I disagree with a lot of Deanna's planning: collecting all the firearms and locking them up, allowing a man to go unpunished for beating his family simply because he's a doctor, letting her oldest son lead recon teams and keep coming back with dwindling members, ignoring all advice from a proven leader and survivor.

However, Deanna is smart enough to admit when she's wrong, and is letting Rick teach the Alexandrians how to defend themselves and luring the walkers away from Alexandria. Unfortunately, Rick's developed a "take no chances" attitude and it cost the Alexandrians a half-dozen people. Rick's ideas about training the Alexandrians how to fight, and luring the walkers away from Alexandria should've happened the day after Rick was made town constable.

 

Actually it very defensible, all of the things you point out are only issues because you have learned they are needed based on watching 5 seasons of TWD and understand the big picture.

Alexandria has survived in a unique geographical safe zone due to walkers falling into a pit somewhere out of town, so they've had no learning experience of large numbers of walkers finding their town. Same for outside human threats. If you don't have any threats, don't have any walkers problems you don't know that there are any problems to defend against.

It would be like criticizing them for not being prepared for Godzilla, or King Kong or dragons, if the threats don't exist you're not going to need to be proactive and install a defense for them.

That's the environment they have been surviving in since the apocalypse, no Godzilla, no King Kong, no dragons, no walker threat and no human threat, no reason for them to do anything to defend against them.

 

For all her failings, she did recognize that the community could not go on living as they were; and welcomed Rick's group with the idea of the community would be made stronger.

She was also receptive to Rick's suggestions and views, other leaders might find it difficult to let go of such power.

 

Hmmmmm. No.

Godzilla and King Kong and Dragons dont' exist in their world. Walkers do.

There's a difference between preparing for a myth and preparing for a known reality, even if that reality is not in your backyard yet.

 

It's only a reality if it exists. The citizens of Alexandria would no more prepare for a threat no one knows about such as walker hoards or human attacks than they would for any other unknown threats such as an attack from above due to helicopter invaders, a tsunami or hordes of bigfoot tribes. As I said, we have seen the threats, they never have, you don't defend against something you don't even know exists.

Walkers do exist as you said, but in their area due to the quarry, they have little to no walker threat that their great massive walls haven't simply handled for them by keeping the odd one that shows up rarely from doing anything until they decide to eliminate it. That is their reality, a greatly diminished amount of walkers compared to what goes on in the rest of the show. Those walls they built have been more than adequate to be all they have needed to live a safe life up till now.

 

No, that's not the same thing, we know about the possibility of a massive earthquake because :

There have been massive earthquakes in the past, the damages are recorded and known as well as we've seen solutions that help prevent devastation such as reinforcing buildings against them.

Alexandria hasn't ever faced walker hoard threats or human threats, they don't even know they exist to be worried about them. In their minds they've over defended for the known threats they know exist, which are a few walkers here and there that end up there and they've got a gate and walls which gives them peace of mind against someone who might stumble upon them and not be a good person, even though they've yet to have anyone do that. The threat level to them has been almost zero so of course their responses and readiness to the massive threats that we've seen are not something even on their radar.

If the Alexandrians have been over run repeatedly by walker hoards, have had attack after attack upon their community from hostiles AND they were acting like they were with no guards etc... then of course you'd say WTF is wrong with you people? But again, no problems, no way to know there is a problem. They've got a nice big fence, it keeps out the few and far between walkers that show up rarely and no humans have ever threatened them with an attack. Everything had been good in Alexandria they could focus on community not defense of non-existent threats, of course we know the walker threat has been artificial due to the quarry, but they didn't know that.

 

I can disagree with her decisions, but would NOT go so far as to say she's a bad leader.

As soon as walkers started appearing, they built stout walls to keep them out. Good planning. Presumably the walls are strong enough to keep out a reasonably sized amount of them attacking at once, and no wall short of some huge concrete structure will keep out a horde consisting of half the population of Washington, D.C.

As far as we know, they've never had an attack by human invaders. They try and screen new people before even letting their presence be known, and assuming they aren't on a major thoroughfare, she must feel avoiding contact would be their safest route. This is not unreasonable, considering there are only 50 of them or so, if another force did decide to attack them, say by showing up at night and getting in good position to fire then ramming a truck through the gate and killing people when they ran out of their homes to respond, they might get slaughtered no matter how prepared they were.

As far as the unarmed populace, I personally think that's a bad idea, but again, we don't know the full story. They've had to expel multiple people from the camp prior to Rick's group meeting them. Were there shootings of one townsperson against another? If so it would be reasonable for her to say that the townspeople themselves presented a greater danger than outsiders. Is that an excuse to NOT train people to shoot and fight, store weapons in multiple locations, etc? No, but she may have put getting basic safety (the walls), food, water, electricity, etc. as a higher priority - again, one may have decided differently, but her actions aren't unreasonable.

On Pete, he's someone who you'd want to see justice delivered to. OTOH, if he's your only surgeon and who's the one that's been keeping your people alive after construction related accidents, etc.? It would be a tough decision to kick him out. Think about "diplomatic imunity" now. Someone from another country can run over someone and get sent back to their own country rather than facing justice here, so it's not palatable, but at least it's understandable why she looked the other way.

At the end of the day, her methods to date have kept a much higher percentage of her people alive than Rick's methods, the Governor's or the Terminites, and she has a compound that's safe from Walkers, food and water, sanitation, occasional electricity, medicine, etc., etc. It's therefore hard to say she's the worst ever.

I didn't see anything about the kids going to school though. That really bothered me. What's the point of building all this if there's no one to repair it in the next generation?

 

No, a myth is still greatly different than a potential. We don't pay for godzilla insurance, but we pay for health insurance, even if we aren't sick yet. Two separate ballparks.

 

And the alexandrians know about the possibility of a walker threat because:

they are aware that almost everyone has turned into walkers.

 

My home insurance went up so much this year, I feel as if I should be covered for Godzilla, King Kong, zombie horde, dragon, harpy, chimera, Minotaur, werewolf, wendigo, and vampire attack as well as structural damage due to sharknado.

 

I'm covered against Crazy Content Toe.

 

Is that actually your toe? Please say yes.

 

Possibly.

 

The sad part is that even if you have coverage for something truly major, when the event happens the insurance company will say, "Oops, Act of God, we aren't responsible", and you'll still be on your own.

 

I'm going to pretend that it is.

 

My home insurance went up so much this year, I should be covered against God.

 

I actually meant to quote your other post but whatever- I think when Carol was first meeting the other teens they had mentioned going to school. Carl was weirded out by it.

 

Really? My opinion of Deanna just went up! She might have been trying to continue "normalcy", but even so it was a good decision.