Fear The Walking Dead 1x04 episode discussion...**SPOILERS WITHIN**

[Buzzbomb]

Nick was talking to Alisha, wearing a T-shirt, but when the army arrive & they are watching Grizelda being taken away, he's already got his 'old man' coat on in anticipation of being shipped off?

[slayerized]

This is what frustrated me about the 9 day time jump between episodes 3-4. They need to make up their minds. Either they go with the slow burn approach or skip 9 days worth of vital information. Clearly Daniel's reaction to an occupying military force and conforming to a concentration camp lifestyle would have been different than Travis for example. That conflict would have been nice to see. Also, if the goal was to show us the fall of society then they skipped over all that too. As Chris States in the beginning of the episode everything within a six mile radius is dead or so they're told. We literally go from an up an running society to 12 safe zones, sporadic power grid, food rations and Gestapo tactics such as whisking people's loved ones away in the middle of the night at gunpoint, and they didn't think anything in the interim was worthy enough to show? Odd. Just for the record episode four failed to show one infected (I'll stick with that being as that the term walker does not exist at this juncture) yet it's my favorite episode of the season by far. I understand the slow burn approach is a narrative choice but is some consistency too much too ask for? Don't slow burn me and make we watch people play monopoly (seriously I still can't believe they did that.) And yet skip through what was probably the most eventful 9 days of the apocalypse. Seriously, more people had to die within the first month or two of the plague than in the next 3 years combined. It would be nice to see that. I'm all for character development (I'm a GAR fan for God's sake) but isn't the other stuff important to see as well? The reason you didn't see what happened outside the gates in the "DZ" is because neither did any of the main characters. Everything up to this point (for the most part) has been from the point of few of main characters. If they didn't see it, we didn't either. Since they were stuck behind the fences pretty much in an information black-out by the military then that is basically what we see too. Had the producers fit in another episode or 2 in between it would have simply shown the characters trying to carry on as normal of a life as possible inside the camp and the occasional burning building or patrol seen from a DISTANCE (because that is how our characters are experiencing this new world so far!). Once shit hits the fan and they go over that fence we will be right there with them!

[darth los]

I agree to a point. You are probably correct in saying what they didn't see we didn't see as what was a conscious choice by the writers. However, there was plenty that they certainly would have been interesting, at least as interesting as a game of monopoly. Like how convincing them that fencing them in basically a police state went over with the individuals in the group for example. What was that internal conflict like? I don't know about you guys but you would think the fact that the U.S. military is ruling their city with an iron fist and is overriding their constitutional rights, whether if leaving was a better option would have come up. That would have been an interesting conflict. Again at least as interesting as a Board game. There are other examples that I won't go into but I'm sure you get the idea. I think my point was more it's curious in what their choosing what to and what not to show us considering the pool of plausible topics to choose from.

[MinionZombie]

Agreed with the 'if they don't see it, we don't see it' angle. IIRC Chris said in his vlog thing he was recording that they - Travis in particular - were pleased when the military rocked up and stuck up the gates (which I presume was somewhere within maybe 36 hours after the events of the first night). With the riot that had just happened, and the stuff that they had seen - including the sight of their neighbour getting his head blown off in their living room - I'd say the only reaction to a secure fence and military presence would be a great big sigh of relief. I'd say there's little juice you could really get out of that. Maybe some fires burning in the distance, the sight of the fences going up, and not much else really ... perhaps they could have had a little montage at the start of this episode instead - perhaps from Chris' video camera perspective - that then bled into the moment where he spots the flashing light in the distance. I also think that keeping the characters locked up for nine days helps in other ways - the pressure cooker, cooped-up feel, the creeping paranoia and frustration, and most importantly: the shock of seeing what the world has become in just a matter of days when they sneak out (as in Madison's case). It represents a big, fat lie that's been peddled to them. Plus, we also have to consider time and budget constraints, there's only so much money and time in the day to get the shots you'd need, and montages are notoriously difficult to shoot in comparison to normal scenes - you spend an awful lot of time setting up stuff that'll only be glimpsed - so you're doing lots of work for little screen time, which is why they're used sparingly, if at all, in smaller budget/short schedule work. We also must consider that the budget for the season is balanced in such a way that they will spend more on one episode than they do on another (e.g. look at the rioting in episodes 2 and 3 - large scale and complicated scenes filled with people, stunts, and effects), so that'd cost quite a lot. This is why we sometimes get "bottle episodes" - e.g. that one in Breaking Bad where they're both in the lab, and Walt's chasing after a fly - it's essentially two people in one location and that's it. A great episode, but also a very cheap and simple one in terms of production and budget, which helps balance out a more expensive and complicated episode earlier or later in the season. I'd rather we play catch up a little bit and move forward a few days to the realisation point, where it starts to creep into their heads, that this quarantine isn't all it's cracked up to be. If we saw too much other stuff it could easily present other, perhaps larger problems: there's only six episodes in the season, so you've got to make them count, and you've also got to think about pacing. It may have been a time jump, but it was only just over a week. Yes, stuff was happening in that week, but as has been said before, not witnessed by our central cast. I'd imagine the next episode or two will be closer together in terms of time passed - episode 5 will, I reckon, pick up straight after 1x04 as we have a very clear next step: the "hospital" and what goes on there, so there'll be no need for a time jump. Plus, there's also the possibility of flashbacks - perhaps we get to see some earlier events (e.g. in the middle of Los Angeles as it's getting evacuated) in season two. FTWD does allow them to do things a little differently from TWD, which has only used flashbacks on rare occasions (although they do "play with time" more regularly now - e.g. Morgan's appearances in Season 5, Beth in the hospital). So it's 15 episodes for Season 2, eh? Ah! Well, there's plenty of screentime to play around with.

[darth los]

Something that caught my attention. It may turn out to be a small detail or a big one, we have no way of knowing at this juncture. In episode 4 we basically have three families living in Madison's house, one of which whose native tongue is Spanish. If you bring it back to the pilot when Alicia first talks to Matt at school as he's doing his paint by numbers thing he asks her "shouldn't you be in spanish?" And continues, "you know you could probably teach that class." To which she gives a nod that seemed to indicate that he was probably right. If that is indeed the case, it's interesting that Alicia is practically fluent in spanish yet there's been no mention of it nor has it come into play despite over half the group being Hispanic if you include Liza and Chris. Perhaps that's one of the reasons that she and Ophelia have seemed to have a good rapport with each other.

[MinionZombie]

Yeah ... I'd forgotten about that. It could come into play - perhaps Alicia could overhear something in Spanish, a secret of some sort or vital piece of information, and then go and tell Madison et al.