If the character was living in New York City (or even downtown LA), I'd agree with your assessment of the scene. It would have been spot-on and even funny. Two New Yorkers could run into each other in the hallway of their apartment building dragging two separate bodies to the incinerator room and never so much as say…

Good point.

Fair enough. In that case, I suppose my only quibble is with Jenner's assumption that nobody else would have already known this. . .but then again, maybe he's another character who didn't watch the news on TV.

Do we know for certain that's what Jenner whispered to him? That seems like a pretty tame revelation for Rick to have kept to himself for all these months. I had always assumed that it was something related, but even worse. . . for instance, that at a certain point the virus was going to become capable of taking over…

Yeah. That bothered me as well. Leaving the zombie apocalypse aside, how is it that people trapped inside a building because of a riot wouldn't be watching news coverage of that riot on the television set that was clearly shown to us in the previous episode?

Right, but (and I could be wrong here) wasn't there at least one instance of a body being discovered and ruled as "ok" because the person died of a gunshot wound?

One other point about the plot. In The Walking Dead, the only way to become a zombie was to be infected by a bite. People killed by "normal" means remained dead. The revelation, later in the series, that the virus had adapted to reanimate all dead humans was framed as a horrifying new thing.

Exactly. I mean, in the hands of a subtle, empathetic writer, the phenomenon of people learning that they're dealing with a plague of the walking dead and then unlearning it, only to be forced to relearn this unwanted reality again and again and again until it finally sinks in could be portrayed as extremely human and…

All true; but the characters' insistence on viewing the walkers through the paradigm of "people who are delirious and highly violent due to some terrible illness" as opposed to the more correct paradigm of "risen corpses of the dead, which reproduce by devouring the living" is still at least a little bit…

The dude paused to take out his garbage and leave it at the curb. . . but somehow that scene wasn't played as evidence of his terminal case of tunnel vision (indeed, his neighbor, who looks like someone who's been waiting for a zombie apocalypse for his entire life, is shown doing the same thing. . . and neither man…

That's true. Even accounting for the crazy echoes that would have bounced around between all those buildings and all that pavement, it should have still been somewhat clear where the noise came from. . .and an exploding head/falling body definitely qualifies as motion. [Edit: I was tempted to argue that maybe they…

Ha. I actually didn't even get the sense that the door was being opened by a person. I thought it was just a flap that the zombies had just never happened to notice, because it had never been used until then. But it's been a while since I've seen the movie.

Oh. My bad. . . yes, those zombies had a strangely exclusive diet. Although a case can be made that what they were really attracted by was motion. They're mildly curious about the dog, and when they see it go through the door, they become mildly curious about that too.

The zombies do attack animals -they kick off Episode One of The Walking Dead by consuming an entire horse, after all. My guess as to why this isn't a huge plot point in the series is that most animals (house pets temporarily excepted) have keen enough senses that zombies have no real hope of sneaking up on them, even…

Why, thank you!

That's fair. We know they're zombies. . . but in the World of the Walking Dead, there's apparently no such thing as a zombie movie (if there was, surely someone would have called the Walkers/Biters/Eaters by their actual name by now in at least one of the shows). So the characters are, if anything, even more freaked…

Right. Except that maybe for this particular set of writers, this could be the hardest part of the story for them to get a handle on. The "adapt-or-die" storyline is premised on an environment that's already present and immutable when The Walking Dead begins. Humanity is already toast before the curtain rises, and…

That would have been a good reason, if the electricity went out and stayed out. . . but it's really been working just fine throughout most of the show. What's weird isn't that it went off in this episode (it's about damn time), but that, having gone off, it came back on. If the supply of fuel to the power plant has…

It occurs to me that a good easter egg for those broadcasts would be to show footage of the wife of the guy from the CDC (long deceased by the time Rick & Co. reach the facility) assuring people that the government is on the job and that they're weeks at most from developing a cure for the virus.

Exactly, although I think a shout-out is also due to Orson Wells' War of the Worlds, which masqueraded in its entirety as emergency news coverage. Closer to our plot, Romero's Dawn of the Dead (and the opening minutes of 2000s-era remake) both did a good job of using small cuts of "broadcast news" to highlight the…