Lets Talk About The Walking Dead Pt. 2

The Walking Dead extra long premiere episode covered about 35 pages of the already short comic book, I was really hoping that the series would pick up the pace of the show and cover about a book an episode. Its now very clear that won't happen. Episode 2, "Guts" is more or less a throw away episode. It covers almost nothing that happened in the book and introduces a bunch of new survivors that I could really care less about.

Just sayin, for being in a zombie apocalypse those are some nice jeans.

The episode starts with Glenn helping Rick escape from downtown Atlanta. While Rick is running. he is also shooting his gun at pretty much everything that moves. Alerting everyone in a few mile range. Rick makes it to the roof tops and meets a group of survivors. May I first point out that this whole encounter did not happen in the books; half of these survivors are not in the book; and I'm glad they were left out of the books. T-Dog? For real? That's what your going to call your black character? Come on Walking Dead, you can do better than that.

It becomes clear that Rick's gunfire has drawn a lot of infected to the building that the survivors were staying, trapping them in the building they are in. While trying to find a way out it becomes clear that one of the survivors is a hardcore racist who starts bashing on T-Dog, god I hate even writing that name, Rick sucker punched the him and handcuffed him to a pipe on the roof. He is left up there while the others look for a way to escape. Of course someone needs to keep watch on the racist, better leave the black guy. For real? Your going to leave the black guy to watch the racist? It seems like the only reason this was done was to create more tension between these two characters. It might have worked, maybe even could have been cool, if the acting and dialog wasn't so bad! This is my favorite example of this guys horrible dialog.

"Hey baby doll, how bout you get me the key to these cuffs and we go bump uglies?"

I wish this wasn't a school project so I could post some of the stupid racist stuff he said, this guy should be a meme.

Meanwhile with the other survivors came up with the plan that they will steal a moving van that is parked out side the building they are in at drive back to the camp they have outside of Atlanta. The van is parked quite far away so they decided that if they cover them self's in chopped up pieces of the dead they won't notice. This is something that happens, but way later in the book, and instead of going to get a van they are going back for the guns Rick dropped earlier. All covered in guts and feet they head out towards the van. Not even 50 feet into the walk it starts to rain and wash the smell off of them. Of course right? It's got to start raining right when they leave, Rick and Glenn begin to sprint towards the van that conveniently has the keys still in the ignition and drive off.

With all the infected around Rick and Glenn decide that they need a good destruction to get the others into the van. This is when the writers bring in my all time most hated cliche, driving the sports car through the abandon city. Why does this always happen? I've been to Atlanta. There is not a mustang parked on every street. Did they find the mustang in Atlanta? Well good job to them. They steal and hot wire the car with the alarm still going off and proceed to drive around Atlanta as a distraction. I'm not even going to to tell you if that was in the books or not. Take a guess. I'll give you a clue. Its not in the books.

Always gotta be a sports car scene.

Rick pulls the van up to the building and the survivors all jump in. This is the worst part of the episode, maybe even the whole series. As T-Dog is leaving Dixson, the racist, starts yelling that he can't leave him up on the roof to die, its just not right. T-Dog turns back to give him the key but in the process trips and the key falls down the smallest hole possible. This scene was also slowed down to increase the dramatic effect. Instead it just came off as cheesy and bad.

It's things like this that make me hate this show.

Like I said in part one, I really do want to like this show. The books are so great that it seems like it would be hard to mess up the show. By barely fallowing the books, poor acting, bad dialog, cheesy effects and an incredibly slow pace AMC has managed to make this show down right terrible. It has become a chore to watch this show each night.