AMC's "The Walking Dead"

[Lj.]

Loved this weeks past episodes, but like most, I don't like the fact that we have to wait till February to see the next episode. I just hope people's interest in the show doesn't fade while months pass. On a side note, there's a preview for episode 8 up, but for some reason I can't get it to work. Anyone else having trouble watching the video?

[GoGo Yubari]

It didn't exactly fade over the course of the year it was gone for, so I doubt it will. I would have brought it back in January, though.

[thatblindgeye]

With the cliffhanger it left viewers on, Im sure people will remember to start watching again come February. At the very least, the ads and word of mouth will also be enough of a reminder.

[Johnny Latino Heat]

This episode was brilliant. I really wasn't expecting Sophia to be in the barn, and like someone already said, I thought it was going to be Hershel's wife that came out last only for Hershel to go ballistic trying to defend her. Sophia being in the barn shocked me, and I loved the group's inability to do anything. Even Shane, who was all badass before, was shown to be truly shaken.

Regarding Shane... I really don't know what to think of him. He acts like a bastard, but he does so for the good of the group. Even when he shot Otis, it was to save Carl's life, and he was shown to be having trouble dealing with it. Was I the only one who thought that he was going to kill Dale?

All in all, like I said, pure brilliance in this episode, and I'm loving the way Shane's character is advancing. February can't come soon enough.

[Trench]

This episode was brilliant. I really wasn't expecting Sophia to be in the barn, and like someone already said, I thought it was going to be Hershel's wife that came out last only for Hershel to go ballistic trying to defend her. Sophia being in the barn shocked me, and I loved the group's inability to do anything. Even Shane, who was all badass before, was shown to be truly shaken.

Regarding Shane... I really don't know what to think of him. He acts like a bastard, but he does so for the good of the group. Even when he shot Otis, it was to save Carl's life, and he was shown to be having trouble dealing with it. Was I the only one who thought that he was going to kill Dale?

All in all, like I said, pure brilliance in this episode, and I'm loving the way Shane's character is advancing. February can't come soon enough.

I thought he was going to kill Dale also. And Shane is not acting for what is good for the group, he is acting on what is good for Lori and Carl. He told Lori he would do anything to make sure she was okay and when he found out she was pregnant, he went straight for the barn and stopped waiting. I think Shane would kill anyone in the group if it was for the benefit of Lori and/or Carl.

[Kazuka]

Shane isn't hated because he's BAD, he's hated because he's RIGHT, in my opinion. Nobody likes to see his way of doing things because he's not trying to SAVE people, he's trying to SURVIVE. It makes his actions detestable, but in the end, what he's doing is the logical course of action and it's that lack of emotional empathy that makes all his edgier actions so off-putting. It also makes him an amazingly compelling character.

As for the ending. I wasn't expecting much from it, but as it came to a close, I ended up being absolutely in awe. It was a moment where the series went from "Just Good" to undoubtedly Awesome.

Edited December 1, 2011 by Ekiyashi

[GoGo Yubari]

In unsurprising news, Norman Reedus is awesome. Bold on my favorite parts.

On the talk-heavy nature of the first half of season two;

I can say that in the second half, after this hiatus, people are done talking. It's all kind of firecrackers from here on out. It gets more action packed. The first part of the season, it gets slow when people have to talk. That's just how it works. I think the writers have done such a great job with setting up storylines and explaining them when they need to be explained, not over talking it and not over thinking it. There are certain things that need to be said to keep the story moving and I think they've done a good job with it. I know when people watch the show they go, ‘More zombies. More death.' But you have to do a bit of talking. Otherwise it's ‘Transformers.'

On Daryl and Carol's relationship;

We do have a sort of special bond, and it's not so much romantic as I think it's damaged people hanging out with damaged people. They sort of gravitate towards each other. I even find that more interesting. We were talking about how we should do a spin off called ‘Daryl & Carol' where we live in Central Park and there would be a still in the woods in Central Park and she'd be knitting blankets on a bench and people would walk up and go, ‘Do you know where the Statue of Liberty is?' ‘Fuck you! What are you looking at?' We had a theme song that goes, [singing] ‘Carol is feral and Daryl feral, a match made in hell.' You never know. As far as a romantic thing, I have no idea if that's in the works. I think it's almost more interesting that it doesn't happen, to be honest.

He needs to be on the show forever.

[Jimmy]

Fantastic mid season finale, this season has been consistantly good with each epsiode getting better in my opinion. Called Sophia being in the barn about a minute before it happened but it still had the same amount of shock factor on me. The end was brilliant. I can't wait for it to return in Feb, they've done a great job. Totally agreed on that Shane's been written wonderfully - a real interesting character.

[Herr Matzat]

New comic out today.

[VerbalPuke]

I just watched the first two seasons in the last two days and I think this might be my favorite show now. I can't wait for February to see where they continue to go with this. Daryl is definitely my favorite character, seeing him as a uncouth redneck prick at first, but then showing his compassionate side while looking for Sophia was great. On top of that, he has a fucking cross bow, he's great.

[TGC]

I got this from AICN, where they link to a video from Sam Witwer, who played the tank corpse in S1 of TWD, uncredited, and he describes this alternate S2 opener. Nordling at AICN asked Darabont about this, and he replied with the following:

Dear Eric,

Sure, I'll confirm that storyline. Why not? Big caveat here though: CraveOnline is much mistaken in saying this was for a "web series." This was never meant as a web gimmick, this was intended for use in the actual TV series. I wanted to kick off the 2nd season with the flashback episode Sam describes, which would have followed a squad of Army Rangers getting trapped in the city and trying to survive as Atlanta falls.

The idea was to do this with a very focused "you are there" documentary feel. Not going all shaky-cam, but still making it a bit rawer and grainier than the rest of the show. We'd start with a squad of maybe seven or eight soldiers being dropped into the city by chopper. They have map coordinates they need to get to; they've been told to report to a certain place to provide reinforcement. It's not a special mission, it's basically a housekeeping measure putting more boots on the ground to reinforce key intersections and installations throughout the city. And we follow this group from the moment the copter sets them down. All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from "the city is being secured" to "holy shit, we've lost control, the world is ending." Our squad gets blocked at every turn and are soon just trying to survive. I wanted to do a really tense, character-driven ensemble story as communications break down, supply lines are lost, escape routes are cut off, morale falls apart, leadership unravels, mutinies heat up, etc. (Yes, this approach owes a spiritual debt to a number of great films, including Walter Hill's Southern Comfort.)

Along the way, I thought we could briefly dovetail this story with a few established characters from the show. Not to overdo that, mind you, because it could get silly and too coincidental if you load too much into that idea. But I thought it would be great to veer off on a quick narrative detour that brushes our soldiers briefly up against some people we know. Picture our squad arriving at a manned barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city on shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it's a panicked high-intensity scene, and in this crowd of desperate people we find Andrea and Amy. The barricade gunners panic, the civilians start to get mowed down by machine gun fire, and in this melee the girls get pulled to safety by some old guy they don't even know. It's Dale. He's nobody to them, just some guy who saw the opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment. This would have been perhaps a minute or two of the episode, just a cool detour like the various outposts the soldiers encounter in Saving Private Ryan, but we would have witnessed the moment that Dale meets Andrea and Amy, seen where that relationship began. I also felt it would be a great way to get Emma Bell back into the series for a moment, because she was so wonderful and we were all so sorry that her character died and she had to leave the show. (Of course if this "brush with established characters" idea didn't work in the script stage, I'd have tossed it out. You try a lot of ideas like that as you go, see how they play. But I thought this one stood a pretty good chance of being engineered to work well.)

So the story follows these soldiers through hell as the city falls apart and the squad implodes, with Sam's soldier being the main character and the moral center of the group. He becomes the last survivor of the squad, and he finally gets to the map coordinates they've been trying to get to from the start: it's the barricade at the Atlanta courthouse intersection from the pilot where Rick later finds the tank. The soldier is still alive when he gets there, but he's been bitten. He's accomplished his "simple" mission, but he's gone through seven kinds of hell to do it (including being forced to frag his squad leader), and now he's dying. And he crawls off into the tank just to get off the street and under cover. As his fever builds and the poor guy starts to hallucinate, he pulls his last grenade and considers ending his life. He sets the grenade down on that shelf for a moment to reflect on all the shit and misery that brought him to this sad end-point of his life, and to dredge up the courage to pull the pin...but before he can act, the fever burns him out and he dies. 



After the soldier dies this squalid, lonely death...and after a quiet lapse of time...we do a shot-for-shot reprise from the first episode of the first season: Rick comes scrambling into the tank to escape the horde...blows that zombie soldier's brains out...now Rick's trapped...fade out...the end.

The notion was to take the "throwaway" tank zombie Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier's story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his journey, but don't reveal who he is until the end. The idea being that every zombie has a story, every undead extra was once a human being with a life of his/her own...was, in a sense, the star of his own life's movie. And we've followed this one particular guy and seen how his life ended; we witness his struggles, see his good intentions and his failures, and we experience his godawful death in this tank. That's why I cast Sam as that tank zombie in the first place instead of just casting some extra. I had this story in mind while filming the pilot, and I knew I'd need a superb actor to play that soldier when the time came.

And then starting with Episode 202, we'd be back with Rick's group and back in step with the flow of the established story from last season.

I always had in mind to throw in a "wild-card" episode every season, maybe as a season opener or closer. Just a separate story more in the feel of an anthology series, one that appears completely off the track of the regular series but actually does wind up tying in somehow by the fade-out. They did that sort of thing on LOST on occasion, and I really respected it. It always seemed like a bold choice that trusted the audience and rewarded their loyalty with a totally unexpected surprise episode every so often.

That's it from me. I hope things are well on your end.

Best,

Frank

The whole thing can be found here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/52526

[Summers]

That would have been absolutely fantastic.

[Herr Matzat]

The wait is almost over! The Walking Dead returns Sunday, Feb 12, but you can catch a sneak peek tonight, during the Hell On Wheels finale at 10/9c! Be sure to check out Hell On Wheels' page for your chance to win an AMC prize pack!

From AMCs Facebook.

[TGC]

AMC announced over the weekend that Season 3 of The Walking Dead will consist of 16 episodes, an increase from this season's 13. The first season of the hit drama, based on the long-running Image Comic series by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, contained just six episodes. Like the current season, which returns Feb. 12, Season 3 will be split,

Zap2it reports. The show will also add two new writers: Nichole Beattie (Rubicon, John from Cincinnati) and Sang Kim (Crash, Hawthorne).

[GoGo Yubari]

Kind of excited about a Rubicon writer coming on. They did character-building very well on that show.

... man. I miss Rubicon. I would trade all of The Killing and all of Hell on Wheels for a second season of Rubicon in a heartbeat.

[TGC]

Kind of excited about a Rubicon writer coming on. They did character-building very well on that show.

That reminds me...I never did finish Rubicon and still want to but I have a rule that I never finish a series I know has been cancelled and ended with a cliffhanger. So can I finish Rubicon or will it just piss me off with a cliffhanger?

[thatshortguy]

That reminds me...I never did finish Rubicon and still want to but I have a rule that I never finish a series I know has been cancelled and ended with a cliffhanger. So can I finish Rubicon or will it just piss me off with a cliffhanger?

If you're like me, it'll piss you off for a completely different reason. Consider this fair warning.

[GoGo Yubari]

Kind of excited about a Rubicon writer coming on. They did character-building very well on that show.

That reminds me...I never did finish Rubicon and still want to but I have a rule that I never finish a series I know has been cancelled and ended with a cliffhanger. So can I finish Rubicon or will it just piss me off with a cliffhanger?

Regrettably, it will sort of piss you off with a cliffhanger. Which is a pity because it turns into such a good show, and their payoff for one of the big terrorist conspiracy plots is brilliantly done. If you never watched the lie detector test episode, though, you should watch that even still. I believe it was written by the same person who did the lie detector test episode of Homeland.

[TGC]

I am pretty sure that was the last episode I saw.

And now I am wondering what Midget meant.

[thatshortguy]

I am pretty sure that was the last episode I saw.

And now I am wondering what Midget meant.

I don't want to spoil anything, but I both respect and loathe how the show ends.