I have an early ass business meeting, so I’mma make this quick before my nap.
As season whatever-it-is-now closes, I just have to ask my fellow Dead Walker Watchers:
1. Where are all of these blue, dusty looking zombies coming from? There are stages to death!
At least some post mortem skin slippage? Degloving?
The body doesn’t just dry up right away after death. There are stages. I want to see at least one walker at the gate spontaneously have part of his skin rupture and explode from the building gases inside of him (not just when stabbed).
Ironically, one of the worse-off walkers was actually not a walker at all but a crawler: the one Rick encountered right after the apocalypse on the ground outside the hospital as he rode away on his huffy. How did she look so decayed so quickly, while everyone else looks like they aren’t a day over dead… after a year?
I’ll let the livor mortis pass (that’s when the skin pools in one area after a while) because they’re obviously moving around so it’s just staying where it is.
2. Speaking of moving around, where do the walkers get their ATP from to move their muscles? I get that they’re back from the dead because of a virus or something, but there’s still gotta be a science to it since the CDC was involved. It’s not supposed to be magic. This isn’t True Blood. Zombies have to contract muscles to move and they have to have ATP to do that. The ones who haven’t eaten in a long time should be a lot weaker than the ones who recently feasted. That should be a thing.
3. Why aren’t there more flies and maggots on the walkers? It’s free dead meat. They aren’t going to flick them away! Dinner’s served, betches! Where you at?
4. Why doesn’t anybody’s hair or facial hair grow? Are they using whatsername’s samurai sword for that? Even if I let that pass, I can’t let the fact pass that everyone’s eyebrows stay perfectly plucked.
Wait, speaking of which… did Andrea have the means to do some downstairs grooming before bumpin’ uglies with the Gov’nah? If not, that explains the season finale. I would have killed myself out of embarrassment.
5. Did anyone have contact lenses when it happened? How are they keeping them from drying up or storing them at night? What if they lose them?
6. Why hasn’t ANYONE gotten sick and turned from getting zombie blood spatter into any of their facial orifices like eyes, nose, or mouth? It happens via blood transfer right? It’s not just the teeth and bite that makes it special, is it? And you know that’s a job hazard when you’re a zombie slayer. Still, I’ve yet to see that happen.
7. What do they brush their hair with? Or teeth?
And finally number 8 is an answer:
Somebody asked a while ago why zombies look so dirty so quickly after the apocalypse starts.
Well, first, you’d shit your pants a little if you got bit, much less eaten to death. Second, the skin gets discolored on its own as the blood stops circulating and stuff dies, and then turns greenish as gases of dead cells and normal bacteria your body fights off when alive, take over, come to the surface, and rupture the skin. Also, whatever waste you didn’t expel when you pooped yourself as you died, would also leave the body pretty soon after deadsies. So there you go. Lots of reasons to be get dirty really fast as a zombie.
Now YOUR turn to answer my questions.
xoxo
<3~A
4 Comments
Velt
I can answer the first 3 with the same response. Late in season 1, they were at the CDC and talked about the science behind it a bit. Their explanation (which is similar to other zombie explanations) is that the body is still alive, albeit the “human” part of their brain. This is actually not that far fetched either. If you have ever been extremely starved, dehydrated, burning, drowning,etc… instinctual parts of your brain go into overdrive to make it stop, your normal thought process is nonexistent, and it’s not too inconceivable that a virus could someday have this effect on the brain. Think that’s a crazy statement? Ask many countries why their governments have preparations in place for a zombie apocalypse. The CDC even has protocols for this type of virus.
#4,5, & 7 have a single answer too. They have showed them making trips to pharmacies, raiding houses, etc. I think they just let the watcher assume they take some of the bear necessities, so they can rest at ease. 😉
#6, no clue. Sound logic. Maybe they’ve all just been reallllllly lucky so far.
Ashley
Oh, I don’t doubt the science behind some kind of zombie being possible.
What I mean is the body (whatever its condition) literally needs ATP to allow muscle movement (you remember ATP? Biology and cells and all that stuff, right?). For someone in the panic mode you described, their blood flow and redirection temporarily allows for a different “mode” to kick in. But “blood flow” is the key word there.
Zombies in WD don’t have blood flow.
While I totally invite the concept of an infected or shut-off-brain-part kind of zombie (totally possible – just look at lobotomized patients), one who is physically dead and lacking in the actual ATP molecule biologically required to make muscles contract and move in the body move (much less bite with strong force after a year)? At best, the walking dead zombies would be active for a brief while (enough to cause destruction, granted), but before too long, the ATP in their cells would be lost and no longer allow movement.
If the brain went on restarted electrical movement, they’d just be conscious, angry, hungry dead things, sitting there and snapping their jaws until those muscles ran out of ATP too.
That’s my only bone to pick 🙂
Velt
I’m sure the writers would argue that the ATP nucleotides are still functioning as usual, as well as blood flow. I don’t remember off the top of my head if they said blood is actually flowing in the zombies or not. It’s all still science fiction…. for now 🙂 Fun to theorize about though. My survivalist buddies and I have at length discussions about fictional situations like this and ways we’d go about them. I personally would be a lot like Bill Murray in Zombieland, just trying to get out on the golf course whenever I can.
Walker
When someone is bit by a walker, they aren’t dying because the virus spread through the bite, they are dying due to an infected open wound. The infection isn’t necessarily from the zombie virus, but just a general, nasty bacteria infection which is on it’s own pretty fatal without antibiotics. I wouldn’t be surprised if something about the bite prevents the wound from healing too, further ensuring a long death. Assuming blood loss isn’t significant, all bites take a few days to take the life of the victim. And even wiht antibiotics, it’s likely they would still be worthless in this case, so there is nothing to do but to take of those before they turn.
The other nuance, which we learned at the CDC, is that everyone alive already have the zombie virus in their systems. That’s why when people die of natural causes, they still turn. Therefore, when a bit of zombie blood gets into someone eye’s or mouth, it’s not really that big of a deal – they already been exposed and the virus is already in their system. Maybe the human immune system, when fully functioning, is equipped enough to keep the virus at bay, but when systems start shutting down, the virus takes over. So the immune system can handle bits of blood, etc. At least that’s how I rationalize the irrational 🙂