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Fear the Walking Dead II: The Apocalypse of Social Issues


Corvinus85

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Just to be completely clear, are there really people flipping their lids because a single solitary character happens to be anti-gun?  

I wouldn't go that far. Right now some people, and I am one of them, don't give said character lots of chances to make it in the long run.

Travis, right now, is mostly being compared with Dale and Hershel. But who knows, he could be a male Carol.

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I think there's more than meats the eye there.  His line to his son, "I've had my nose broken a million times."  His whole, "nature always wins" lecture in the first episode.  I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Travis is a reformed gangbanger or was a very violent youth and has his reasons for not wanting to be around guns.  

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I think his stance on guns in the last episode seemed to be a little unrealistic in the circumstances. I think even fairly anti-gun people like me would be a bit more flexible under those conditions. I agree that I think Travis' backstory isn't likely to be all PC liberal sunshine and rainbows.

 

The last thread ended with people going overboard on personal politics and I hope we can avoid it for this thread. I prefer to stick to discussing whether character actions / reactions feel realistic under the circumstances, in the context of what we know about the nature of the character. The show has established Travis' personal philosophy on certain things, which is good to know. But the question is was it well done from a writing perspective. I think Travis' comment to his son about guns felt a bit contrived. Even if you consider the army rolling up and taking out the "sick" people buy shooting them in the head could be interpreted by characters as "ZA probably averted" (noting that they don't really know these people are zombies), it would surely still be alarming to everyone that the army is sweeping suburban neighbourhoods and shooting "sick" people in the head, and dragging off people who have been exposed to "sick" people. It seems like the ideal time for an anti-gun person to decide that guns now have a place in every home, at least on a temporary basis until things get back to normal, which we know it won't, but they don't know that. 

 

I don't see where the Dale / Herschel comparisons are coming from... err what's the spoiler policy here on the original series?...aside from that fact that Travis seems to want to retain some humanity. And in the context of the hammer scene, not having to be forced to bash in the skull of a close colleague the previous day, and the family seeming to not communicate their experiences of the last 48 hours very well, Travis has no reason to believe the neighbour's condition isn't amenable to treatment. So being not an immediate threat, it seems like taking a hammer to a formerly beloved neighbour's skull might be an over-reaction. If the show is being realistic about human emotion I don't think it can have people easily flip a switch and just be all fine with taking out the walkers and seeing these things that look like people walking around as being nothing but animated rotten meat bags. For a while at least there has to be some hesitation, some reluctance and some emotional trauma about re-killing these things. The trick will be to not drag that change in attitude to re-kill on instinct too long.

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I think his stance on guns in the last episode seemed to be a little unrealistic in the circumstances. I think even fairly anti-gun people like me would be a bit more flexible under those conditions. I agree that I think Travis' backstory isn't likely to be all PC liberal sunshine and rainbows.

 

 

While it's been three episodes, it's only been like 24 hours in the story.  He's seen some wicked crazy things but it's barely been a day, so I think it's feasible that he wouldn't be willing to throw away any strongly-held personal beliefs.  There's still hope that things will be figured out, that it's a temporary problem, so there's no need for his son to learn how to use that gun.   

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I had no problem with his actions in the hammer scene. In fact, I had a problem with Madison's actions there. They have no way of knowing yet whether the condition is curable, so putting people down out of mercy, this early in the outbreak feels a bit weird.

Rick's group didn't find out that it is incurable until they met with Jenner at the CDC. So Madison seemed to reach that conclusion awfully quickly.
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I had no problem with his actions in the hammer scene. In fact, I had a problem with Madison's actions there. They have no way of knowing yet whether the condition is curable, so putting people down out of mercy, this early in the outbreak feels a bit weird.

Rick's group didn't find out that it is incurable until they met with Jenner at the CDC. So Madison seemed to reach that conclusion awfully quickly.

 

I think at this point it's less out of mercy and more because of how dangerous they've already shown themselves to be. I never really got the whole 'mercy' thing, anyway - maybe being a zombie is awesome. At the very least they don't seem to feel pain. I remember in one of those Romero movies John Leguizamo's character gets bitten, and his friend asks him if he wants to be shot. He says 'No, I've always wanted to see how the other half lives' or something like that.  I bet there'd be some people with that attitude.

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  • 4 months later...

So, thinking of trying this, the premise intrigues me, seeing how the world is and deals with an actual outbreak.

 

More interesting to me than the constant and full on zombie hacking from the Walking Dead series which I gave up on in season 2.

What did you guys make of these 6 episodes?

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10 minutes ago, Calibandar said:

So, thinking of trying this, the premise intrigues me, seeing how the world is and deals with an actual outbreak.

 

More interesting to me than the constant and full on zombie hacking from the Walking Dead series which I gave up on in season 2.

What did you guys make of these 6 episodes?

I thought it was pretty poor which is a shame as I had similar expectations to your own. It suffers from suggesting people just stumble into it like sheep. Which is sadly quite possible but not thrilling TV. A character pops up in the last 2 episodes where you think "please let this person hang around, he seems like a guy where things happen".

I might watch the second season as a binge but it will probably require a lot of people on the thread (whose tastes I trust) commenting on how much better it is.

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4 hours ago, Calibandar said:

the premise intrigues me, seeing how the world is and deals with an actual outbreak.

This is not the show you are looking for.

 

Very general spoilers about the direction and focus of the show with no mention of the fates or actions of any characters:

Seriously.  FtWD billed itself as that show, and even starts off being that show, but then for utterly inexplicable reasons takes a giant leap forward to some time after the outbreak and subsequent breakdown of society.  It then picks up after the jump forward from the pov of a small community of survivors who have been almost completely sequestered from the mayhem of the ZA.  Our group in S2 ought to be at about exactly the same level of discovery and adjustment as the original group from tWD was at the start of that show.

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Well, I don't mean to pan the show too harshly.  It's just not what I was expecting, based on what I felt I was led to believe the focus of the show would be.  I too was hoping for a more in depth look at the incremental unfolding of events on a citywide scale.  And there are a few glimpses here and there of a growing awareness by the societal infrastructure that something very unusual is happening.  But really its just background for the much more personal focus on the family group pov.

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8 hours ago, Calibandar said:

In World War Z, the actual first outbreak was definitely one of the best and most memorable parts.

Have your read the book? It has a lot of what you're looking for and the movie adapted it only very loosely. 

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On 13.2.2016 at 9:26 PM, Calibandar said:

So, thinking of trying this, the premise intrigues me, seeing how the world is and deals with an actual outbreak.

 

More interesting to me than the constant and full on zombie hacking from the Walking Dead series which I gave up on in season 2.

What did you guys make of these 6 episodes?

Aw, you missed the Governor.

I thought they were okay, a little worse than the original series but it got fun in the later episodes.

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  • 1 month later...

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