In Slight-Defense of the Season Premiere

After watching the premiere, admittedly I kind of felt confused and annoyed at first sight. Afterwards, I can address why it sort of works. But before I do, let's just name the negative aspects to get them out of the way.

First, where the hell was Vasquez? It was important to flash-back to this event, but not important enough to explain where the hell Vasquez is when he definitely should be here, timeline wise? Who knows, maybe he was off trying to find the Zeroes, and this is where the group starts taking notice how often he disappears. Second, if this was so important, why wasn't this shown last season? I enjoyed every episode last season, but even I can admit there were some episodes that could have been taken out, like 10K's adventure with Sketchy and Skeezy, the incident with the Zombie Collector, the incident with the company retreat at the hotel. Third, the show tried to add suspense with Warren being captured. How are we supposed to give a crap or fear for the lives of her or anyone else in the group when we already know they survive this? And finally, this 2 hour premiere was essential, I'm guessing, to establish Dr. Teller, The Man and the leader of Zona as important characters our group will come across this season. But the entire episodes focused on Teller's group fighting off against The Man's army...only for ALL of them to die. Granted, that is the apocalypse, it happens, but our group's inclusion on this did absolutely nothing to change anything. Any other group could have been placed here, and nothing would have changed. Hell, no one could have been placed here, and nothing would change, except maybe this group lacks plot armor and dies. Admittedly, there were events in other episodes that didn't advance the plot for out main group. Remember when Murphy was being flown away from a failing nuclear reactor in Edgemont, so the group can stay behind and fix it? Well, the group wound up helping fixing it, but the people they were helping ended up dead, the pilot flying Murphy crashed and died, and the group wound up reconvening with him. That was kind of pointless too, as were Sketchy and Skeezy, but as 2 hour season premiere, this felt like more a waste of time.

Negatives aside, the Premiere does kind of work when you stop and look back on each individual episode from the beginning, and how they connect. At the end of each episode, try to figure out how many Zs 10K has at the very end, and how many he has at the beginning of the next. There's possibly a notable difference in-between episodes, right? Why weren't we shown those Zombies' or Humans' deaths? Or how about in the premiere, Warren and Addy discuss an incident that involves a silo full of zombies and gasoline back in Arkansas, and Addy gets it mixed up with an incident in Iowa. What incidents were they talking about? We never saw these incidents. How about in the season 1 finale, Doc and 10K suggest using a tactic they used in a grocery store. What grocery store, and when did this happen?

My point is there are events that ARE occurring in-between certain episodes, and we only get to see the entertaining ones. Unlike the Walking Dead, where it shows almost every boring moment, this show just shows us the entertaining bits. This premiere is probably like one of those boring incidents, just something that happened that the group would probably talk about in passing, and we usually wouldn't see because, compared to everything else we've seen, this was probably the most boring pair of episodes to date. But, I guess this is the show's way of saying "events that occurred in passing will come back to bite them on the ass".

In reality, I know this is something the writers came up with after writing the Season 2 finale, but overall, it works, kind of. It could have worked better if Episode 3 of Season 3 was the premiere, and the flash-back event aired after it, but nevertheless, putting that aside, the 2 hour flashback season premiere episodes sort of work for the series.