TWD 5x09 "What Happened and What's Going On" episode discussion... **SPOILERS WITHIN*

[Trin]

I enjoyed the episode well enough. It was a bit artsy. It had the feel of, "Look, we can do artsy." But that's not an unwelcome change, now and then. And it was done well enough. I enjoyed how Tyreese was seeing the girls and Beth telling him it was okay while the ex-villains were reinforcing his feelings of failure. His ending vision was oddly comforting with his most beloved ex-survivors in the SUV with him. As to how Tyreese got into that mess ... I'm not buying any of the proposed arguments. They weren't dehydrated, underfed, or tired. They had a solid plan for approaching and assessing the place. They took down the walkers with relative ease upon entering. They showed no signs of mental or physical degradation. There's no reason it goes down that way. They saw the place was a mess. They had no idea what happened, or if residual danger was lurking (zombie or otherwise). They split up and left Noah broken down in the middle of the street with only Tyreese to watch over him. That is like pulling into your garage and seeing your house has been broken into and deciding to go have a look around before calling the police, leaving your wife and kids in the car. And ... assuming your house is broken into every month and the robbers are ALWAYS still there, and you've lost several former wives and children to them.

[MinionZombie]

As for the gated community. Do you think the guys who hit it were the same guys who hit the country club? Remember that one corpse in the country club who had her arms and legs cut off and put on a table, with the "rich bitch" sign? It could be a trademark way of killing something a serial killer would do, or an army of serial killers.. In any case I hope they dont do a rich vs poor angle with the wolves being the poor. I doubt it. The country club was it's own little thing where the staff wiped out the rich club members after they all holed up there.

[Wyldwraith]

@Trin: I completely agree with you. I just conceded the possibility of those factors to their proponents to avoid getting bogged down in debating the relative physical health of Team Rick, when that wasn't relevant to the point I was making. Personally (going to spoiler-tag just because this is the thread from the first episode)   Seeing Team Rick suddenly staggering down the road, so weak they're overbalancing and almost falling while trying to shove Walkers around struck me as a bit absurd. As for the dehydration factor, with the others going off in the woods looking for streams/creeks etc....I have PERSONALLY marched over large sections of Georgia and southern Virginia, mostly while looking for feral pigs to blast away at, in some REALLY unforgiving brush. One thing I can tell you, in undeveloped areas of both states (by "undeveloped" I mean nothing built in the area but the road(s) running through it) you'd be hard-pressed to go twenty miles without finding a decent-sized creek, middling-sized stream, or one of the COUNTLESS watershed-assisting pond-lakes created by the Forestry Service. The notion that DARYL of all people can't find a decent water-source is UTTERLY LAUGHABLE. The ONLY, and I do mean ONLY reason for them to be striking out on water is if the streams/creeks/ponds they ARE finding are visibly contaminated by dead bodies lying in them. Even that, if you want to get technical wouldn't render the water unusable, since boiling will kill damned near any form of nastiness you could find in water, but I'll concede that from a psychological perspective the survivors might not be able (at least at this point) to bring themselves to drink from such "contaminated" sources. Of course there comes a thirst-threshhold where no amount of foulness is going to stop humans from trying to purify the water and hydrate themselves. Thirst is a HIDEOUS way to die, and honestly it could drive someone so damned crazy that before they just lay down and die of dehydration I could easily see someone sticking their face in a creek with a body lying in full view ten feet upstream and just swilling the water down. Such is the power of thirst beyond that "X-threshold" ::shrugs::

[Trencher]

I agree that Daryl or anyone else for that matter should be able to find some water in that area but I chalked that up to it being a bad location. If they had filmed it in a place where all the trees were dead and such it would have been much more believable. The ground was pretty moist for a drought to be going on lol.

[Staredge]

My issue with Tyrese's death was this: IIRC, a walker moan was what called his attention to the back room, and caused him to head that way. C'mon....you've been doing this for three years, you HEAR a walker and you don't clear the room? I get the whole confusion about the pictures (sees the dead kid on the bed, sees pictures of him on the wall......wait.....why are there two???), but YOU HEARD A WALKER!!!!!! You know there's one in there somewhere.

[MinionZombie]

The active walker is behind a closed door, so I'm assuming Tyreese thought it was in a sealed room - and not what turned out to be a room connected by (by the looks of it) a shared bathroom. He goes into the boy's room and doesn't check the place properly, he sees the kid lying on the bed all dead and messed up, and then goes straight for the pictures which got him all caught up - the active walker then comes through, but it doesn't make a sound behind him until it's right on top of him so he gets grabbed/bit just as he's turning around. They could have staged the scene better, I agree, but I'm not overly concerned either. It's been 17 days since Beth, and even though they're not outwardly exhausted to the extent we later see them, they have a vehicle in this episode which makes a big difference. Also, some might be coping better than others, and it's the emotional toll that's the key player here ... in some ways I think Tyreese wanted to die ... indeed, he chose to let go and stop fighting to survive in the car (even if he would have likely died soon after from the loss of blood). So, over the piece, a few tweaks to the staging would have been useful as well as a bit more visible exhaustion from them. However, these are also small tweaks, so it's not like the error in staging is gargantuan. They do get so many things right, it's fair to say.

[Trin]

I get what you're saying MZ, and I agree. It's a decent episode and when looked at as a staging error it's not gargantuan. I'm just disappointed that the writers put that amount of effort into being artsy and made us scratch our heads at Tyreese dropping his guard in an obvious danger situation. It's like they were so intent on the irony of Tyreese getting bitten by the zombie brother (which, I mean as brother of Noah... not brother, brother.... you get it) that they forgot to make Tyreese's actions believable. It's a nice testament to TWD that these WTF moments don't overshadow the enjoyment ... but they happen often, and when they happen it's very jarring. It can easily undermine an episode. And most of the time they are unnecessary WTF moments. As you said, with a few tweaks they'd be justified and believable. Long story short, I don't want to see TWD win the GAR award for art over substance.

[MoonSylver]

If it'd been me, I wouldn't have had brother #2 make any noise, T only sees a pic of one (or the other, or not together) when proceeding through the house, sees #1 in the bed, then sees the pic of them together, has a "Oh shit, TWINS! Where's the other one!?!" reaction, starts to turn, reveal, bit. Still plays 99% the same, but eliminates the wonky inconsistency of why he let his guard down KNOWING there was a walker in the house, & makes for a nice reveal & surprise to boot. I kinda think that's what they were going for, but didn't set it up very well?

[triste realtà]

Long story short, I don't want to see TWD win the GAR award for art over substance. TWD is very far away from being in danger of having either.

[MinionZombie]

If it'd been me, I wouldn't have had brother #2 make any noise, T only sees a pic of one (or the other, or not together) when proceeding through the house, sees #1 in the bed, then sees the pic of them together, has a "Oh shit, TWINS! Where's the other one!?!" reaction, starts to turn, reveal, bit. Still plays 99% the same, but eliminates the wonky inconsistency of why he let his guard down KNOWING there was a walker in the house, & makes for a nice reveal & surprise to boot. That would have been pretty much bang on, I think.

[Wyldwraith]

Eh, I'm not so forgiving of the "The Walker was in a (supposedly) sealed room, so Tyreese understandably relaxed his guard" reasoning. The group has had dry-rotted doors collapse inward/outward dumping Walkers onto someone or multiple people, they're VERY accustomed to "straggler Walkers" that don't come on out immediately when they do their customary banging to draw any Walkers inside out to them, and most importantly, they know the community is infested with Walkers! All of this more than suggests its unreasonable to believe that an experienced survivor would make such an elementary mistake. Yes, as I've said before, I "get it"...but just because they were shooting for an artsy send-off for Tyreese doesn't justify implausibility of an unrealistic level, at least for my tastes. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot I found very compelling about the episode...but the Tyreese walker-ambush was so jarring to my sense of disbelief it immediately jerked me out of the narrative and dropped me mentally into Critic Mode.

[Publius]

As for the dehydration factor, with the others going off in the woods looking for streams/creeks etc....I have PERSONALLY marched over large sections of Georgia and southern Virginia, mostly while looking for feral pigs to blast away at, in some REALLY unforgiving brush. One thing I can tell you, in undeveloped areas of both states (by "undeveloped" I mean nothing built in the area but the road(s) running through it) you'd be hard-pressed to go twenty miles without finding a decent-sized creek, middling-sized stream, or one of the COUNTLESS watershed-assisting pond-lakes created by the Forestry Service The notion that DARYL of all people can't find a decent water-source is UTTERLY LAUGHABLE. That's what I was thinking when I watched 5x10, too. They're supposed to be somewhere between Richmond and DC now. I live in northern Virginia, pretty close to DC. Surface water is everywhere. It's really hard to believe they can't find any, especially with the reduced demand for water from people and agriculture.

[Wyldwraith]

@Publius: Agreed. This whole lack-of-resources plot point has been stretched beyond the believable at this point, precisely because they (the writers) focused on water as the thing they're most in need of and don't have. Had they gone with food I could've bought it, but food doesn't have the immediacy that water has, causing the writers to depict an extremely wet area as some sort of wooded desert. Heck, if nothing else the group could have been cutting up Prickly Pears (or storing them for transport for that matter) to extract water from. It's so easy anyone with a blade can do it. Cut in half, wrap cloth around cut prickly pear to avoid getting any of those hair-fine spines in your hand, leave the cut end exposed and squeeze like hell. It'll take a while, but you'll get two or three (small) mouthfuls of water out of each pear-pad. Prickly pears are everywhere in the Southeastern United States. That's just one example of easily accessible water. There's simply no way the group would be punch-drunk staggering dehydrated as they've been depicted. It's a plot device that wasn't well thought out, and again has been carried near to the point of absurdity at this juncture. Edit: Also, regarding the area around Gabriel's church, I saw several palmetto thickets. If you dig down to the heart of a palmetto bush, you can dig out a few 2nd rate hearts of palm, which are both edible and contain the same sort of electrolyte-heavy water/milk as a coconut, albeit in smaller quantities. Said hearts of palm require next to no preservation, and can thus be tossed in a sack by the several dozen for a mobile reserve. Someone like Daryl, who lived in a moonshine shack for a significant period WOULD KNOW THAT.