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1x05 "Cobalt" Complaints and Criticism

Discussion in 'Episode 105 - Cobalt' started by H5N1, Sep 10, 2015.

  1. dhdhdh33

    dhdhdh33 Member

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    If my timeline is right Atlanta will be bombed in about 15 days. Could be the same in L.A.
     
  2. Morgotha

    Morgotha Well-Known Member

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    There would be valuable stuff for survivors for years and years in L.A. though, and even if it's overrun with zombies now and inaccessible, that doesn't mean it will be in the future. I mean if they aren't taking in energy somehow, which something that's "dead" isn't, they'll run out of stored power sooner or later, and at the beginning of the outbreak people don't know how long that'll be. What if a reanimated corpse only has the energy in it for 3 months, or a year? A bit of waiting and you could walk right back in. If you blow everything up, you'll just be left with a pile of rubble.

    I guess the main reason I'm arguing this is that I'm just not a big fan of blowing up stuff that generations of people have worked so hard to build :(

    And once the government blows up part of the city, you can bet any survivors aren't going to stick around for training, at least I wouldn't. When the Army officer says that their plan was to destroy everything South of main street and hold the line here, what's going to happen to the area North of main st. when the army officer gets uncomfortable? Will he tell YOU any more than he told the people south of main?
     
  3. westwingnut

    westwingnut Well-Known Member

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    We don't know how much of Atlanta was firebombed, do we? For all we know, it was a targeted strike meant to make it easier for some soldiers to evacuate, or to prevent walkers from pursuing them.
     
  4. Camilleyun

    Camilleyun Well-Known Member

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    True enough.
    I'm just looking at it from the angle that we were supposed to be shown how society collapsed before Rick woke up in the hospital and stringing together what Rick saw when he emerged from the hospital, Shane's experience, what Shane and Lori saw happen in Atlanta with what we see the military doing in FTWD.
    I guess it's plausible that if the military can't contain 2000 people in a stadium, their better options are to train & arm a few hundred thousand people and/or aim to wipe out of all mankind.
     
  5. Tara La Reine

    Tara La Reine Member

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    i'm not a fan, either, but it has happened in real life for lesser reasons. And I'm still not convinced that Cobalt is about wiping out everybody, so it may not be as destructive as some people are imagining. After hearing Adams describe the military retreat, Maddie talks about "our people" and "what happens to them". *Them*, as opposed to "us". She's talking about Nick, Liza, and Griselda, who are in the medical center and therefore seen as being at high risk. So it seems to me that Shane observed part of Cobalt at Rick's hospital. Of course, the soldier could be lying- but to what end?
     
    #65 Tara La Reine, Sep 29, 2015
    Last edited: Sep 30, 2015
  6. westwingnut

    westwingnut Well-Known Member

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    I agree with the general idea that more information is better than less information. But we also have to think about how many people would believe the government at the outset of the ZA. How many people could put a bullet through the brain of a family member who was walking around with glazed eyeballs? How many would be willing to do that to somebody else's family member? Morgan and Carl both couldn't do it even after a year into the ZA.
     
  7. Marc

    Marc Well-Known Member

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    Why? Seemingly numbers are thinning down, see the library? Probably more died than Travis and the others got to see and in this episode their numbers are shrinking and their control is slipping and they are afraid of having to "clean out" the zone with Codename Cobalt.
     
  8. Stealth

    Stealth Well-Known Member

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    Yes, they just raced through the whole thing with the soldiers at a ridiculous pace. A good part of next season could've been dedicated to this stage of the apocalypse since we didn't see any of it while Rick was in the hospital. You could've even had the regular citizens teaming up with some soldiers to overthrow the Commander in the end. It had even less depth than last year's TWD Grady arc which I was really critical of. At least there they built up Dawn, the doctor and couple of others. It wasn't executed well enough, but at least they tried. Last couple of episodes of FTWD has been very disappointing. So many opportunities lost.
     
  9. Camilleyun

    Camilleyun Well-Known Member

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    I'm not a fan of blowing stuff up either, but from the government's standpoint it may make sense to sacrifice large population centers if they thought it would contain the outbreak and maintain the country as a whole.

    Like I said previously I'm trying to string together what we're watching with what we saw in TWD. When the soldier explained Cobalt, I just accepted this is why Shane saw civilians being gunned down in the hospital. I didn't wonder why the military didn't arm the hospital patients instead. Arming citizens wasn't the protocol. Would it make for some cool scenes, yeah, but that's not the way it went down, apparently. Shane saw the people get gunned down and later when he and and Lori were stuck in traffic trying to get out of the city, they saw military strikes on Atlanta. Since Cobalt involves evacuation of the military and the "humane" extermination of civilians, I'm assuming it's in anticipation of military strikes on LA like we saw in Atlanta. Obviously I could be very wrong. It's just what I came up with as I keep what we saw in TWD in mind.

    Don't get me wrong, I have my own gripes and disappointments ( I do with TWD at times too ) but I'm trying not to project my own expectations into every scene to the point that I miss what IS being shown.
     
  10. dhdhdh33

    dhdhdh33 Member

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    I agree. The civilian population could not be relied on to debrain the sick and apparently dead. There would be zombies in basements an tool sheds everywhere. Plus an apocalypse is the only time I would want to live next door to someone who could.
     
  11. Lindigo

    Lindigo Well-Known Member

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    You're right, people would have a terrible time doing it. Their minds wouldn't even take in that that was necessary. That's exactly why authorities would have to have harped that there was no other choice, why people would need to be told the glazed relative is going to kill everyone else. I think it is odd there was no effort to try to educate, since that would have been the only hope of controlling the spread. Maybe they did try and, as you say, people just couldn't do it. If they could have shown the failure of people to accept that, even after being told, that would have helped to make good on the advertising that we would see how society crashed so quickly. I don't see any evidence that arming people with information was ever attempted. It makes no sense to me that apparently the exact opposite happened and all communications were intentionally shut down. But it is what it is, so I just need to go with it.
     
  12. Lindigo

    Lindigo Well-Known Member

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    No, I didn't think a mob armed with smoking torches and assorted cudgels could retake the city. You're right, that would be NUTS. I only meant that an information barrage would have helped people to protect themselves from dying. If individuals don't know what desperate measures they need to take to survive, the army has no chance at all to contain the spread.

    I will never understand why there was no effort to educate, to share info, to keep communications up. Oh, well.
     
  13. EZD

    EZD Well-Known Member

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    My gut reaction is to agree with this but if I think about it more and admit that we see these things through the Lens of these characters instead of our own I can almost accept that these are people who just do not pay attention to what happens in the world for whatever reason.

    I realize it seems idiotic at best but I actually know people like this?

    I always ask and start conversations about stuff going on the the world and it shocks me how many otherwise "sensible" people that I know have no interest at all in anything but their own lives and further they even reject the idea that it has anything to do with them and they will not pay attention for fear of wasting time or being depressed by life and the things that go on. You know.....news.
    There is also a patent distrust of all things of the mainstream media and even less trust of the non-mainstream media?

    So if we are supposed to accept that this all happened in a week or so and these are this type of idiotic people then I can believe that there was some info broadcast out there but there are still people so stupid that they did not take advantage of it.

    Even Teachers!

    I can't imagine being like this for a second myself but I do have relatives who could easily remain oblivious right up until being eaten!
     
  14. Camilleyun

    Camilleyun Well-Known Member

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    It isn't just my opinion that the idea is nuts and downright impossible, which I still stand by, but more the fact that we are witnessing what has already come to pass in TWD. We aren't being shown civilians being trained and armed to aid the military because that's not how it went down. If this was the protocol during that time, Shane wouldn't have witnessed the hospital scene. If the military wasn't firebombing large population centers, Shane and Lori would not have witnessed that in Atlanta. I think Cobalt is the equivalent of what happened in Atlanta and probably every major city, and they are showing us how that went down.

    I still think many viewers are so fixated on what they want to see, that they are missing the actual story being shown. I totally agree on the lack of communication and particularly the lack of media coverage in the beginning. I am disappointed in how underplayed the media coverage was with the brief snippets we did actually get to see or hear.

    I hope I didn't come off as personally attacking your ideas , that was not my intent.:Grin:
     
  15. Morgotha

    Morgotha Well-Known Member

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    I'd like to see a mob of angry, frightened, torch-carrying people go head to head against a mass of slow moving zombies. I bet they'd do o.k., and what t.v. it would make.
     
  16. Lindigo

    Lindigo Well-Known Member

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    No! You are a gold standard at treating others courteously! I actually meant to thank you for that in an earlier exchange. :)

    Someone else also pointed out that the timeline was established all the way back in the comic book days, which was a big help for me to be resigned that it all had to go down so fast, to remain internally consistent in this universe.

    Still, I thought society would fail later in some parts of the country, the same way any war has multiple fronts where some are going better than others. I didn't bring the memory of the Atlanta firebombing into FTWD, because I didn't think the military would be taking the same action everywhere. Maybe it was that coordinated and it felt that hopeless to the Generals. We'll see!
     
  17. Casca910

    Casca910 Active Member

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    And the radiomen... who tell 2 people... who each tell 2 people... lather rinse repeat
     

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