Dark Brown Waffles

Umm…here are the problems, briefly:

1. Everybody in my living room knew that there were dead people somewhere on the farm. There had to be. It was too idyllic, too perfect, too serene. That Hershell kept alluding to things he couldn’t talk about only hinted that something somewhere was amiss. So it wasn’t entirely shocking when Maggie’s freakout about having sex in the loft with Glenn had everybody saying, very dryly, that it must have been full of walkers. (In case you’re wondering if they’re going to explain why these zombies don’t consume one another while the zombies in the woods ate the hanging zombies legs, don’t bother. Because they’re not. That was just another opportunity for the special effects guys to masturbate in front of all of us. It wasn’t actually applicable to the story itself.)

2. The same was true of Lori’s pregnancy, confirmed late in last week’s episode and mentioned again in tonight’s. Everybody knew she was knocked up, because why wouldn’t she be after her husband had been in a coma for an indeterminate amount of time. And just because Glenn and Maggie were smart enough to use condoms doesn’t mean that Shane and Lori were capable of making the same smart decision.

3. That the group has no plan of what to do when walkers appear on the horizon, even single, solitary shamblers. In this case, the walker was actually Daryl, on his way back from trying to find the missing girl Sophia. At a distance and injured, he looked like a zombie and despite being surrounded by four men capable of easily killing a single walker, Andrea decided to prove her worth by nearly killing him with a sniper’s bullet. Because the group has no plan of what to do if zombies appear. They apparently haven’t even discussed it. Not only that; their only concern appears to be the place that Daryl entered the scene, despite the fact that they’re surrounded on all sides by woods and the possibilities of the horde zombies they introduced in the first episode. 

4. Speaking of not planning, the very opening of the episode reveals life during the midst of the outbreak, life that involved human beings being trapped together on a road somewhere near Atlanta. Forget the big reveal at the end (helicopter gunships approaching the city and firing wildly at something) and instead focus on this: why didn’t the characters on that road come to learn that traveling by popular main roads was difficult to downright impossible? At the very beginning of this season, the survivors don’t seem to account for this coming challenge at all, despite having collectively lived it only a few shorts days (or weeks) ago. Seriously? We’re supposed to seriously believe that after leaving the CDC, nobody said something like, “Hey, remember when were on the highways a few days ago and they were packed with people and travel was practically impossible?” The answer to that, in case you’re wondering, is no. Nobody said that. (Nor did anybody have the common sense to get lighter, easier to maneuver vehicles that would be more manageable. Which is why they’re still hauling a goddamned RV around.)

5. Me watching this show. It’d be reasonable to say, “Why do you keep doing this?” and the answer is, “Because I keep hoping it gets better. We’re technically not even through an entire season’s worth of episodes yet. Tonight’s represented only episode 11 of the entire show. Two more and it’ll be over for the time being and at that point, I’ll have to seriously re-evaluate unless it shows some signs of, dare I say it, life.