The Walking Dead Season 3 Premier

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of the TWD. Everything in that show just seems a little off to me. The writing, the acting, the directing...all just a tad off in a way that I can't articulate. Just to mention one odd thing in particular, neither Rick nor Shane is plausibly from Georgia. Not only do they not talk like they're from Georgia, they weirdly don't even look like they're from Georgia. Well, I might as well go ahead an air my major complaint again: too much soap opera, too little action. I think it's good to limit action in such shows...but not if you're going to fill the time with shrieky, weepy Real Housewives of the IZA crap. I'm not knowledgeable about movies and the like, so I don't have the conceptual tools to say much beyond that, really. I'll watch almost anything with zombies in it, but I basically gave up on TWD, and didn't even realize until last night that I'd not seen the final episode of season 2.

But I watched both the end of season 2 and the beginning of season 3 last night, and I have to say, I thought there was a notable improvement. More action, less overwrought dialog , and several kinda cool things showing up here and there. I thought [spoiler alert] fillingspacefillingspacefillingspace ok: I thought that splitting everybody up after the farm fight was really well done. Though it sure was hell on secondary and tertiary characters...

There's still annoying stuff in TWD. Like: shooting zombies in the head at twenty yards from speeding vehicles. Not gonna happen my friends. Not gonna happen. As I've noted before, you can't do that. Especially not while dropping a deuce and crying for your mommy. But everybody on TWD is a crack shot, e.g. hitting zombies in the head with pistols from fifty yards, and never missing a shot. Here's a hint: stop the vehicle, shoot, drive some more, stop, shoot. Meh, that's not their fault so much; they inherit that crack-shot convention I suppose. Oh and: the group's public deliberations still make little sense, to the point that they're painful to listen to even when they're not painfully overwrought. There's no way these people would actually have survived; they reason together like a bunch of twelve-year-olds. And they always just wait for Rick to be right anyway. So why bother?

Still, there was reason for optimism on display last night I thought, even with the arrival of Kendra the Zombie Slayer who, though a bit wince-worthy, was still pretty cool. And her pack zombies were awesome--in the sense of grotesque and horrible. Nice gruesome touch.

So good job, TWD. Glad to see things getting on a better trajectory.