The Walking Dead

[Kaos]

...to show that he is worthy of leading the group.  I hope Herschel goes all Goolily(sp) now and beats the shit out of Shane with that lead he was holding.

Yeah.  That's what I got out of that too.  Nobody else would step up. 

Of course they could have just unhooked that neck thing from the bitch Shane shot and put Sophia's scrawny ass back in the barn.  A lot easier to keep one walker than a dozen.  She could have been a pet.  Maybe they can be tamed.

The last five minutes last night showed some promise again. 

I just hope all the preaching and speeching can be eliminated when it comes back in February. 

[Saniflush]

Yeah gotta say that I am back to really digging it.  There has been a complete transformation in the characters.

[AUJarhead]

Yeah gotta say that I am back to really digging it.  There has been a complete transformation in the characters. I just want to do Maggie.

I wish Rick would have put a bullet in Shane at the end.

[Saniflush]

I wish Rick would have put a bullet in Shane at the end.

I wish we could see Maggie take some bullets all over here face and chest.

[Kaos]

Hmmm. 

I enjoy missing The Walking Dead more than I enjoyed watching the short first part of the second season. 

I want to know what happens, but don't want to be subjected to the long speeches to get there.

[AWK]

Hmmm. 

I enjoy missing The Walking Dead more than I enjoyed watching the short first part of the second season. 

I want to know what happens, but don't want to be subjected to the long speeches to get there.

Zombies and shit, asians have sex with farm girls, Old McDonald goes crazy, etc...

[Saniflush]

Had Frank Darabont stay aboard The Walking Dead for its second season, you might have seen a very different - or as he calls it "wild card" - first episode for the series' sophomore run.

Remember the tank zombie? Y'know, the one Rick encounters early on in season one when he seeks shelter in a tank from a horde of zombies roaming Atlanta, Georgia's streets? Darabont envisioned a whole back story for that zombie - played by Sam Witwer (The Mist, Being Human), and inside, you'll get a taste of what would have kicked off season two.


Darabont explained his concept:


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. 



The kicker comes in the last moments of this episode:


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.



He goes on to say that episode two of the second season would pick back up in the present and continue its story thread.

Stupid AMC

[Kaos]

Stupid AMC

Well damn. 

That's a shitload better than missing Sophia. 

I hope they start over again with a new writing crew that's less in love with the sound of their own words.

[Catphish Tilly]

Not to derail but if you're a fan of Walking Dead I'd also recommend: "We're Alive".  It's a podcast that began back in 2009 (I think) and is currently into it's 25th chapter.  Harkens back to the days of the old school radio drama in design- only it takes place in a modern day zombie apocalypse/survival story setting. 

While the fact it's broken down into 15-25 minute episodes (3 episodes a chapter) may seem a bit tedious, you can actually download/stream the entire story from iTunes and it's quite entertaining.   Well written in that there are no throwaway lines whether you realize it then or several episodes later.  Definitely worth a listen. 

[Kaos]

Not to derail but if you're a fan of Walking Dead I'd also recommend: "We're Alive".  It's a podcast that began back in 2009 (I think) and is currently into it's 25th chapter.  Harkens back to the days of the old school radio drama in design- only it takes place in a modern day zombie apocalypse/survival story setting. 

While the fact it's broken down into 15-25 minute episodes (3 episodes a chapter) may seem a bit tedious, you can actually download/stream the entire story from iTunes and it's quite entertaining.   Well written in that there are no throwaway lines whether you realize it then or several episodes later.  Definitely worth a listen.

Tha fuck is a listen?  are tere no pictuers?

[Vandy Vol]

Tha fuck is a listen?  are tere no pictuers?

You'll just have to imagine that the main character has nice feet.

[Kaos]

You'll just have to imagine that the main character has nice feet.

That's way overblown. 

Feet as a whole pretty much disgust me. 

A man should never expose his unless he's at the beach, actually on the sand or in the water (or in a shower or pool).  Men should never wear sandals of any sort and flip flops are for raging homos. 

Women should put theirs in the open if and only if they bother to care for them.  Nothing is more of a turnoff than dirty feet with cracked polish or god forbid hair toes or something. 

I do notice those that are particularly well cared for and shaped nicely, but I have no inclination to touch them or have them touch me in any way. 

As a followup, I also appreciate good taste in shoes.  I probably like shoes better than feet.  I always notice what kind of shoes a woman has on.  I also care about my own shoes.

I like to hoard shoes.  I have five or six pair of underarmour shoes still in the box in my closet and at least five pair that I alternate wearing.  Got a couple of Nikes I bought before Underarmour became my favorite.  They're still boxed too. If I find a dress shoe I like in black, I also buy it in brown.  I don't have a single pair of sandals or flip flops and I don't wear Crocs.   Got a couple of pair of sanuks.  Those are okay but only with certain types of outfits.

[Vandy Vol]

That's way overblown. 

Feet as a whole pretty much disgust me. 

A man should never expose his unless he's at the beach, actually on the sand or in the water (or in a shower or pool).  Men should never wear sandals of any sort and flip flops are for raging homos. 

Women should put theirs in the open if and only if they bother to care for them.  Nothing is more of a turnoff than dirty feet with cracked polish or god forbid hair toes or something. 

I do notice those that are particularly well cared for and shaped nicely, but I have no inclination to touch them or have them touch me in any way. 

As a followup, I also appreciate good taste in shoes.  I probably like shoes better than feet.  I always notice what kind of shoes a woman has on.  I also care about my own shoes.

I like to hoard shoes.  I have five or six pair of underarmour shoes still in the box in my closet and at least five pair that I alternate wearing.  Got a couple of Nikes I bought before Underarmour became my favorite.  They're still boxed too. If I find a dress shoe I like in black, I also buy it in brown.  I don't have a single pair of sandals or flip flops and I don't wear Crocs.   Got a couple of pair of sanuks.  Those are okay but only with certain types of outfits.

You've got an erection from typing that, don't you?

[wesfau2]

After avoiding it for years, and watching a documentary about Duffy and swearing to myself that I would never watch it, I got bored and watched The Boondock Saints.

Imagine my disappointment at Darryl being a McManus.

And Defoe completely selling the fuck out to be in this shitpile.  A cross-dressing super-sleuth?? Willem, you're better than that.

[Vandy Vol]

After avoiding it for years, and watching a documentary about Duffy and swearing to myself that I would never watch it, I got bored and watched The Boondock Saints.

Imagine my disappointment at Darryl being a McManus.

And Defoe completely selling the fuck out to be in this shitpile.  A cross-dressing super-sleuth?? Willem, you're better than that.

[wesfau2]

Honestly, it was the documentary about Duffy that spoiled it for me.

The movie?  Eh, not bad...not great.  Certainly not worthy of the cult following.

But Duffy?  God, what an insufferable fuck.  To paraphrase myself from another thread: Call him Entitled White Boy.

[Saniflush]

First 3 minutes of the next one....

[GH2001]

Honestly, it was the documentary about Duffy that spoiled it for me.

The movie?  Eh, not bad...not great.  Certainly not worthy of the cult following.

But Duffy?  God, what an insufferable fuck.  To paraphrase myself from another thread: Call him Entitled White Boy.

Although not GREAT, I do think it's pretty decent. In comparison to a similar movie, I found it more original than Pulp Fiction which has a shit ton more cult following than Boondock. Some people swear by Pulp Fiction and consider it a top 10 all time movie.

[AWK]

Tune in this Sunday, whores.

[Jumbo]

Tune in this Sunday, whores.

I'm taping the entire season so far, I should catch up by next weekend.