Headscratchers / Zombieland: Double Tap

• Madison lived in a freezer for 10 years? Issues of food, water, sanitation and boredom aside... why didn't she, well, freeze?
  • She probably looks for food, water, and sanitation throughout the mall, given that she encounters Columbus in one of the stores. Plus, she does wear a heavy winter jacket to protect her from the cold of the freezer. As for boredom, knowing her personality, she likely found some women's fashion/gossip/sex (e.g., Cosmopolitan) magazines to keep her entertained.
  • Wasn't it only two years?
    • At the time she is discovered, 10 years have passed since the zombie apocalypse began, and she states she's been hiding in the freezer since the apocalypse's start.
• How is this the first time Babylon has been attacked by zombies? They aren't exactly hiding.
  • As with Madison's existence, because the writers wanted to have a bunch of stupid characters in the movie more than they wanted to have a logical reason why people this stupid would survive.
  • To be fair, there is that wall standing in the way. And the people of Babylon are not above dropping objects on the zombies' heads, as demonstrated by Berkeley doing just that with help from Madison.
    • Plus, they're not above using shields to block zombies, as shown by them using shields to make a path to get a horde of zombies to fall to their (the zombies') deaths.
    • The fact that they're not above luring zombies to their (the zombies') deaths should also indicate that they believe in fighting to some degree.
    • Actually, wrong on both counts, Madison is the one who comes up with dropping things on zombies, and Tallahassee is the one who makes them use the shields, before that point the only reason Babylon survived, was because of in-universe plain luck, The walls probably helped for smaller hordes, who couldn't pile up and get over the wall, plus the smarter versions of Zombies seem to be a recent development, it probably took time for the T-800s to reach a number that could class as a horde.
    • True, but the people of Babylon were still willing to drop random objects on zombies and still willing to use shields, even if Madison came up with the dropping objects method and Tallahassee made them use the shield method. So it's very likely that they would have been willing to at least use melee weapons when a zombie breaches Babylon.
  • It was mentioned that the T800/Bolts were moving west from the inland, so Babylon might have been surrounded by regular zombies that could be avoided and Homers that didn’t actively hunt. The main characters were skeptical of the T800s until encountering one themselves, so the people of Babylon probably felt safe with a tower, walls, and melee weapons to handle the occasional Hawking.
  • Babylon did not necessarily have the "no guns, no violence" rule the whole ten years. That could have been established more recently because of some tragic incident that they wanted to prevent from happening again. Also, Babylon was not necessarily always as big as it appears to be in the movie's present time. The population grew gradually (minus a decimation or two in the early years) as more human stragglers found their way towards it and decided to join because they had nowhere else to go.
• Why does everyone in this world adopt the "your name is your city" thing (how are they communicating the idea, for starters) and what happens if there's more than one person from the same city?
  • Madison's name might actually be her name. It's another stroke of luck that it happened to be the name of a city as well. Reno is just as paranoid as Tallahassee about giving her real name or even what city she's from, and Albuquerque and Flagstaff are personality clones of Tallahassee and Columbus. Not sure if anyone besides Little Rock and the main group call Berkeley by that name, but he was fine with adapting to it to impress Little Rock.
• Why does Madison seem delighted to be referred to as Columbus's girlfriend, but barely reacts to his suddenly marrying Wichita?
  • Because she'd just met Berkeley.
  • And her attraction to Columbus comes across as lust. Her attraction to Berkeley is not yet known, but it's possible that it's more than lust in the case of Berkeley and Madison.
  • And furthermore, there are some hints that Berkeley and Madison are genuine lovers. For example, Berkeley and Madison drop objects on the zombies together, almost as if they are slowly becoming a mundane equivalent of a Battle Couple.
  • It's quite possible Madison isn't so much an idiot, as a walking coping mechanism, which results in a spotty attention span and determination to curate some kind of valley girl social butterfly lifestyle in a zombie apocalypse. She even states outright that she just wants sex with somebody, and Columbus was the best of her two possible options. She wants a boyfriend just to have a boyfriend, and even as they were now surrounded by new people, she probably felt Columbus had that familiarity/earned her loyalty or whatever. She may or may not have felt a deeper connection with Berkeley, but is happy just as long as everybody has happy and nobody is alone.
  • She read the writing on the wall and finally saw the chemistry between the other two.
• How have Albuquerque and Flagstaff survived this long, only to be taken down by a few zombies?
  • To be fair, Albuquerque and Flagstaff were not battling the super-zombies, so they were most likely used to common zombies and other types of zombies weaker than super-zombies. While those two mentioned super-zombies before, they admitted that the fled from the super-zombies previously. So, in other words, they never actually fought the super-zombies until the scene where the super-zombies surrounded the monster truck.
    • Actually they had. Flagstaff alluded to calling them bolts after Usain.
    • Yeah, but didn't they admit that they ran from the super-zombies?
• Madison may be dumb, but she would be long dead if she had a nut allergy that serious and had no idea what nuts are.
  • To be fair, she does have some intelligence, such as when she drops random objects on zombies' heads in the climax, the fact that she can drive a vehicle, the fact that while driving the vehicle she actively looks for Columbus and Columbus' group and signals for them when she's close to their vehicle, and the fact that she found a good safe haven from the zombies.
  • Meaning that if she's smart enough to do all that, she was likely smart enough to check for nuts in what she eats. She just did not do so at that moment most likely because, knowing her personality, she let her lust towards Columbus get the best of her because she let it cause her to easily trust the group enough to not check what edibles she asks to eat.
• Madison was having a severe allergic reaction and it looked like she was turning, so Columbus almost shoots her but chickens out and just leaves her there. She recovers on her own, catches up with them, and isn't even a little upset?
  • She's not the type to hold grudges, and also understands why he did it.
  • As bubbly as she is, she has survived long enough she might understand why they would kill her in that situation. She also knows that Columbus didn't miss but deliberately shot over her head, which at least shows there was enough affection between them that he didn't want to kill her even when he thought she was turning.
  • Maybe Columbus realized she was just having an allergic reaction and told her to run so that the others won't accidentally shoot her while thinking she's a zombie like how Bill Murray died.
• How did Madison recover in the first place? Doesn't she need Benadryl or something?
  • To be fair, she is surprisingly smart in dangerous situations. Perhaps she was lucky enough to find allergy medication and was also smart enough to use it properly.
  • The amount of purging that took place might have reduced the amount of allergen in her system and bought her time to find medicine. The shot of them driving away lingers on her discarded belongings so she might have had an EpiPen in her jacket or purse.
  • She had her purse with her, which we see Wichita throw out of the van along with her coat. If she had anything to counteract the allergic reaction she was having, she would have kept it closer to her than in her bags that got left at the White House. It just happens to be dumb luck that Wichita threw them out and maybe Madison went back after the van took off on the off chance that the purse was there (she'd need to go back to the road anyway to backtrack to where the Ice Cream van was anyway).
• Aren't the T-800s supposed to be tough? They can take multiple gunshots to the head, but a long fall kills them?
  • Maybe the super-zombies' heads suffer enough impact from the fall that it was enough to kill them.
    • This fits in with how the first one was killed. Stomping in the head proved more effective than shots to the head. Delivering blunt force trauma to the brain might become as critical a rule as double tapping.
• Tallahassee hates musicians but loves Elvis?
  • He probably meant some musicians, NOT all of them.
  • He was a fan of Willie Nelson in the first movie.
  • He might just hate musicians that are dating his kinda daughter. Plus, hearing the words pacifist, Berkeley, and guitar probably conjured up the image of some doped out hippie who couldn’t hold his own and help Little Rock protect herself.
  • Fair enough, but knowing how conservative Tallahassee is in terms of his political views, he might also just hate musicians that play music commonly associated with liberals.
  • There are musicians, and then there are (ugh) "musicians"—the first are people who make a career out of singing and playing music for crowds of hundreds, the second is some dude at a party strumming Wonderwall for people too polite to tell him he needs to practice more. The vibe is different.
• Given how dumb that giant zombie horde was, why didn't Tallahassee just lead them away from Babylon?
  • Probably Hawkings (smart zombies), among that horde. Plus, the super-zombies/T-800s are also quite smart themselves.
  • They were referred to as adapting to the hunt so might have given up on chasing a car and went for the stationary target. Not to mention Tallahassee would have no guarantee that he wouldn’t run out of gas before reaching a safe location to losing the hoard or finding a safe bunker.
• Famously badass Tallahassee can't handle a single zombie holding onto his leg?
  • To be fair, he was clinging to a hook while the zombie was weighing him down. At least Little Rock shot the zombie off using a gun Elvis gave to Nixon.
  • He was using both hands to hold onto the hook. There's not much he could have done.
  • Not to mention it wasn't one zombie; it was two. A police officer chained to a prisoner.
  • True. That was obviously enough weight to cause Tallahassee to struggle to hold on, badass or not.
• Just wondering about those two zombies that were a prisoner and a police officer cuffed together, they were supposed to be T-800 zombies. T-800 zombies need most of their brains destroyed in order to permanently kill them, as seen from the T-800s that needed most of their brain matter destroyed by objected dropped by Madison and Berkeley in order to kill them. So why was one headshot from Little Rock's gifted pistol enough to kill the T-800 cop zombie clinging to Tallahassee's leg?
  • Maybe the shot didn’t kill it but stunned it so that it let go of Tallahassee’s leg. The first T-800 they encounter goes down for a few seconds the first time it’s shot. T-800s that haven’t been shot before might be caught off guard the first time it happens.
• And for that matter, why was a single headshot from Nevada's pistol all it took to kill the T-800 zombie Flagstaff?
  • Well, the thing is we don't know for sure if the T-800 zombies have a unique strain of the virus to turn humans into T-800s (for all we know, the strain they carry may still cause normal zombies and then over time convert them into T-800s). Then again, it may also have to do with the fact the T-800s that bit Flagstaff may have been T-800s a long time, thus the infection had lead to them being toughened up, and Flagstaff was recently infected and it didn't have enough time to make him as tough as the T-800s that had followed.
• How did Columbus know of the Zombie Kill of the Year all the way in Italy? How do the survivors manage to share their kills without any surviving internet or long-distance form of communication?
  • Radios still work, as shown in the first movie. For example, Columbus' car in the first movie has music still playing because he has a CD in his car's radio. If that function of radios still function in Zombieland, why can't other functions of radio still work?
  • Plus, some Italian survivors probably found a way to get to America and tell some surviving Americans about one of their brave heroes in the apocalypse, which Americans interpret as a dude who earned the Zombie Kill of the Year.
  • How did Columbus know Zombie Kill of the Week with Sister Cynthia Knickerbocker dropping a piano on a zombie in the first film? The only answer that makes sense is that he heard about it in his traveling (in the first film, he may have heard about the Zombie Kill of the Week from some passerby he encountered before he ran into Tallahassee. Maybe that story he told Tallahassee about Beverly Hills may have been true). And since a while did pass, it could be surmised that before they ended up at the White House, they came across another group of survivors who were on their way somewhere and Columbus heard about it (though it's hard to know if the attempted Zombieland TV show is considered canon to the films or if it's unique thing. If it is, then there's a lot of times that Columbus and company ran into others or had communications with others).
  • Either passerby people, working radios, or both. Take your pick.
  • I assume it's fourth-wall breaking.
    • Fair enough, but still, most survivors would be smart enough to keep radio's working, such as with Columbus with the first car he was seen driving in the first movie. And when survivors meet, as long as they are friendly, they're likely to talk about their experiences and word would get between survivors using that method.
• How did the word get out that Bill Murray died like that? There were four people present. And we don't have any indication that those four people ran into any other human beings since the last time we saw them.
  • It's possible that some other people went to Bill Murray's house in between the time of the two movies after the protagonists did. They found Bill Murray's corpse, saw the gunshot wound that was not in his head, carefully touched Bill Murray's remains enough with plastic gloves or rubber gloves to learn that Bill Murray was wearing make-up to look like a zombie, put two-and-two together, and then used a working radio to tell survivors that Bill Murray was accidentally killed because somebody mistook Bill for a zombie because Bill was using make-up to fool zombies.
  • Little Rock met with Nevada before Columbus, Tallahassee and Wichita, so it is likely that she told her about it and Nevada made up the saying ("Murraying") before they arrived. It is equally likely that Little Rock left out the part where Columbus killed him and she didn't know, or she did tell Nevada, Nevada did know it was Columbus and she was just messing with him.
    • Fair enough, but considering that Nevada's behaviour indicates that she was being serious about killing the person who killed Bill Murray, if Nevada knew Columbus did that, she would have shot him as soon as she saw him.
• Why didn't Tallahassee and Columbus help Flagstaff and Albuquerque? I know there's the "always ask for help" rule, but especially with the T-800s becoming harder to beat, Tallahassee and Columbus should make doubly sure they have allies against the new uncertain circumstances.
  • Best answer is ego. Flagstaff and Albuquerque were egotistical to where they didn't ask for help, believing they could handle it. And Tallassee and Columbus stood back because they weren't asked for help (Columbus introducing us to the new rule of "Never be afraid to ask for help.")

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