"And on TV theyre almost always portrayed that way."

The best performance of your life?

I agree with this.

Theory: the problems with getting their lead actor's accent right led the narrative to Rick's present 'something snapped' state, so he can spend more time reading his dialogue with an indistinct, threatening growl.

It's been a crazy ten days since the prison fell…

What a stupid way to die. Good job Dawn had the gun that she could reflexively fire, otherwise the ending would be :

Whovian has it right. At the outbreak and shortly after, it's presumed the bite (or a scratch, or ingesting walker-gunk…) kills you and turns you. When people see the not-bitten recently dead rise and groan and walk again, that's when they start to realise they all turn when dead.

That's not soon enough!

Has there been a thing in the show yet where someone *doesn't* trust someone else, and pays dearly for it? Or is it always going to one 'don't trust 'em' lesson after another?

Sasha learned the hard way that, in life, we all get one good, trustworthy Bob to call our own. The rest are a shower of bastards, and you NEVER turn your back on them.

I'm the other way round. I think he's well played, I'm just not sure what he's doing in the series.

I don't think we're meant to buy Dawn as an authority figure. I presume, pre-virus, she had the authority granted her by the system she and the other cops were in. She represented authority, and the authority she represented was respected.

Well there we go. I don't think Shane shooting and sacrificing Otis was out of character. In that situation, he needed something to distract the walkers, so as to be sure he could get to the car with the supplies and get back to help save Carl.

Defend in what way? Obviously I don't defend it morally. I defend it in terms of the guvnah's character, as it was, well, his character. It made sense to me. The existence of the group at the prison troubled him. Torturing Glenn and Maggie was a way to get information. To put it mildly, the governor was a conflicted…

Shane didn't exist outside of the show. He was as he was written (and acted, etc). They all are. It's not like he was otherwise a good, actually existing person whose life was momentarily overtaken by a mysterious group called 'the showrunners' who made him do a bad thing that he then tried to put right.

Rick, as encouraged by Herschel (and, you know, basic humanity), wanted - perhaps still does - to live in a world where you don't kill any human you come across as soon as you come across them, where you don't trample without hesitation any human who crosses your path. Shane was quite fine with doing so. You can't…

Shane would be a nightmare leader. Quick to anger, in love with his own ability - rather, insistence - for making 'hard' decisions (the outcome being borne by others, not him), willing to drop you as soon as you were deemed a hinderence to the survival of Lori, Carl or himself.

They killed some walkers, had encounters with other survivors (some good, some bad), talked about the past and how things had changed (bonding a little), some good non-dialogue bits (one being a cold open with a moody-yet-plaintive sounding song), a good action set-piece, and an attempt to thread some sort of…

I am not coddling her character. I'm male, and I would quite possibly freeze up in Beth's position in that lollipop scene. I have full sympathy with her lack of action there. It has nothing to do with her being female.

I appreciate the effort you're putting in. I'm pretty sure we were definitely watching the same episode, such that we saw the same events. We just read them very differently.