develop character or set up a Chekov's Gun for the end of the season, but it is never brought up again. Then you realize that
 * When Glenn outlines some rather thorough strategy to help get back the bag of firearms, yet still taking time to ensure that he is covered for multiple escape routes, Rick and Daryl look at him in surprise, and ask what he did before the "walkers" arose. Response? Pizza delivery guy. They don't ask about hobbies. As a young, urban and "normal" guy, he very likely has extensive experience playing war-like video games, giving him a solid grasp of fundamental combat strategy.
 * Further evidence for that theory - Glenn makes a reference to Portal when chatting with Maggie. He's definitely a gamer.
 * Also, as a pizza delivery guy, he has to be good about maneuvering through streets in order to deliver the pizzas quickly.
 * Leaving the "Vatos" storyline without closure may be an example of Executive Meddling, but at the same time it leads to a rather pragmatic aspect. The group has been told that no cure is to be had, that the entire world has fallen to the zombie plague and there's nowhere to go. What reason is there for the group to expend what little fuel and food they have left going back into the death trap of Atlanta to let the vatos know about this? The leader G told Rick the only thing keeping them going was the hope of getting together enough of a crew to get enough vehicles going to get the elderly out of the city. What're they going to do exactly, dash that dream and tell them everyone is going to die and they're just wasting their time because there's nothing left?
 * As mentioned above, the show seems to work on the same rules as the comics, so it's entirely possible that one of the elderly patients died, reanimated, and attacked the group from the inside. Possibly worth mentioning is that material that wasn't used in the show shows that the retirement home was overrun.
 * Word of God states that Otis found the zombified Sophia and put her in the barn with the rst of the Walkers. This has lead to a lot of questions concerning the timeline of the second season premier episode and how everything happened in the time that it did. But one has to realize that it wouldn't have had to be the infection that killed her for everything to happen. Sometime after disappearing and was bitten, we know this for a fact. Sometime after being infected she could've been running, tripped and landed on a rock with enough force to stop her heart. Maybe running without food and water sped up infection process. Maybe she fell down the same cliff Daryl did and didn't survive the landing. If her death was not long after her initial disappearance it's entirely possible Otis found and corralled her during the hours between the two incidents and still had time to go out and wind up shooting Carl and the deer together.
 * Another possibility is that, as a child, and therefore having a smaller body, it would likely take less time for the infection to take over.
 * In "Triggerfinger", Shane tells Andrea he's got to get some sleep because he's taking the graveyard shift as sentry (Ironic term indeed). But Shane staying up all night actually helps explain some of his actions. People who are sleep-deprived (remember, Shane is appearing in just as many daylight scenes as everyone else) get jumpy and irritable in the best of times. Couple the stresses of the Zombie Apocalypse with his current drama and the hours upon hours in darkness he has to sit there thinking he is the last and only line of defense, and his criticism of Rick makes sense from his perspective.
 * In the final episode of season one, Jenner wants them all to die in the CDC with him. He must be nuts, right? They leave and he whispers something to Rick, which we don't learn until the end of season 2 - everyone has the virus, when you die you'll come back as a walker, period. BRILLIANCE! Those who stayed were completely incinerated! Jenner was offering the group (who he was probably sure would die anyway), a chance to not come back as walkers, and thus further complicate whatever the rest of civilization was going through! He was trying to help them go out with dignity, and not as a shambling, rotting walker.
 * In the final episode of Season Two: Lori looks horrified and backs away from Rick when he says he was forced to kill Shane. She refuses to let him touch her and runs away in disgust. Even after Rick clearly said it was in self-defence, after her explicitly telling him that Shane was a threat a few days before and that he had to deal with him, and moments after saying that she was there for him. Why? Because she still had feelings for Shane, and had been knowingly or unknowingly stringing him along for two seasons by this point.

Fridge Horror

 * By the time Merle makes the hard decision to cut off his own hand to get off the roof, chances are the hacksaw was already dulled up from trying to cut through the handcuffs. As if making a Life or Limb Decision didn't involve enough pain already.
 * In 'Better Angels,' Carl happens on Rick and prompts his father to leave the body and go to him. This move could have very well SAVED him. If Rick had been alone, he probably would have stayed by the corpse  up until it reanimated and takes a chomp out of him.
 * Rick hasn't told anyone that
 * The revelation that everyone is infected and turns upon death means the Vatos from season 1 are almost certainly dead. Not only were they a band of 30-odd men in a city with potentially millions of walkers, but the elderly hospice patients they were caring for are all timebombs and none of them know it.

Fridge Logic

 * Couldn't Merle have just cut off his thumb?
 * Simple answer: he was in a panic, and the thought didn't occur to him.
 * Just taking off the thumb wouldn't have done any good. It doesn't add that much width to your hand, and if the cuff was tight enough around his wrist it still would have caught on the rest of his hand.
 * When Rick is riding into Atlanta on his horse, we see that the outgoing part of the highway is gridlocked while the incoming lanes, where his is, are completely free of cars. This is even the picture on the box for Season 1. This is all well and good thematically, as well as something that should have tipped Rick off that all might not be well, but Fridge Logic kicks in when this means that there were 5 lanes of perfectly good highway that nobody used to escape an infected city during a zombie apocalypse.
 * Maybe we don't see the inbound lanes backed up because when people used it to escape, it wasn't backed up, probably done after traffic laws went out the window.
 * Real people can be Lawful Stupid at the worst of times. Sad, but true.
 * it's also possible that the inbound lanes were being used by the military, and they didn't want them being clogged up by civilian traffic.
 * The scarcity of resources is presented as being a big challenge to the survivors. Food maybe, gasoline less maybe, but we're supposed to believe that guns are difficult to obtain in the Deep South? Even if we were told that every single gunshop was locked up or empty, they could just start raiding houses. Odds are good that any given household will have at least one firearm.
 * That's assuming that in the several months that have passed, nobody else has thought of that.
 * That's been tossed around, but I don't really buy it completely. The human population rapidly dwindled, clumped into groups then turned into walkers or left the city. Some stores were probably skipped by looters because there were walkers all around. (And some of those walkers were from previous attempts to loot the store!) With the lack of resistance Rick ran into upon entering the city on the horse, it's pretty obvious these people either weren't trying hard enough or were too scared to try. I mean look at how long it took to check all the homes in New Orleans after Katrina by an organized military. We are talking thousands of homes and shops.
 * My take was that guns might not be altogether rare, but that ammo would be. Plenty of people might keep a gun in their attic but they're much less likely to carry around more than a few weeks' worth of ammo at the most and ammo for one gun isn't guaranteed to work for another.
 * That's what I was thinking. You don't need ten boxes of bullets if your only reason for having the gun was for home defense.
 * Just the opposite. Most gun owners have multiple guns in their home and a fair amount of ammo. Three reasons. #1 Ammo lasts forever so buy in bulk to save a bit of money. #2 guns are often owned by people who want to be ready for trouble so extra ammo makes sense. #3 guns eat ammo fast. Gun owners practice and shoot for fun. A single box of ammo is not enough.
 * Eh, actually, it depends. Ammo doesn't last forever, but it will last for quite a while if it is properly stored. Good ammo costs money, however, and buying in bulk requires adequate storage. Simple home defense doesn't require more than a few boxes lying around, and that would go quickly in a zombie outbreak. Sporting goods and gun shops would have a lot more available, but would also be the first target for looting -- which would have started before everything was overrun by the walking dead. Also, you need to have the right ammo. Sitting on a crate of 5.56 NATO doesn't do you much good if all you have is a .357 and a shotgun.


 * Why have none of the women been taught how to defend themselves? They are three healthy, uninjured adults. Lori especially should be going Mama Bear when Carl is threatened, but instead her tactics are limited to Human Shield, crying and screaming, or running and hiding. Andrea's lack of access to her dad's gun is justified, but there are plenty of melee weapons that they could use if they need to. If there was at least one guy among them, it would be a more realistic "Not everyone is going to become a gun-ho zombie slayer if Z-day actually happens," but right now the Stay in the Kitchen implications are VERY unfortunate. Even Glen is showing some potential for Badassery, so why haven't these three done anything like it?
 * It's not just the women. The entire group, men, women and children should have their own melee weapons at worst, and realistically, they should all have guns as well. They were either lazy or stupid.
 * Agreed, but Shane did make a good point about untrained people with weapons wasting ammunition and making quite a ruckus by absentmindedly shooting at something that moves before they verify the target.
 * It could be argued that the group would be justified to go back to an antique lifestyle of men doing the fighting and the women staying home. Eventually the process of making babies will need to restart, and one of the main reasons to keep the women off the front lines was not that they couldn't handle themselves but the fact that you don't want to lose reproductive capability in the group you are trying to defend - otherwise eventually, over a period of years, there's no group to protect and all of your fighting has been for naught. (In a society like ours with MANY reproductive pairs to keep things going for the future, woman and men alike have the freedom to be single and reach for their dreams, these folks don't exactly have that sort of latitude - numbering less than 20 and all.) So while Stay in the Kitchen understandably strikes a bad nerve with some female viewers, keep in mind that the guys on the show are having to fit Men Are the Expendable Gender, and there are many men who don't exactly jump up and down in excitement at the idea of taking that role, either. And I'll also point out that there is an Action Girl in the group, and Dale's job seems to be back at home with the women. (For the record, I'm a male who would prefer to stay back at camp helping out with the chores and spelling Dale guarding on top of the RV. I wouldn't be much good out killing walkers, I think.)
 * Nobody is asking the women to become battle-hardened zombie slayers. We're asking them to pull their own weight. It's not that hard to get a baseball bat/crowbar/giant stick and swing it at anything that looks like a zombie. It wouldn't kill them, obviously, but it would SLOW THEM DOWN enough for them to escape or reach the men.
 * One word: Michone.
 * Three words: What's that mean?
 * Michonne is a highly capable female character in the comics. It's hoped that she will appear in the T.V. show earlier than she did in the comics
 * Andrea at least has started training with her gun, and went with Shane to look for Sophia...though it's fortunate she's not too good a shot, or she would have straight-up killed Daryl. No excuse for Lori, though, especially since she's married to a cop. Given how psychologically fucked-up Carol was by her abusive marriage, she kind of gets a pass for now, though I wouldn't be surprised if she starts picking up a weapon now that.
 * And "Triggerfinger" proves they're not entirely useless. Lori manages to take out a handful of Walkers and survive for several hours, alone, while injured from a car accident, and using improvised weaponry.
 * Mitigated by the fact that she's a Southern cop's wife and she still doesn't know not to look down the barrel of a gun...
 * Well, apparently she does know how to use a gun. She is able to sucessfully gun down some Walkers in "Beside the Dying Fire" when the barn is being overwelmed. Lori is perfectly capable of firing a gun. She just chooses not to.
 * Actually, keeping your potentially childbearing women safe in a post-Zombie Apocalypse world is completely useless unless you have an extremely well fortified home. A pregnant woman is a resource drain which slows down the rest of the survivors, and the child she carries really wouldn't be a benefit until after at least a decade.
 * To be fair on this whole thing, somebody does need to do chores like cooking and cleaning because, well, diseases. Being a hardened badass is pointless if nobody is keeping the place sanitary. It would make sense that Lori and Carol would take on these roles because they were probably ordinary housewives before the whole thing started and would therefore already know what they're doing in these departments. The handful of times we see Lori and Carol attacked by the walkers, Lori can handle herself fairly well. Carol can't, although she probably hasn't sought training.
 * In the first episode Morgan points out that anytime the car out front is bumped the alarm goes off and the noise attracts more Walkers, especially at night. Why didn't he and Duane go out and disconnect the battery during the day when all the Walkers wandered off?
 * They might not have known how. Tampering with a car battery without knowing what you're doing is a good way to electrocute yourself.
 * No. You might get a painful shock, but car batteries aren't all that complicated.
 * More specifically, it's pretty hard to get under the hood of an alarmed car without setting off the alarm. And then you've got problems.
 * Setting off the alarm wouldn't be a problem so much if they could work fast. Once the alarm is going off they can disable it any way they want, or at least pop the hood then run so they can snip the wires the next time the coast is clear.
 * In the episode "Guts" the group of survivors in Atlanta includes Glenn, Morales, T-Dog, Jacquie, Andrea and Merle. Given that Merle is a racist and a sexist individual can anybody explain why he would be included in a group made up almost entirely of non-white individuals?
 * Merle is a veteran and an experienced gunhand, but he still needs backup, so both sides consider it a marriage of convenience.
 * Merle is a veteran and an experienced gunhand, but he still needs backup, so both sides consider it a marriage of convenience.