The Walking Dead 2.11 - Judge, Jury, Executioner (spoilers)

Dannyalcatraz · Mar 7, 2012

1) I reiterate, there's only a dozen of them - "full time babysitter" is not an available job description yet.

And yet nuclear families & single parents manage to do better...

It's not about full-time babysiter, it's about him being given age-appropriate tasks that keep him busy and in LoS. It's about recognizing he needs to grow up a bit faster than a city kid Pre-ZA.

It's about letting him have some space, but also being a nag by reminding him (and his still-developing brain) about the dangers of wandering off because there are Walkers about...and maybe even arming him because there AREN'T armed adults all over. Kids have basically learned to heed warnings about wolves and lions throughout history, but the warnings need to be delivered. Repeatedly.

Its about teaching him basics of gun handling. I don't know anybody with an NRA card and kids his age who hasn't taught them something about playing with guns...and those in law enforcement seem to start earlier than most.

Umbran · Mar 7, 2012

Dannyalcatraz said:
And yet nuclear families & single parents manage to do better...

When working within the social structures they started in, yes. Well, when the parents are psychologically sound...

Let me put it this way: It is reasonable to assume that every person on the show is suffering from PTSD the likes of which humans have rarely seen.

In the real world, we send men and women trained to handle violent scenarios to war, and a significant number of them come back broken, some of them so badly that they become violent, others such that they need support and counseling to remain a functioning member of society. And these are people who at least knew that, in the end, they'd be able to return home.

The folks on Walking Dead don't have the training, they don't have that hope of home, there is no support structure, and they had pretty much every other person on Earth turned into implacable monsters that want to eat them. Daryl, the person who was arguably the best prepared for this new world, has experienced outright hallucinations under stress. Several of the folks we have seen have attempted suicide when faced with what has happened.

You want to continue thinking of them as if they should be acting in sane and rational manners, or do you want to consider them as folks who are hanging on to sanity with their fingernails, for whom sane consideration itself is an accomplishment?

This is my problem with the "armchair ZA survivalists". Everyone's talking as if people should be (and they themselves would be) immune to the psychological trauma that accompanies violent change. I find that implausible.

If the show took place, say, 5 years after the ZA, I'd agree with you. Anyone who didn't get back to rationality after a while would likely have died before 5 years had passed. But we are still just a few months post-ZA. Recovery takes time.

Umbran · Mar 7, 2012

Hand of Evil said:
See them safer than a corn field that the dead can come in and out of at will. You could do kiddy pools of potting soil, etc.

I do square-foot gardening as a hobby. I use raised beds, for which I periodically have to cart in new soil. Each bed is 4'x'4'x6", so 8 cubic feet.

Topsoil (depending on water content, and all) is about 78 pounds per square foot. For four such beds, I wind up carting about 2500 pounds of dirt. One and a quarter tons just for hobby gardening, which yields enough to so that my wife and I have some really fresh veggies in-season. My garden does not produce enough to get into serious storage and canning.

You want them to tote around enough dirt to support a dozen people year-round? Ugh!

The problem is they have wasted a lot of time, they should be out there looking for goods to harvest, empting homes of can goods, know where the local Wal-Mart is. Finding a gun shop for equipment to do your own ammo. The group is not planning at all, they are living day-by-day without thought.

I think that's demonstrably incorrect. Think back, and you'll find they've been planning, but the plans don't pan out.

They started with a permanent encampment, and were doing okay, and intended to stay. But, that camp got overrun. Seeing that they were too few to reliably defend a camp, they tried to hook up with civilization, heading for the CDc. That was a bust. They try then for a military base - they came on the farm due to accident, and have recently found out the military base was also a bust.

On the farm, there's food production, there are local people who already know where to raid and scrounge. Unfortunately, the ZA seems to have happened after spring planting, and it is only now getting to harvest time.

I would be in an outfit like a fireman suit everytime I went out because I know it is like armor to bite and claw attacks.

In high summer in Georgia? Yeah, that's a good plan.

NewJeffCT · Mar 7, 2012

Umbran said:
This is my problem with the "armchair ZA survivalists". Everyone's talking as if people should be (and they themselves would be) immune to the psychological trauma that accompanies violent change. I find that implausible.

If the show took place, say, 5 years after the ZA, I'd agree with you. Anyone who didn't get back to rationality after a while would likely have died before 5 years had passed. But we are still just a few months post-ZA. Recovery takes time.

Good point Umbran

2 days before Halloween this year, Connecticut and some other Northeast states were hit with a freak blizzard. Because the trees still had leaves on them, the heavy snow snapped thousands of branches and trees. A good portion of Connecticut went dark - a lot of people were without power for a week, and some for even more than that.

In this scenario of being without power for a week, people were getting into fights over gasoline, sitting in gas lines for upwards of an hour (when they could have driven 20-30 minutes out of the city to a place with power and filled up with no line like I did), the places that were open were swamped with people, who hovered over every available power outlet so they could recharge phones, laptops, iPads, etc. People called in threats to the power company, the CEO of the power company became the most hated man in the state, etc, etc. It was pretty ugly - and, that was without flesh eating zombies roaming about.

Remus Lupin · Mar 7, 2012

NewJeffCT said:
Good point Umbran

2 days before Halloween this year, Connecticut and some other Northeast states were hit with a freak blizzard. Because the trees still had leaves on them, the heavy snow snapped thousands of branches and trees. A good portion of Connecticut went dark - a lot of people were without power for a week, and some for even more than that.

In this scenario of being without power for a week, people were getting into fights over gasoline, sitting in gas lines for upwards of an hour (when they could have driven 20-30 minutes out of the city to a place with power and filled up with no line like I did), the places that were open were swamped with people, who hovered over every available power outlet so they could recharge phones, laptops, iPads, etc. People called in threats to the power company, the CEO of the power company became the most hated man in the state, etc, etc. It was pretty ugly - and, that was without flesh eating zombies roaming about.

My family lives in Connecticut. I could swear I remember reports of flesh eating zombies! Ah well.

Dannyalcatraz · Mar 7, 2012

When working within the social structures they started in, yes. Well, when the parents are psychologically sound...

Let me put it this way: It is reasonable to assume that every person on the show is suffering from PTSD the likes of which humans have rarely seen.

I agree and disagree.

Yeah, the entire group is reeling and still finding their feet. They will make stupid moves.

But the nature of the stupid moves re: Carl's supervision I think are a tad unrealistic. Even within modern society, parents of today take extreme reactions to the dangers of the day, as mentioned, restricting unsupervised play in dangerous areas even when the anger is far more speculative. Kids in a gang infested neighborhood simply don't have the privilege of wandering off without warnings & admonitions...and there is no question as to the amount of PTSD in the populations of those areas.

That said, the closest thing to what they're going through would be the plight of war refugees or the victims of ethnic cleansing. And in those populations, too, parents suffering from PTSD manage to at least verbally warn their kids about the dangers of wandering off to far. Many don't let their kids wander, period.

In this series, Carl's parents vacillate between having him under lock & key and letting him be a free-range kiddo. At the very least, I'd have expected some kind of buddy system to be in effect, and not necessarily just for Carl.

(BTW, I still think this is one of the better shows on TV in some time, and my favorite treatment of ZA fiction since Shaun & 28 Days.)

TanisFrey · Mar 7, 2012

Umbran said:
When working within the social structures they started in, yes. Well, when the parents are psychologically sound...

Let me put it this way: It is reasonable to assume that every person on the show is suffering from PTSD the likes of which humans have rarely seen.

In the real world, we send men and women trained to handle violent scenarios to war, and a significant number of them come back broken, some of them so badly that they become violent, others such that they need support and counseling to remain a functioning member of society. And these are people who at least knew that, in the end, they'd be able to return home.

The folks on Walking Dead don't have the training, they don't have that hope of home, there is no support structure, and they had pretty much every other person on Earth turned into implacable monsters that want to eat them. Daryl, the person who was arguably the best prepared for this new world, has experienced outright hallucinations under stress. Several of the folks we have seen have attempted suicide when faced with what has happened.

You want to continue thinking of them as if they should be acting in sane and rational manners, or do you want to consider them as folks who are hanging on to sanity with their fingernails, for whom sane consideration itself is an accomplishment?

This is my problem with the "armchair ZA survivalists". Everyone's talking as if people should be (and they themselves would be) immune to the psychological trauma that accompanies violent change. I find that implausible.

If the show took place, say, 5 years after the ZA, I'd agree with you. Anyone who didn't get back to rationality after a while would likely have died before 5 years had passed. But we are still just a few months post-ZA. Recovery takes time.

Dannyalcatraz said:
I agree and disagree.

Yeah, the entire group is reeling and still finding their feet. They will make stupid moves.

But the nature of the stupid moves re: Carl's supervision I think are a tad unrealistic. Even within modern society, parents of today take extreme reactions to the dangers of the day, as mentioned, restricting unsupervised play in dangerous areas even when the anger is far more speculative. Kids in a gang infested neighborhood simply don't have the privilege of wandering off without warnings & admonitions...and there is no question as to the amount of PTSD in the populations of those areas.

That said, the closest thing to what they're going through would be the plight of war refugees or the victims of ethnic cleansing. And in those populations, too, parents suffering from PTSD manage to at least verbally warn their kids about the dangers of wandering off to far. Many don't let their kids wander, period.

In this series, Carl's parents vacillate between having him under lock & key and letting him be a free-range kiddo. At the very least, I'd have expected some kind of buddy system to be in effect, and not necessarily just for Carl.

(BTW, I still think this is one of the better shows on TV in some time, and my favorite treatment of ZA fiction since Shaun & 28 Days.)

I remember hearing about a study of what now is PTSD from WWI and WWII done by the UK. It found that you could expect a higher % of PTSD occurring in modern societies where we are separated from death. As in we pay others to handle the dead and bury them.

During WWI, the UK controlled about 25% of the world including very primitive areas. UK soldiers from Napal suffered the least PTSD. In napal you do not preform a traditional burial under 6 feet of dirt. You are lucky in that region to grow some fruit bearing trees in the rocks. So to depose of your dead the family would preform a "sky burial". The family handed their own dead and prepared them for the burial.

None of the characters on WD has a background dealing with dead/death except Hershel. All of them should be suffering from PTSD, including the kid.

Dannyalcatraz · Mar 7, 2012

Yep, and to give the writers credit, some of the characters show some of the classic signs- depression, suicidal thoughts, excessive drinking, misplaced aggression, etc.

Kzach · Mar 7, 2012

Umbran said:
This is my problem with the "armchair ZA survivalists". Everyone's talking as if people should be (and they themselves would be) immune to the psychological trauma that accompanies violent change. I find that implausible.

Believe it. Hell, I'd release the virus myself if I had the opportunity.

Kzach · Mar 7, 2012

Umbran said:
In high summer in Georgia? Yeah, that's a good plan.

Although I think a fireman's outfit is a bit extreme, wearing biking leathers from head to toe isn't and nor is wearing a helmet or at the very least a bandana around the mouth and some glasses.

How many times have the characters come face-to-face with zombies and stabbed or slashed their way to survival and yet never had any blood spatter in their eyes or mouths? Pretty damn convenient if you ask me. Hell, Rick just had what? Four zombies pile on top of him and he shot all of them and didn't have even a drop of zombie-blood touch a mucous membrane. I call BS.

The Walking Dead 2.11 - Judge, Jury, Executioner (spoilers)

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator

Umbran

Mod Squad

Umbran

Mod Squad

NewJeffCT

First Post

Remus Lupin

Adventurer

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator

TanisFrey

First Post

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator

Kzach

Banned

Kzach

Banned

Similar Threads