even a superficial bite will cause a fever that eventually kills you, so that can take a good long while to kill, a day or two. once you're dead, fast or slow, you ought to reanimate pretty quickly. just a few minutes.

i just think there's a big difference in effort between making sure every frame of a character's hand (the second most important part of an actor's performance?) for the rest of his time on the show is greenscreened out and just… not.

"no circulatory system, no digestive system, no excretory system"

it's not just you. there are hundreds of comments about that on this webpage.

i think folidote makes a great point. i wasn't thinking this at all yet. the helicopter people would explain why hacksawing the cuffs or pin was abandoned, how merle could survive the loss of blood, and where he disappeared to.

i didn't appreciate the severed hand for 2 reasons.

one the one hand (heh), yes there are a lot of new characters being added, and the obvious reason would be as fodder to intensify the threat moving forward.

i think the zombies feeble nature is acknowledged, especially in the book. they really aren't that dangerous at all, except in a surprise attack or when they overwhelm you with sheer numbers.

"If it's going to be used in a future episode, then they'll have to remind us of it somehow, which will be clunky. "

i've read the comic, and i thought the pilot was ok and this episode less so. not because of divergences, though. i completely support the addition of merle, for example, but as has been covered here, it was just poorly executed.

am i the only one who wasn't in love with the pilot? it was fine, and decent enough to follow through, but not really amazingly impressive.

at this point, i don't think it's a spoiler to acknowledge that there will be conflict between rick and shane. so you have a "villain" of sorts (from the comic) already. but obviously part of the appeal is that shane is not an inherently bad guy, but desperate conflict will arise from these intense and unfortunate…

early in the books, the characters do start to use the term "zombies," though my memory is that the trend drops off. rick says something along the lines of: "it took us a while to be able to use that word with a straight face."