I caught up on most of the latest episodes yesterday. Just two more to go. For me, this show feels like a foreign bootleg of a figure. It's interesting because it's closely related to something you really like, but it also looks cheap with glaring flaws. You'd put it in your collection as a novelty, but it doesn't hold a candle to the official product you know and love.
Yeah, the characters are all pretty lame. No, I don't like watching the majority of the show through subtitles. Of course the family drama is completely overdone. But what bugs me most about the show is that they don't follow the "rules" of the original show.
- The zombies are conveniently slow and non-threatening outside of anyone purposely trying to kill themselves.
- At times they just wander - why aren't they all pressing up at the fence at the colonia?
- The zombies all walk in tidy, convenient packs. That group Nick ran into on the road earlier in the season all just walk in a tight group? At the same speed? Staying in the confines of the road?
- I can't stand the way everyone just slaps on a little zombie blood and suddenly they're invisible to the undead. TWD uses this sparingly and makes a big deal of it when they do it, and there's still a constant threat of it not working.
- Why would the mob of zombies just keep walking off that pier?
- Was the soft piano music really enough to attract zombies several floors up?
- How did anyone ever get infected? You can fight off hoards of zombies with a busted wine bottle.
I know it's hard to defend "realism" in a show about zombies, but that's really what it comes down to for me. TWD feels like a constant, real threat. FTWD feels like a cheap tabloid trying to capitalize on the latest buzz of the original. The only truly interesting thing they have going is that Alejandro somehow survived that bite. I wonder if we'll find out it was something other than a zombie bite or if there's some real clue here to the origins of the virus.