Painting Walkers in Blue Face
I may have missed something, what was the purpose of Blue Facing the Walkers?
shareSome professor is studying their "migration patterns".
I thought that might have been some bullshit though, based on the last scene, and the British woman killing the Blue Face Walker. Maybe not.
shareWhat? Is this for real? Migration patterns lol. This makes me happy I've decided to skip this. Absolute nonsense.
shareSome kind of GPS or wireless tag is the only other way I can think of to do a study of walker migration behavior. But this is ten years after the ZA. With no new satellites being launched the GPS system must be in the process of failing. Certainly there's not a lot of 5G coverage out there.
They supposedly shifted colors every so often so they could tell different groups apart. The data your observation teams could gather from recording sightings of painted walkers would be better than nothing but, yes, limited.
It's laughable this show would think that zombies suddenly would start practicing some seasonal movement as a result of an internal compass or some genetically programmed ability to navigate by the sun, the stars or the Earth's magnetic field or other land features.
There would be nothing more to a zombie's movements than "No brains here. Want brains. There is noise/light over there. Maybe brains there. Me go there".
Well you wouldn't know there aren't other influences. Herds might have a tendency to move south in the winter like birds, then north again in the summer, or be affected by magnetic fields. In the absence of attractive stimuli in the immediate area, just milling about with nothing much happening, it would only take a very subtle influence to cause "drift".
You might find (for example) that ultra low frequency sound associated with seismic activity tends to attract - or repel - walkers. If they were driven off by it, that doesn't mean you wouldn't find them in seismically active areas like southern California. Just that those areas would tend to spontaneously clear out over time if there was nothing to keep the dead around. You don't know unless you do the research. Right?
I just think it's a little far fetched a zombie would suddenly key into something like magnetic fields or low frequency sound. If live Humans can't sense it, I don't see how a zombie would with massively decimated senses. At the end of the day, they are walking corpses with limited brain capacity. Birds and other animals migrate for specific reasons. None that would apply to zombies.
TWD has set many, many precedents of zombies that have been almost in a state of hibernation until one of the dim witted survivors stumbles near it and it suddenly "wakes up". Think about how many times a zombie has appeared out of mud, water, snow (less so for snow). Or even just chilling in a building. One of my pet peeves is the zombie laying down and suddenly getting up when you get near it in games. They have shown no internal drive without external stimulus. Of course we're talking about zombies so it's all nonsense really so I have based my reasoning of off demonstrable facts within TWD universe.
I took "migration" to be in a more general sense, as in how they tend to move from one place to another, not in the specific sense of mass movement for a specific purpose, such as changing of the seasons.
Either way, simply marking them is not enough to discern anything. They'd need unique identifiers, like tags, and accurate records where they started and how they moved from there.
If Herschel and his crew could wrangle walkers and put them in his barn at the outbreak, it would stand to reason that this group 10 years in could put some collars on them. But to just spray their faces blue is pretty stupid.
I can just about kind of see someone justifying to themselves it would be a good/interesting idea to "tag" groups of zombies with different coloured paint. See how groups merge, what kind second death rate drops group numbers etc. That would be obvious with some basic record keeping. E.g. Blue group started off around 35 at location X. Six months later, their numbers are around 15 and they've been joined by 5 from green group near location X etc.
Though as far as I'm concerned, zombies out in the wild are practically walking landmines. They should be shot on sight. If you want to keep some in a secure lab, pen or whatever to study decomposition, mobility degradation over time or whatever, have at it. However, treating large groups like some kind of science project is just asking for trouble imo.
I can't disagree.
shareTrying to clear all the zombies "in the wild" is an exercise in futility. You avoid them whenever possible, take them out when you need to. Actually I'm surprised Whisperer type accessories haven't become standard equipment. Walking through that tire fire would've been easy as pie.
The kind of data you could gather without radio or GPS tags would be of limited value. Many of your painted zombies would set off on a 500 mile walk to nowhere with ten thousand of their closest friends never to be seen again in your area. The Civic Republic might have the kind of equipment to tag enough of them so they could track herds across the continent and look for patterns. The Campus Colony wouldn't though. Their study might have more to do with teaching students (it is a school after all) than expecting some Earth shattering revelation to come from it.
Disagree. As time goes by, there will be less and less to deal with. It makes perfect sense to dispatch zombies around areas of population, outposts etc to create a soft "safe" zone. I'm not saying send out hunting parties to gun down hordes thousands of miles from populations but they should be absolutely taken out when encountered.
If the survivors had half a brain, they would setup zombie traps powered by wind to make noise/some other bait at strategic points away from populations which would reduce zombie numbers almost passively. Perhaps requiring a burn in the trap pits every now and again.
At this point all the large communities have effectively impenetrable walls, and they practice herd management (leading them away). Even if all you had to deal with was the nearly 330 million former US citizens that's 330,000,000 zombies! If you count the full populations of North and South America you get about 800 million free to roam both land masses. Subtract all the ones stuck inside buildings. How long do you think it would take to trap most of the rest? Clear the area around your community and how long does it stay clear?
A society like the Civic Republic could eventually make a sizable dent in the zombie population by using helicopters or drones to gather stupendous numbers of them in one place and then bomb them with thermobarics, rinse and repeat. Just be careful not to start a wildfire - you can't count on fire teams from all over the world to come help you put it out! Eventually you'd hit a point of diminishing returns though. And getting to a noticeable drop in walker density everywhere would take many years. Even the largest herds, which eat up quite a bit of time and effort to gather and lead to an appropriate disposal site, probably wouldn't amount to more than a few hundred thousand.
It would be tempting to simply let the walkers decay (which they're doing slowly, but they are doing). Once you have six foot thick concrete walls around the whole area where your population lives, grows its food, and manufactures its goods, why do you need to clear the whole world? Clear adjacent areas as you need them. By the time your community is ready to expand significantly most of the dead will have rotted away and become inactive, or at least incapacitated.
Say you come back from a supply run and you come across a group of 15 or so zombies around 300m front your front gate. Are you suggesting a group of survivors would gear up and pied piper those guys somewhere? Some convenient cliff for them to drop off x miles away? Or further afield. Risk those guys escorting them? I just can't see it. Sure, if you get a horde coming near you, by all means manage their path away from populations but that shouldn't really be an issue if you have setup decent lures, OPs on high ground with early warning systems in place. I never said to go after all of them in the whole country/world. Just kill the ones you come across in your day to day tasks.
As for the mammoth task dealing with what's left of the zombie population, how long is a piece of string. Sure, we started off with hundreds of millions but after 10, 15, 20 years, time will have taken it's toll and they will have decomposed to a point where being ambulatory is physically impossible.
Remember, whilst you maybe safe from zombies behind your 6 foot thick concrete walls, there is always the possibility of rogue Human groups that might want to attack you for you stuff or for shits and giggles or for other reasons. Maintaining a soft safe area around your walled city makes sense should you need to evacuate, fall back to a secondary site etc. That would be hampered if you routinely let zombies wander around outside your base.
Those large communities (and even the smaller ones) aren't doing much scavenging anymore. Smaller places like Alexandria or Oceanside have gone back in time to simpler methods, the city states like Portland and the Civic Republic have remained in the 21st century by keeping factories up and running. But ten years in, you're making all your own stuff. People who do go outside for various reasons may occasionally come back with "old world" luxury items that are hard to get because they're not a priority for new manufacture. But less and less of that as time goes on.
Those scout groups will avoid walker herds. Smaller clusters too, if they can. If a handful of dead see them and start coming in their direction it's easier to pop them than go to the trouble of outdistancing them and hiding till they go by. They're ten years in at this point, every season the average walker looks a little more messed up. I thought that one that became host to a beehive like a rotting tree was pretty creative. They've found a few that are overgrown with fungi or saplings and can't really move much anymore. Eventually most of them will end up that way. Seems like it'll take at least another ten years, if not longer.
The only serious threats to large modern walled cities would be other city states. The Campus Colony never would've fallen to walkers, and after this much time random bands of survivors no longer have the kind of equipment it takes to threaten a place like that. Being able to make your own guns and ammunition means you're fully stocked where they may have a couple of guns and a handful of precious bullets left.
Yeah, there have been some pretty cool zombie effects. Pretty much the only reason why I'm still watching.
shareActually, I think the biggest mistake they made was to make the walkers so non-threatening. Early on they were more dangerous. Also the producers were more willing to kill off any character, at any random time, so when people went into dark buildings (for example) there was a lot more tension.
Remember when Andrea was trying to get away from the herd that attacked Hershel's farm? She was running for her life for quite a while. The crowd of walkers around the fire barely seemed threatening by comparison. Granted the living will always be the more formidable opponents, but the sense of danger from the undead is an important part of the show that seems to have been lost along the way.
Agreed. The nonchalance in which they casually stroll up to a zombie and give it a poke through the skull with such ease with literally anything at hand, cocktail stick, sharpened carrot etc really annoys. And then they just drop in one stab. The brain is so much more hardy than this. Think about all the people that have been shot in head, had large sections of their brain removed, construction accidents with huge nails penetrating into the brain. It takes a lot more that a little stab from a knife to do enough damage to turn off a brain.
They've basically turned the zombies into an afterthought. "Oh, we should probably have some zombies in this episode but get back to the boring soap opera BS ASAP"