The Walking Dead (2010) / Fridge

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Fridge examples for The Walking Dead (2010).

Fridge Brilliance

In Rick's big speech to the Governor, he says "You put down your weapons, you walk through that gate, you're one of us." Tara then lays her weapon down and refuses to fight during the battle and later walks through the gate to enter the prison to help Glenn - making her an official member of the group by Rick's own words.
In episode 4, during the large fish dinner at the camp, Dale is asked of why he bothers to wind up his watch everyday and his concern with time when it seems irrelevant in the current situation of the world. This lengthy discussion seems to just develop character or set up a Chekov's Gun for the end of the season, but it is never brought up again. Then you realize that Dale was the first to notice and inquire about the "time" in episode 6....
When Glenn outlines some rather thorough strategy to help get back the bag of firearms, yet still taking time to ensure that he is covered for multiple escape routes, Rick and Daryl look at him in surprise, and ask what he did before the "walkers" arose. Response? Pizza delivery guy. They don't ask about hobbies. As a young, urban and "normal" guy, he very likely has extensive experience playing war-like video games, giving him a solid grasp of fundamental combat strategy.
- Further evidence for that theory — Glenn makes a reference to Portal when chatting with Maggie. He's definitely a gamer.
- Also, as a pizza delivery guy, he has to be good about maneuvering through streets in order to deliver the pizzas quickly.
- I'm almost shocked that, as he's Korean, nobody ever said it was from obsessively playing Starcraft.
Leaving the "Vatos" storyline without closure may be an example of Executive Meddling, but at the same time it leads to a rather pragmatic aspect. The group has been told that no cure is to be had, that the entire world has fallen to the zombie plague, and there's nowhere to go. What reason is there for the group to expend what little fuel and food they have left going back into the death trap of Atlanta to let the Vatos know about this? The leader G told Rick the only thing keeping them going was the hope of getting together enough of a crew to get enough vehicles going to get the elderly out of the city. What're they going to do exactly, dash that dream and tell them everyone is going to die and they're just wasting their time because there's nothing left?
- As mentioned above, the show seems to work on the same rules as the comics, so it's entirely possible that one of the elderly patients died, reanimated, and attacked the group from the inside. Possibly worth mentioning is that material that wasn't used in the show shows that the retirement home was overrun.
  - However, said unused material has Rick saying something about the bodies they found — they were all shot in the head, execution style. It was implied someone broke in and killed them all for their supplies, perhaps as a foreshadowing to the Governor.
Word of God states that Otis found the zombified Sophia and put her in the barn with the rest of the Walkers. This has led to a lot of questions concerning the timeline of the second season premiere episode and how everything happened in the time that it did. But one has to realize that it wouldn't have had to be the infection that killed her for everything to happen. Sometime after disappearing and was bitten, we know this for a fact. Sometime after being infected she could have been running, tripped and landed on a rock with enough force to stop her heart. Maybe running without food and water sped up infection process. Maybe she fell down the same cliff Daryl did and didn't survive the landing. If her death was not long after her initial disappearance it's entirely possible Otis found and corralled her during the hours between the two incidents and still had time to go out and wind up shooting Carl and the deer together.
- Another possibility is that, as a child, and therefore having a smaller body, it would likely take less time for the infection to take over.
- It's also possible, considering recent revelations, that she was never bitten in the first place. She was a little girl walking alone through a forest. A lot of different ways for her to die.
  - She was bit on the neck, so that could have killed her first, and even still, Dr. Jenner said in "TS-19" that the reanimation process following was reported as taking as long as eight hours and as little as two minutes, so that same could be true of the actual infection and death.
- Just before leaving her to kill the walkers chasing them, Rick makes a comment about keeping the sun over her "left shoulder" if she runs back to the group. When she is found as a walker, it can be seen that the walker that attacked her had bitten her on the left shoulder. This would mean that if Sophia understood Rick's instructions, she was bitten when she was on her way back to the highway.
In "Triggerfinger", Shane tells Andrea he's got to get some sleep because he's taking the graveyard shift as sentry (Ironic term indeed). But Shane staying up all night actually helps explain some of his actions. People who are sleep-deprived (remember, Shane is appearing in just as many daylight scenes as everyone else) get jumpy and irritable in the best of times. Couple the stresses of the Zombie Apocalypse with his current drama and the hours upon hours in darkness he has to sit there thinking he is the last and only line of defense, and his criticism of Rick makes sense from his perspective.
In the final episode of Season 1, Jenner wants them all to die in the CDC with him. He must be nuts, right? They leave and he whispers something to Rick, which we don't learn until the end of Season 2 — everyone has the virus, when you die you'll come back as a walker, period. BRILLIANCE! Those who stayed were completely incinerated! Jenner was offering the group (who he was probably sure would die anyway), a chance to not come back as walkers, and thus further complicate whatever the rest of civilization was going through! He was trying to help them go out with dignity, and not as a shambling, rotting walker.
- On a contrary point, he also shared a tip that gave Rick's group a slightly better chance of surviving, so they would know to shoot a dead body's head even if they did not get bitten. Another reason Jenner may have felt compelled to share it is because as far as he knows, he is the last person alive who is in the know and willing to share this information. The secret would have died with him. By telling Rick, he was releasing it to the public, which would give any other civilians a more equal chance not just for surviving, but for continuing the human race. So he may have had a little hope for humanity even if he did not have it for himself.
Many people have pointed out the lack of AR 15 from the Police Station armory. However Rick point's out that there are weapons missing, those weapons would have been the first taken.
In the final episode of Season 2: Lori looks horrified and backs away from Rick when he says he was forced to kill Shane. She refuses to let him touch her and runs away in disgust. Even after Rick clearly said it was in self-defense, after her explicitly telling him that Shane was a threat a few days before and that he had to deal with him, and moments after saying that she was there for him. Why? Because she still had feelings for Shane, and had been knowingly or unknowingly stringing him along for two seasons by this point.
- Lori's apology to Shane seemed more obvious on this point. They reminisced and she acknowledged the significance of Shane possibly being the biological father.
Dale's RV has an upside down US flag hanging inside. An upside down flag means the person flying it is in trouble, which every survivor is...
In the Season 3 premiere, Rick argues that it's very possible the prison could be a goldmine for supplies, remarking that since most of the walkers they've seen are guards and inmates (i.e. no apparent civilians have gone there seeking refuge,) the prison must have fallen pretty early. Given the recent revelation at the end of Season 2, that'd make a lot of sense when you think about it: prisons are dangerous places, and any shankings (or worse yet prison riots) that happened after the infection would have probably doomed the prison pretty early.
- One of the five prisoners they find in the cafeteria says that there was a massive riot, the likes of which they had never seen before. It most likely started as an average riot, but once a few people died, it shifted quickly into a walker infestation.
Out of all the women present Carol's hairstyle is the most practical. Being cut short and close to the scalp there's nothing long and flowing for a Walker to grab onto and pull her back.
- The true fridge brilliance is that Carol was an abused spouse before the series began. Keeping her hair trimmed that short was likely to keep Ed from grabbing it.
  - Explicitly confirmed by Season 9. Henry tells Daryl that he overheard Carol telling Ezekiel that she cut her hair during her marriage to Ed to keep him from grabbing it; now that she’s in a healthy, loving marriage to Ezekiel, she’s comfortable letting it grow out to its natural length.
- This also ties into Season 3, when Carol is the one who tells Andrea to sleep with the Governor and then stab him in his sleep. She probably had that idea when she was still with Ed, and like Andrea, she failed, as she was still in thrall to Ed as much as Andrea is to the Governor.
Remember that as the series progresses, everyone is getting more used to and proficent at killing zombies. So this naturally makes it easier add the fact that everyone is becoming less afraid of the zombies as well and you get some pretty good Villain Decay.
- Not to mention actual decay. Those who have been turned for more than a few months stand to lose muscle mass and mobility, especially since they can't heal and most walkers tend to mindlessly walk straight into mounted pikes, traps and other dangers to get to their prey, losing skin and limbs in the process.
- It's remarkably easy for most of the cast to crush bone with a one-handed attack, and it gets easier over time, especially as the cast gets better and better at going in through the eye socket to kill the brain. That's only natural, we see several zombies turning to mush and fusing with earth and wood if left stationary long enough, and the primary symptom of a walker bite is a lethally high fever that apparently never really fades, even if the body dies and then turns; the walkers' skulls are soft because they've been boiled into soupbones.
The revelation that everyone is infected and any death will lead to turning neatly solves one of the logical problems with a zombie apocalypse: biting is a highly inefficient way to spread a disease and is unlikely to cause a large outbreak, let alone a global one; however, if everyone turns, then a large-scale outbreak is basically inevitable, since there are millions of people dying every second and many would still have fairly intact bodies afterwards. Grandma has a heart attack? Coworker trips and breaks his neck? Son drowns in a pond? All those would turn into walkers and proceed to attack and infect those around them, who would not know to fight back and would in turn infect those around them....
- There aren't millions of deaths every second on the planet, maybe a couple every second or around 200.000 per day. But yeah, that should be enough to speed up the spreading of the zombies quite a bit. The strange things is how that fact is not common knowledge if that really was the main/most efficient way for new infections.
  - It's likely the people who would have been in positions to notice this (doctors, morticians, etc.) were the first victims during the outbreak. If they were unable to tell people that everyone who dies comes back, or just didn't make the connection in their heads, then people would have only noticed it was those who were bitten coming back as zombies.
- Hospitals would have been far and away the first places overrun, as that's where most people die. They don't usually have that much security, so most of the population would probably just see walking corpses spilling out of a hospital, still wearing scrubs/gowns/etc. Also, if you saw somebody (apparently) die, then start to open their eyes and move, you'd probably go over to help them. "Oh yay, you're alive!" *chomp*.
Using alarm when Woodbury Army is inside the prison complex. At first it looks like Rick and his pack just tries to scare them. Then you realize that the alarm is so loud that orders can't be heard and any kind of organization falls in mere seconds, allowing to easy rout the attackers.
When that kid was handing his gun over to Carl in "Welcome To The Tombs", Carl shoots him because he didn't want to take any chances. When Rick handed his gun over to Shane, Rick killed him.
In Season 3, when Glenn is eulogizing T-Dog to Hershel, he mentions that T-Dog drove a church van around to rescue senior citizens in the early days of the apocalypse. When the group traveled to the CDC in Season 1, one of the vehicles that they use is a church van, meaning that this seemingly-out-of-nowhere character revelation was in fact a subtle continuity nod.
Rick's actions from the start of the series to the end of Season 2 and the Governor's actions in Season 4 have a lot of strong parallels. Both characters are abandoned by their allies when they assume they're too far gone to be worth saving, they then wander around, only to be taken in by a kind family. They then join a camp and end up reuniting with the same person that abandoned them, only to end up killing them for control of the group. Now that they have done this and are in control of the group, they take on a more forceful role and gun for the prison. This is reinforced by the fact that Mitch and Pete are similar to Merle and Daryl (the latter comparison especially). In fact, if you look at crowd shots for the camp, you can see actors that look like characters from the Atlanta camp, particularly Mitch, who bears a striking resemblance to Shane.
Word of God says that in "After", the two new zombie pets Michonne acquires used to be the Governor's men, which is why she specifically chose them.
Lizzie shows remorse for killing walkers, but not people. Why? After people die, they turn, and that's all they are until they are shot in the head. Lizzie doesn't view the walkers as "dead" but just "different" from the living. As in, another stage of life. In "The Grove", she also makes a point about not wanting to shoot people in the head, because then they can't turn. When Lizzie kills Mika she tells Tyreese and Carol to wait for her to turn so that she can come back and they can continue playing. To Lizzie, Mika is still there, and she's going to come back, she's just going to be different. And who would be a better walker playmate for Lizzie than her own sister? If you mix Lizzie's logic in with a child's imagination, it's no surprise why she doesn't feel what she did is wrong.
- It goes further than that. Just because there's a zombie apocalypse doesn't mean there aren't any mental disorders. Mika seemed strangely familiar with Lizzie's coping mechanisms, so there's a likelihood that she's displayed these symptoms prior to the outbreak.
- It's strongly implied that Lizzie is a clinical psychopath, which means she can't really empathize with other human beings' emotions or the facial expressions, vocal tones, and body language that convey peoples' feelings. When she's not interacting with others, she lacks affect, and she's very clumsy in displaying it when she does interact, as if she's got no intuitive sense of when it's "right" to smile, cry, yell, etc. This may actually explain why she feels such a connection to the walkers: they don't display any affect either, and their only urges ( killing helpless creatures, pulling prey apart) are the same urges Lizzie feels herself, which others (to her perplexity) don't seem to share or understand.
The walker that Carol kills at the start of the Season 5 premiere was originally a female, and had a handcuff dangling from its wrist. It's encountered quite close to Terminus. Was it one of the women who'd been raped and abused by the thugs who betrayed Gareth's and Mary's group originally, who escaped her captors but died in the woods? Or was she another of the "cattle" who got away from the place after they turned cannibal, but failed to make it very far? Either way, the handcuffs make sense.
Eugene's revelation that he's not really a scientist in "Self Help" puts the fact that he knocked their original truck out of commission in a whole new light.
Eastman is a Christ-figure. Not only does he die to save Morgan and, by extension, all of Alexandria, his death causes a chain of events that will eventually cause the false-Saviors to be defeated. If he hadn't trained Morgan and then died when he did, Morgan would never have rescued Daryl and Aaron in "Conquer" and they would have been killed by the Wolves. During the aftermath of Pete's execution in "First Time Again," without Morgan accompanying him to bury Pete's body, Rick probably wouldn't have stopped at the exact spot that he did, and would not have noticed the walker herd in the quarry. As the truck blocking the only exit collapsed shortly afterwards, the entire herd (not just half of it) would have escaped and headed straight for Alexandria and destroyed it (as the residents would be completely unaware and unprepared and Abraham would never have found the RPG that Daryl uses to get rid of the rest of the herd). With Rick's group dead (or at least catastrophically depopulated and forced to flee Alexandria, reduced to life on the road like before Aaron found them) and not in Hilltop to stop Ethan, Gregory would have been killed, destabilizing the community, which does not really have anyone else capable of taking the reins of so many people (as Jesus is a submissive badass and no one else in the colony commands a significant amount of obedience). Without Alexandria's powerful influence, the Saviors' subservient communities would likely have never united, and Negan, a Satanic archetype in this sense, would have reigned supreme and continued to expand and grow more powerful.
All of Morgan's attempts to rehabilitate the Alpha Wolf fail quite spectacularly, which culminates in the latter taking Alexandria's only doctor, Denise, hostage while the town is being overrun by a walker herd. However, in "No Way Out", Denise is able to break through the Alpha Wolf's Ax-Crazy exterior just a little bit, or at least enough to make him save her life. Why was she able to do this when Morgan failed? Because Denise is an experienced psychiatrist, just like Eastman. Both of them are professionally trained to oversee and rehabilitate people with mental illness or acute psychological problems, something that is not nearly as simple or straightforward as Morgan's Thou Shalt Not Kill philosophy implies. They know how to talk to people like the Alpha Wolf and can quickly determine what approach would be best for each individual person's specific set of problems.
- Although it's subtle, Denise takes a very different approach to Morgan's when speaking with the Alpha Wolf, skillfully using their dire situation to manipulate and turn his intentions around to save her and possibly even himself. She plays on his need to survive instead of Morgan's advocacy towards kindness, arguing that there are many ways to survive in their Crapsack World, which can include living in a town like Alexandria that has walls and trained physicians. This approach appears to appeal to the pragmatic Alpha Wolf far more than Morgan's had.
Michonne and Spencer encounter Deanna's walker in the woods and put it to rest. But how is Deanna even a walker in the first place if she had last been seen attacking a horde of a dozen walkers with a pistol while near death? She obviously defeated them in melee combat.
- IIRC She had a revolver and fired six shots at the walkers coming upstairs.
Upon finding the Hilltop vehicle crashed in "Knots Untie", Jesus hesitates when he tells Rick that his community doesn't have many fighters. Later events suggest that he shied away from saying they don't have many fighters anymore, because he's leery of telling them that Negan's group has already killed or taken hostage some of Hilltop's defenders. He'd rather not admit that his own group is being victimized until after Gregory can establish an alliance with Alexandria.
After Daryl assaults Negan and Negan decides to kill another member of Rick's group, why did he decide to kill Glenn instead of killing Daryl or randomly choosing another member like the first time? Because Glenn was the first one to try to assault Negan and he wants to make it clear that he wants none of them disobeying him again. It's also for a way for Negan to have Daryl feel guilty about his action causing another death in the group.
According to Abraham's actor, Negan's "eeny meeny miney moe" routine was never going to be used seriously, but instead Negan used it to gauge each group member's reaction to having the bat pointed at him or her. Abraham was the obvious choice given the circumstances: Negan didn't want to make Rick a martyr, Carl - who also didn't balk - was a kid and, therefore, less of a threat, and the other character who likely would have (and later did) resist Negan, Daryl, was wounded at the time
Jesus's fighting style is noticeably different when he fights walkers in "Go Getters." While he punched Daryl and Rick, he exclusively kicks the walkers. Thinking about it, it makes sense — punching a walker risks cutting your hand on its face and teeth, making kicking with solid boots on a much safer way to dispatch them.
In "Rock in the Road," Rosita picks one stack of dynamite to leave behind, saying she didn't like how it looked, then smiles slyly, repeating herself, after it blows up behind them. She did it deliberately — the Saviors are going to be checking that area later. If there hadn't been an explosion, they would know someone tampered with it. But leaving that bundle of TNT behind to go off covers the Alexandria survivors' tracks, making it look like the trap went off like it was supposed to.
The Saviors tend to engage in an extraordinary amount of Kick the Dog, even when dealing with relatively compliant groups, seemingly Genre Blind to the possibility of Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal. This comes back to "I am Negan", and them perhaps taking it a little too seriously. Many see him brutalize and humiliate his subjects and they follow that example, without the nuance of Negan who shows himself with Eugene in particular to be as familiar with the carrot as he is the stick.
Simon's death, being choked to death by Negan and having his zombified corpse used as part of the walker defense system at the Sanctuary's gates was seen as anticlimactic by many people, who believed he should have died by Lucille instead. But the way that Negan executed Simon was entirely in-character for Negan. He sees people as a resource, and "money on the table", right? So, in death, Walker!Simon is a resource, protecting the Sanctuary for many more days to come!
In "Hearts Still Beating" Negan instructs Carl on how to shave and recommends that he should always shave against the grain. This shaving technique is actually ill-advised because if you were to shave against the grain, you're more likely to get skin irritations, ingrown hairs and razor bumps despite getting a closer shave. This seems to sum up Negan's personality with his group and prisoners, posing as a friend but giving harmful advice at the same time.

Fridge Horror

By the time Merle makes the hard decision to cut off his own hand to get off the roof, chances are the hacksaw was already dulled up from trying to cut through the handcuffs. As if making a Life-or-Limb Decision didn't involve enough pain already.
In "Better Angels", Carl happens on Rick right after killing Shane and prompts his father to leave the body and go to him. This move could have very well SAVED him. If Rick had been alone, he probably would have stayed by the corpse to grieve up until it reanimated and takes a chomp out of him.
Lori's apology to Shane leads to this, considering what he does soon afterwards. Her forgiveness of him could very well have led him to believe he still had a chance with her if he could get Rick out of the way.
Think you were horrified by the poor horse being Eaten Alive in the pilot? Hershel had at least fifty cattle on the farm, as well as chickens and some horses. All these animals were left behind when they lost the farm to the walker invasion, meaning all those poor animals were a buffet just waiting for the walkers to come for them. Especially the horses and chickens, who were locked up in stables and coups...
Rick hasn't told anyone that everybody reanimates when they die, barring trauma to the brain. How many times have the survivors kept a potentially dying person in the house, not knowing that they were risking having a walker inside the perimeter?
The revelation that everyone is infected and turns upon death means the Vatos from Season 1 are almost certainly dead. Not only were they a band of 30-odd men in a city with potentially millions of walkers, but the elderly hospice patients they were caring for are all timebombs and none of them know it.
- Which goes to explain how the virus spread as quickly as it did. People would be watching out for people who were bitten but not people who had gotten heart attacks or died in ways that they were obviously not bitten. It also spread quickly because there is no single Patient Zero: Patient Zeros were probably popping up around the country at roughly the same time.
- In unused material, namely an unused trailer for Season 2, the Vatos were attacked and killed by raiders, demonstrated by the group coming across their overrun base in Atlanta, and hinted at in the official trailer, which has clips of the group standing in an abandoned Vatos' base. The original story of the Season 2 premiere had them finding the stronghold empty and raided, and trying to get out of Atlanta alive.
There were walkers in prison jumpsuits locked inside the cells at the prison. No prisoner would be stupid enough to get near enough to the bars for a zombie to grab him through them. Those guys were forgotten about when the prison started to get overrun with zombies, and must have starved to death in their cells.
Daryl and Andrea encounter a walker in the woods who hanged himself from a tree. In a proper hanging, when the person is dropped, their neck is supposed to snap and kill them. That means that, because the walker in the tree was struggling, the neck did not snap. He probably spent a painful minute or so suffocating to death at the end of his improper nose.
- Though, when Shane snapped Randall's neck, he reanimated as a fully functional walker, so nothing about the camper's death can be concluded.
- Fridge Sadness, all those bonds and happy moments the cast had wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for a zombie outbreak.
  - There are some fanfictions set in the real world that indicate otherwise, like Maggie meeting Glenn or Rick divorcing from Lori and meeting Michonne. Though some of these things, like Carol leaving her abusive husband, are more unlikely to happen without the immense changes they had faced.
In "The Grove", when Carol is about to execute Lizzie for murdering Mika, Lizzie tearfully apologies to her. However, Lizzie doesn't apologize for killing Mika, but for pointing her gun at Carol, meaning that Lizzie had zero remorse for killing her own sister.
- In the same episode, Lizzie acts truly regretful for having to shoot two people to save Tyreese. However during her sad confession she specifically specifies she's upset that she had to "shoot them in the head". She'd have preferred to shoot them elsewhere, so that they could came back as walkers, which she likes.
One of the marauders' lines to Daryl "The little ones don't last long out here" seems like a creepy throw-away line… until the events of "A", where the same group threatens to rape (and afterwards murder) Carl. Which gives the implication that they've done this sort of thing before.
- Indeed, during the Governor's side-plot in Season 4, he, Mitch, and Pete come across a camp set up in the woods. They decide to leave without attracting their attention. Shortly thereafter, the three return to the camp to find that humans have overrun it and killed everyone, taking their supplies. Considering this all happens within a short distance of the prison, it seems very likely it was Joe's group responsible.
In the Season 5 premiere, the Terminus butchers mention that the group at the trough consists of "four from A and four from D". Assuming these letters indicate specific train-cars used to hold captives, and that the cars were named in alphabetical order, that implies that at least one more train-car full of Terminus's prisoners was left behind, to burn and/or get eaten alive, as Rick's group only freed the occupant of one other car (presumably "B" or "C").
- Or even worse, they're left trapped in their train cars and eventually starve to death.
Assuming the theory that Randall's group was the one who attacked Terminus, then the flashbacks become even more horrifying because this was the fate that awaited Rick's group in Season 2 had they found the farm.
Rick's group survives Terminus (after so many others did not) not so much because of their virtues or their working together, but because of their (previously displayed) frictions and fractions. If Abraham wasn't so hyper-focused on getting to DC, and if Rick hadn't exiled Carol, the whole group might have been taken in and dealt with at once.
Aaron's funny story about his mother forcing him to eat food that he hated to "make him more manly" becomes really depressing when you actually think about reasons why she could have done this. He is a gay man who possibly lived and grew up in or near the southern United States, so his mother may have been tried to make him more manly in an attempt to make him straight. He also makes an offhand comment that he and Eric’s relationship has made them unpopular with several unseen Alexandrians who still cling to conservative, homophobic teachings despite an entire apocalypse destroying society.
Carol relates how Sam once overheard a terrible fight between his parents, and came out to find Jessie unconscious and bleeding on the floor while Pete was outside sitting on the porch. If Pete had his her just a bit harder, she could've died there on the floor, revived as a walker, and devoured Sam alive while Pete was outside sulking, oblivious.
The death of Tabitha the goat was probably more tragic than most viewers realized. Goats are quite smart for livestock, and can remember bad things that have happened to themselves or their companions. If Tabitha was still producing milk for Eastman's cheeses, she must have mated and produced a kid since the Zombie Apocalypse started, yet there's no sign of a baby goat in "Here's Not Here". Eastman wouldn't have killed or abandoned Tabitha's baby, so it's very likely that the nanny goat saw her own baby eaten by a walker, and knew what those shambling stinking things were when they attacked her.
The season 6 premiere involves a plan where the survivors lure a huge army of walkers from a quarry and away from their settlement. The plan more or less works out for them. But now consider that there is an unstoppable wave of zombies moving across the US continent as someone else's problem. Pretty harsh...
In Season 8, Daryl is eager to bust down the Saviors' walls when the flood of walkers surrounds the Sanctuary. While the mid-season finale goes out of its way to insist that it wasn't Daryl's fault they got out and that it’s okay even if it was, several Saviors are devoured during the initial waves of walkers flooding the Sanctuary, yet they otherwise make it up the stairwell. It's entirely likely that Daryl killed more workers than Saviors!
There are plenty of walkers who bear remnants of what their last living moments were like. Season 9 had a walker hiding under a car, much like the group had to do at the beginning of Season 2. So many of those stories seemed to end with "They were in the wrong place at the wrong time" or "They were not rescued until it was too late."
It was shown that Dante managed to get into Alexandria by knocking out a man and stealing his clothing. So what happened to that man afterwards?
So in "On The Inside" They had feral people JUST what the hell made those people like that?

Fridge Logic

The riot gear walkers in Season 3 are tougher to kill, sure, but their mouths are covered by the face guards so they can't bite, and they've got gloves on so they can't scratch. Yeah, they could maybe hit you or grab you and give another one a chance to get you, but they're still far less dangerous than the ones that don't have their faces covered, and should easily be the lowest priority kills when facing a herd.
- Which is something that occurs to you when you're sitting comfortably in your chair, watching TV. In the heat of battle, with adrenaline pumping, there wouldn't be time to carefully assess the threat level of an armored walker.
- The walkers would have probably found a way to get to them anyway...
  - Right, even if they can't bite you, the riot gear walkers can still grab, tackle, or trip you and that could be all the difference.
The CDC. It is designed to explode as soon as it runs out of electrical power, to stop military grade germ weapons from being inflicted upon the public. That raises so many basic questions — like why would you build a high explosive, disease filled building in the middle of a densely populated, urban area? Would anyone be comfortable working in a facility that was built to explode? Why did no one turn off this self-destructive computer program when it became apparent that a society destroying zombie plague had cut the main power supply? Why was it not easier to turn off such a destructive power in the first place? Why bother with a system that could kill the entire staff in the first place when a simple system, involving bleaching the germ storage areas would suffice? The staff can't even leave the doomed building, because low power settings prevent the main door from being opened; who thought that this was a good health and safety feature?
- In order.
  - That raises so many basic questions — like why would you build a high explosive, disease filled building in the middle of a densely populated, urban area? The explosion was contained within the CDC, and it's not "in the middle of a densely populated, urban area." Did you see the size of the parking lot? There is tons of open space around it.
  - Why did no one turn off this self-destructive computer program when it became apparent that a society destroying zombie plague had cut the main power supply? Because the guy running it agreed with the self-destruction.
  - Why was it not easier to turn off such a destructive power in the first place? It probably couldn't be shut off. That's kind of the point. The self-destruct exists to keep it out of the wrong hands, so it would've been designed so those "wrong hands" couldn't shut it off.
  - Why bother with a system that could kill the entire staff in the first place when a simple system, involving bleaching the germ storage areas would suffice? To get rid of all the records and work, too, which could be turned against people.
  - They probably did have a simple system of that type, which could be used in the event of a conventional security breach or localized contamination within the facility. The blow-the-building-sky-high scenario was a last-ditch option, to be used only if the entire staff got wiped out by a massive attack or catastrophic breach, leaving nobody behind to keep the power on or activate the other methods.
  - The staff can't even leave the doomed building, because low power settings prevent the main door from being opened; who thought that this was a good health and safety feature? It's not like that's normal operating. And given there are hundreds of zombies outside yes, I'd want a goddamn door that's not going to be opened.
- The staff can't get out because they might be infected with the WEAPONISED SMALLPOX!!! (or whatever strain of Ebola or whatever) that the explosion is designed to contain. The whole purpose of the self-destruct is to eliminate any chance of any of the potentially disastrous contagions held at the facility at any given time escaping. An episode of Star Trek: Enterprise has a similar facility on a space station with a self-destruct designed for exactly the same purpose.
- In response to the above:
  - The explosive yield was described as being "second only to a nuclear bomb". The surrounding buildings (you can see skyscrapers and nearby buildings) would have been knackered by the blast, concrete would be raining from the sky, and the heroes only (and somewhat dubiously) survived by getting a substantial distance away and hiding behind a bunch of sandbags.
  - The guy wasn't the only person working there originally. Apparently every other scientist straight up decided to commit suicide, which is ridiculous hand waving in and of itself being that they have a duty to save mankind, but did none of them ever think at any point that the self-destruct system was worth deactivating in the circumstances?
  - The "wrong hands" would already have to get through an army checkpoint (complete with god damned tanks), blow their way into the facility, and work past the super security to get to the underground lab, just to get at some deadly disease strains they couldn't have even known about, as a result of them being kept such a good secret. What terrorist organisation would have the resources to plausibly pull this off? After a zombie apocalypse, international terrorism is the last thing on anyone's mind.
  - That's assuming that the "wrong hands" they'd been worried about when they'd set up the system were necessarily coming from outside. They also needed to be equipped for the nightmare scenario of a sample being purloined by one of their own staff who's lost his or her marbles, or that of accidental exposure within the facility that scares their own personnel into fleeing the place in a panic, bringing the contagion with them.
  - The Stand is a good example of what could happen if those containment measures are not in place. And while the employees are trained in emergency scenarios, they are still human and capable of panic if the worst case scenario does come true. Though preparing for it helps, seeing the world fall apart despite their best efforts to prevent it is going to have an impact on them.
  - If you want to destroy records — burn them by hand and confiscate all computer data. If any records were able to escape the building in the first place, then security was already compromised and a bomb would help nothing. In fact, all it would do is draw the public's attention to the fact that government facilities are rigged to self-destruct for some reason.
  - Except shutting down the doors is a terrible idea — what if they did find a cure to the disease, only to realize they couldn't get the doors opened. That's kind of an oversight.
That girl that was with Andrea says "this isn't a game!" right after boasting about her zombie killing skills. All Andrea did was kill a walker that wasn't even much harm at that point.
Wait — cutting through your own hand is easier than cutting through a small handcuff chain? Or the rusted metal screw the handcuffs were attached to? Hacksaws are specifically built for cutting through metal.
- Even if somehow cutting through chain wasn't possible, it's much wiser and easier to cut off your thumb and simply slip the handcuff instead, you know, taking your hand away. Thumbless hand is still a hand.
- And even easier and less harmful on long run is breaking your thumb. Done numerous times all around the world, when no tools were around to free yourself.
  - Though, for both of those, you need to take two things into consideration. One, if you're handcuffed to a pipe during a zombie apocalypse with zombies LITERALLY KNOCKING ON THE DOOR NEXT TO YOU, with you not knowing that it's locked, are you going to think "maybe I should try to break my thumb and then slip my hand out?" He didn't have the time for rational thinking (which he is SO well known for) and panicked. Second, Merle is not the brightest bulb in the shed. If he knew how to do something like that, he probably would have thought about it a long time before it became a life or death scenario. Instead, he came up with the easiest solution he could think of: "My hand is cuffed, so chop off my hand".
  - There is a firm difference between panic and being utterly moronic. Chopping your hand takes longer than cutting handcuffs, because even if the chain is hardened steel, it's quarter an inch to cut, while your hand is about 8-9 inches in circuit. Cutting the chain is cutting the chain. Taking someone's limb is agonizing pain assisted with lots of blood loss — bonus point if it's self-amputation. Thumb can be even bitten off in single second, which is actually what handcuffed people do when panicked. And it's really not that hard to figure out that taking your hand is last resort in any situation, not to mention zombie apocalypse and you have saw designed to cut metal in your disposal and thin chain to cut. Using panic or stupidity as an explanation leads to assumption that Merle is on Forrest Gump's level of idiocy. Then how the hell he survived so long, not to mention that he is shown as calculating and at least cunning guy, driving full speed on pragmatism. Early-Installment Weirdness?
  - The metal strut he was handcuffed to was bolted on. As in, designed to be removable. It would have been quicker and easier to grab the pliers instead of the hacksaw and just unbolt the damn thing. Awkward, yes, given how corroded they were...but easier than sawing your own hand off.
  - Granted, it's implied Merle was also rather high on some kind of drugs at the time (likely the same drugs Daryl whips out at the beginning of Season 2). Merle is always portrayed as being unhinged and fairly violent, but he's never portrayed as being quite as outright belligerent as he is in this episode. An altered state would make him more susceptible to panic and making idiotic decisions, combined with the fact that Merle was already a bit dumb, and you've got somebody who possibly would just panic and cut their hand off.
- On a related note, if the zombies had gotten onto the roof and Merle cut his hand off to escape them, why was the hand still there when the others came back to look for him? Walkers are perfectly willing to eat bits of people for as long as those people haven't animated yet, themselves.
  - When given a choice, Walkers are always shown to prefer live and moving prey. They'd have chased Merle and just left the hand.
  - Actually, the zombies never really made it to the roof. Rick, Glenn, Daryl and T-Dog had to cut the chain with which the latter had locked the door. The most important question is: Where the hell did all those zombies go? Those stairs were very narrow and very long, and, though a night had already gone by, walkers tend to stay around the place they are at the moment they lose interest in their prey, unless something else catches their attention.
When Merle rips off the back of Daryl's shirt in Season 3, he says he didn't know that Daryl had those scars. Haven't these two been travelling and living together for years? How is it possible that they've never bathed in the same river or lake or pond together before, or that Daryl's never come out of a bath/shower/whatever shirtless so that Merle catches a glimpse of his back? And even if they only bathe like once a year (which isn't such a stretch), I find it hard to believe that Merle wouldn't have found out already, one way or another.
- Merle was enough of an all-around bigot that he may have been leery of coming anywhere near another male who's bathing — even his own brother — because of imagined homoerotic implications. Also, if Daryl was ashamed of the scars or how he'd gotten them, he could have avoided letting Merle catch sight of them.
- On top of that, Daryl doesn't really seem like the type that would want other people, much less his dickish older brother, seeing him without a shirt on. It wouldn't be a stretch to think that a guy that has been shown to be kind of awkward about human contact, and Hates Being Touched to the point that Word of God says he's a virgin, would be a bit skittish about people seeing him without clothes.
- A bit of Fridge Horror. Men who experienced sexual abuse usually also hate being touched, or are weary about human contact, or nudity around other people. Given what we know about Daryl's background (physically abusive, alchoholic, neglectful father.) It's very likely that Daryl was a victim of this at some point in his life.
The CDC episode from Season 1 makes it clear that only the brainstem and a fraction of the hypothalamus are active in walkers. Leaving aside the issue of how a creature without a working cerebral cortex shouldn't be able to see or hear, let alone move well enough to walk or attack, why is it that some of the walkers that get destroyed on this show go down from shallow head wounds that wouldn't penetrate that far?
- I always took that piece more as just demonstrating that there wasn't any "human" brain activity happening any more, and that while the zombie used more parts of the brain in SOME fashion, it was only those base bits of the human that remained. But the whole brain is still necessary. it's just that we can't measure the way zombie brains work. As it is, the brain measurement systems we use aren't perfect. In experiments, they've gotten a positive brain response from a dead fish for example.

Fridge / The Walking Dead (2010)

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