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dailyfeartwdgifs · 5 years

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Fear The Walking Dead Season 5, Episode 2 Review: 'The Hurt That Will Happen'

Fear The Walking Dead has gone all Chernobyl in its fifth season, introducing us to a new region impacted by a nuclear plant meltdown. Radioactive zombies roam the land and various mysterious clues point toward a new, highly organized group that's almost certainly related to the people who took Rick Grimes away in Season 9 of The Walking Dead.

I was not a big fan of Fear The Walking Dead's Season 5 premiere, breaking with my fellow critics, all of whom apparently really liked the episode. (It had a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes until they added my review into the mix, dropping it down to a 93%).

I hate to rain on anyone's parade (well, that's not strictly true) but I can't help speaking my mind. I'm a critic, not a sycophant. The Season 5 premiere wasn't the worst episode this show has ever produced, but the characters are just so ridiculous at this point, and the entire premise ("We're here to help!") is astonishingly lame and contrived. It becomes hard to watch without a great deal of eye-rolling.

This Sunday's episode, the awkwardly titled "The Hurt That Will Happen", isn't much better. There are still too many instances of characters behaving like idiots and the whole thing remains brutally boring—and honestly, a show with radioactive zombies shouldn't be boring! I don't think people were quite as stupid this week as last—nobody flew a plane they had no idea how to pilot, crash-landing in a completely unknown region in order to "help" some guy they "met" on the radio. That's so egregiously moronic that it pretty much ruined last week's episode right out of the gates. I don't think people were quite as stupid this week as last—nobody flew a plane they had no idea how to pilot, crash-landing in a completely unknown region in order to "help" some guy they "met" on the radio. That's so egregiously moronic that it pretty much ruined last week's episode right out of the gates.

But we still have plenty of stupid in Episode 2. Luciana, for instance, decides to go outside by herself to see what a large crashing noise was. I can understand taking a quick peak—it was the radio tower, blown over by non-existent wind or maybe wind that only blows over large objects, skipping over more mundane things like human hair—but then she just stays outside. In the dark. By herself, injured and alone.

When zombies approach, she doesn't hurry back inside to safety, the clear and obvious thing to do when you're injured and on meds that impact your cognitive functions. Instead she pulls out her gun and tries to shoot the walkers. I get that she was doped up and not thinking clearly, but even in a doped up state your first instinct is going to be running away because people on painkillers usually do understand that they're not at their best. Luciana knew perfectly well that she wasn't going to be a great fighter in her current state. The only conceivable reason why she'd stay outside to fight walkers is because the show is actively trying to make her (and every other character) look stupid. She makes it back, but only just barely. The pursuing walkers are later decapitated by someone—it's a mystery—their heads hung up as some kind of warning to the survivors (helpers?).

While all this is going on, Morgan and Alicia are out trying to find Al who went missing last week when she stupidly went out at night in the rain all alone to investigate the weird armored zombie and got knocked out by someone. Maybe the same someone who cut off those heads, maybe someone else. Either way, not Al's shining moment. (Later, Daniel says that Al can take care of herself, but I'm not so sure).

In any case, Morgan gets into a scuffle with a zombie and is suddenly tripped up by a set of bolas that someone threw at him. I had to watch it twice to fully tell what just happened. It's a pretty weird weapon to have especially for this new character. The zombie is making things tough on Morgan but then a gun goes off and a stranger dressed in a gas mask and protective science-uniform-outfit shows up and tells him to take his clothes off and stop talking. She doesn't have time to explain, but basically the zombies are radioactive and he needs to get cleaned up right away or he could get radiation poisoning just from making physical contact with them.

She tells him to be quiet because apparently talking can make it worse, and when he keeps asking questions she raises her gun and says something about not wanting to do it this way—so I guess she was going to shoot him for talking? In order to help him? I'm confused. I guess it doesn't matter what she was about to do because Alicia comes in like a bat out of hell and knocks her to the ground, demanding where she took Al. She tells them about the nuclear plant meltdown and the radiation zombies that she's hunting down. Morgan gets cleaned up and spends the rest of the episode in a "Don't Mess With Texas" shirt which is pretty funny.

Alicia gets in a fight with some zombies, some of which are radioactive and some who aren't—"I can't tell which is which!" she cries out at one point after the zombies get all muddy. She has a gun because she took it from the nuclear plant lady, but for some strange reason she doesn't use it. She ends up tossing it back to the lady because I guess you're not allowed to fire someone else's gun in the zombie apocalypse. I just don't know anymore. It's a close call for Alicia who, well, handled the whole thing pretty poorly for no reason whatsoever.

Not long after, John Dorie and June radio them (what would they do in this show without all these radios?) and tell them they've found more of the radioactive zombies, all burned in a pile. So they head over there to deal with it and June finds a car that starts up just fine and has three-quarters of a tank of gas. How convenient for them!

Still, they're all waiting on Strand to find a second plane to come save them with because I guess driving is just not an option for some reason. Seriously, can someone please let me know why driving to get them isn't on the table? Strand and his trucker pals have a truck and an endless supply of gas. Just go drive to wherever they are and pick them up. Yes, it will take longer to drive. The silver lining, however, is that driving won't result in yet another plane crash. Nobody can fly a plane!

Hasn't anyone pointed this out yet? Haven't they all learned that flying a plane when you don't know how is a bad idea? Do they ever sit around and talk about actually important stuff or is all dialogue reserved for Morgan's preachy mumbo jumbo about being "stuck" and not having to be, and opening doors and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .

Fortunately, when Strand goes to visit Daniel, the grouchy realist doesn't lend him his plane. "Whenever you try to help people, you make things worse," he tells Strand, and he's not wrong. Certainly taking the plane and trying to fly it would end badly. Daniel tells Strand that if he sees him again he'll shoot him in the face. I really do love Daniel, but I'm not sure how he'll figure in to the rest of the season, unless Strand plans some kind of elaborate caper to steal the plane and Daniel is dragged back into all this nonsense against his will.

Of course, by the time all that goes down they definitely could have driven to wherever Alicia and the rest of the team are, presumably still in Texas given Morgan's replacement shirt. They were going to drive all the way to Alexandria, they can drive to this place instead. Or they could all hop in June's car and drive themselves back home. This is what I mean when I say I just can't get behind this season's premise or overarching narrative. It's stupid to fly a plane when you don't know how, especially if you're doing it to go "rescue" complete strangers. It's far too risky for any sane person, and it's far too stupid for any thinking person with half a brain. The show's producers and writers ignore all that for the spectacle and for the fake conflict it creates.

What fake conflict? Well, the notion that Alicia and her crew are stuck, first of all. They can find cars with gas easily enough and drive themselves home. Second, the notion that Strand needs to find a second plane—which just so happens to be with Daniel, the guy that hates Strand more than anyone—is a fake conflict. Strand could also simply drive to his friends using his trucker buddies. The whole Strand meeting up with Daniel thing is also ridiculously contrived. Al has apparently met every single possible survivor of the apocalypse. Better still, every survivor from the dam just happened to end up hundreds of miles away in Texas. What luck!

The final fake conflict is only fake because of all the contrivances and nonsense used to get us to this point. I'm speaking of Logan (Matt Frewer) and his little prank. He tricked Alicia and Morgan into leaving the mill unguarded and then swooped in when they left. It's a clever idea and I'd have no problem with it if it didn't require all the protagonists to be such monumentally foolish people. Sometimes being foolish or making a poor choice creates a real conflict, because sometimes smart people do stupid things. Think Robb Stark and his poor choices with the Freys in Game of Thrones. That had consequences. But if Game of Thrones built all its conflicts around characters acting uncharacteristically stupid, it would get old very quickly. Robb's mistake was falling in love and that's pretty relatable. Our heroes in Fear made a much less relatable mistake with the plane (etc).

Creating contrived conflicts based on characters acting like idiots seems to be the narrative strategy in Fear The Walking Dead in virtually all of its seasons except Season 3. Because let's be honest: Fear The Walking Dead did not have a great first or second season. Madison caused far too much trouble everywhere she went to be considered a good leader. I always think back to the episode when they showed up at that island and Madison was convinced that the best idea would be for her to take the family's kids away from them and then pretty much everyone died in a totally unnecessary disaster. By the end of Season 2 I thought they should just cancel it and start over, and then I ate my words when Season 3 was so good.

Season 3 crafted a much more interesting conflict between the Native Americans and the survivalists. It was over water and land and nobody was clearly good or clearly evil. I loved how much the show improved in Season 3 and I'm just so bummed out that it's gone so far (back) downhill first in Season 4 and now Season 5. Season 4 had such a promising first few episodes, too, but quickly lost its way. Now we're two episodes deep into Season 5 and it's just . . . not very good. It's not as bad as it was during the Martha episodes, but it really should be so much better. AMC really needs to hire more talented writers and producers for this show. The acting is largely fine, the special effects are good, the cinematography and directing are typically fine. It's the scripts, the story, the constant stupidity and inconsistencies, that drag into down into the zombie muck. Mostly it's just dull and frustrating to watch. Hopefully things pick up next week.

#ftwd #fear the walking dead #season 5 #episode 502 #review #article #forbes #aheartfulloflexa #camila

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savetopnow · 6 years

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2018-03-09 22 FUNNY now

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nancygduarteus · 6 years

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74 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2017

This past year, reporters on The Atlantic’s science, technology, and health desks worked tirelessly, writing hundreds of stories. Each of those stories is packed with facts that surprised us, delighted us, and in some cases, unsettled us. Instead of picking our favorite stories, we decided to round up a small selection of the most astonishing things we learned in 2017. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did, and we hope you’ll be back for more in 2018:

The record for the longest top spin is over 51 minutes. Your fidget spinner probably won’t make it past 60 seconds.

Flamingos have self-locking legs, which makes them more stable on one leg than on two.

If your home furnace emits some methane pollution on the last day of 2017, it’ll almost certainly leave the atmosphere by 2030—but it could still be raising global sea levels in 2817.

By analyzing enough Facebook likes, an algorithm can predict someone’s personality better than their friends and family can.

There are cliff-hanging nests in northern Greenland that have been used continuously for 2,500 years by families of the largest falcons in the world. Researchers read the layers of bird poop in the nests like tree rings.

Hippos can’t swim.

Six-month-old babies can understand basic words like mouth and nose. They even know that concepts like mouth and nose are more related than nose and bottle.

Most common eastern North American tree species have been mysteriously shifting west since 1980.

In 2016, Waymo’s virtual cars logged 2.5 billion miles in simulated versions of California, Texas, and Arizona.

America’s emergency 9-1-1 calling infrastructure is so old that there are some parts you can’t even replace anymore when they break.

The transmitters on the Voyager spacecraft have as much power as refrigerator light bulbs, but they still ping Earth every day from billions of miles away.

By one estimate, one-third of Americans currently in their early 20s will never get married.

Donald Trump has a long and gif-heavy presence on the early web.

Somewhere around 10,000 U.S. companies—including the majority of the Fortune 500—still assess employees based on the Myers-Briggs test.

Humans have inadvertently created an artificial bubble around Earth, formed when radio communications from the ground interact with high-energy particles in space. This bubble is capable of shielding the planet from potentially dangerous space weather like solar flares.

Climate-change-linked heat waves are already making tens of thousands of Americans sleep worse.

China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century.

A lay minister and math Ph.D. was the best checkers player in the world for 40 years, spawning a computer scientist’s obsessive quest to solve the entire game to prove the man could be beaten.

There is a huge waterfall in Antarctica, where the Nansen Ice Shelf meets the sea.

On Facebook, Russian trolls created and promoted dual events on May 21, 2016, bringing Muslim and anti-Muslim Americans into real-world conflict at an Islamic center in Houston.

Boxer crabs wield sea anemones like boxing gloves, and if they lose one of these allies, they can make another by ripping the remaining one in half and cloning it.

Cocktail napkins on airplanes may be essentially useless to travelers, but to airlines they are valuable space for advertising.

Scientists can figure out the storm tracks of 250-year-old winter squalls by reading a map hidden in tree rings across the Pacific Northwest.

On islands, deer are occasionally spotted licking small animals, like cats and foxes—possibly because the ocean breeze makes everything salty.

People complained of an “epidemic of fake news” in 1896.

Languages worldwide have more words for describing warm colors than cool colors.

Turkeys are twice as big as they were in 1960, and most of that change is genetic.

Two Chinese organizations control over half of the global Bitcoin-mining operations—and by now, they might control more. If they collaborate (or collude), the blockchain technology that supposedly secures Bitcoin could be compromised.

U.S. physicians prescribe 3,150 percent of the necessary amount of opioids.

Physicists discovered a new “void” in the Great Pyramid of Giza using cosmic rays.

Daily and seasonal temperature variations can trigger rockfalls, even if the temperature is always above freezing, by expanding and contracting rocks until they crack.

The eight counties with the largest declines in life expectancy since 1980 are all in the state of Kentucky.

The decline of sales in luxury timepieces has less to do with the rise of smartwatches and more to do with the rising cost of gold, the decline of the British pound, and a crackdown on Chinese corruption.

Spider silk is self-strengthening; it can suck up chemicals from the insects it touches to make itself stronger.

Intelligence doesn’t make someone more likely to change their mind. People with higher IQs are better at crafting arguments to support a position—but only if they already agree with it.

Among the strangest and yet least-questioned design choices of internet services is that every service must be a global service.

Steven Gundry, one of the main doctors who has contributed to Goop, believes Mercola.com, a prominent anti-vaccine site, is a site that gives “very useful health advice.”

At many pumpkin- and squash-growing competitions, entries are categorized by color: Any specimen that’s at least 80 percent orange is a pumpkin, and everything else is a squash.

Only 2 percent of all U.S. Google employees are black, and only 4 percent are Hispanic. In tech-oriented positions, the numbers fall to 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

The weight of the huge amount of water Hurricane Harvey dumped on Texas pushed the earth’s crust down 2 centimeters.

Russian scientists plan to re-wild the Arctic with bioengineered woolly mammoths.

The NASA spacecraft orbiting Jupiter can never take the same picture of the gas planet because the clouds of its atmosphere are always moving, swirling into new shapes and patterns.

During sex, male cabbage white butterflies inject females with packets of nutrients. The females chew their way into these with a literal vagina dentata, and genitals that double as a souped-up stomach.

If all people want from apps is to see new stuff scroll onto the screen, it might not matter if that content is real or fake.

Cardiac stents are extremely expensive and popular, and yet they don’t appear to have any definite benefits outside of acute heart attacks.

Animal-tracking technology is just showing off at this point: Researchers can glue tiny barcodes to the backs of carpenter ants in a lab and scan them repeatedly to study the insects’ movements.

One recommendation from a happiness expert is to build a “pride shrine,” which is a place in your house that you pass a lot where you put pictures that trigger pleasant memories, or diplomas or awards that remind you of accomplishments.

Some ancient rulers, including Alexander the Great, executed a substitute king after an eclipse, as a kind of sacrificial hedge.

A colon-cancer gene found in Utah can be traced back to a single Mormon pioneer couple from the 1840s.

In November and December 2016, 92,635 people called the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line to ask for turkey-cooking advice. That’s an average of over 1,500 calls per day.

In the United States as a whole, less than 1 percent of the land is hardscape. In cities, up to 40 percent is impervious.

Half of murdered women are killed by their romantic partners.

Among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines, storytelling is valued more than hunting, fishing, or basically any other skill.

The familiar metal tokens in the board game Monopoly didn’t originally come with the game, to save costs. Popular bracelet charms of the Great Depression were only added to the box later.

Thanks to the internet, American parents are seeking out more unique names for their children, trying to keep them from fading into the noise of Google. The median boy’s name in 2015 (Luca) was given to one out of every 782 babies, whereas the median boy’s name in 1955 (Edward) was given to one out of every 100 babies.

America’s five most valuable companies are all located on the Pacific Coast between Northern California and Seattle.

President Kennedy secretly had Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder, which he treated with injections of amphetamines and steroids from Max Jacobson, a doctor whose nickname was “Dr. Feelgood.”

Some of the most distant stars in the Milky Way were actually “stolen” from a nearby galaxy as the two passed near each other.

Hummingbirds drink in an unexpected way: Their tongues bloom open like a flower when they hit nectar, and close on the way out to grab some of the sweet liquid.

New York City has genetically distinct uptown and downtown rats.

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 created one of the most detailed maps of the deep ocean ever.

People who can’t find opioids are taking an over-the-counter diarrhea drug. Some are consuming as many as 400 to 500 pills a day.

It used to take 10,000 pounds of pork pancreas to make one pound of insulin. (Insulin is now made by genetically engineered microbes.)

Astronauts on the International Space Station can’t enjoy the yummy aromas of hot meals like we can on Earth because heat dissipates in all different directions in microgravity.

“Sex addiction” isn’t recognized by the psychiatric community in any official capacity, and it’s actually a deeply problematic concept that risks absolving men of agency in sexual violence.

The peculiar (and previously unidentified) laughter that was recorded for the Golden Record was—well, we won’t spoil it for you until you read the story.

The oldest rocks on Earth, which are 4 billion years old, have signs of life in them, which suggests that the planet was biological from its very infancy.

Fire ants form giant floating rafts during floods. But you can break up the rafts with dish soap.

Until this year, no one knew about a whole elaborate system of lymphatic vessels in our brains.

People are worse storytellers when their listeners don’t vocally indicate they’re paying attention by saying things like “uh-huh” and “mm-hmm.”

China’s new radio telescope is large enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet.

Scientists calculated that if everyone in the United States switched from eating beef to eating beans, we could still get around halfway to President Obama’s 2020 climate goals.

The reason that dentistry is a separate discipline from medicine can be traced back to an event in 1840 known as the “historic rebuff”—when two self-trained dentists asked the University of Maryland at Baltimore if they could add dental training to the curriculum at the college of medicine. The physicians said no.

Naked mole rats can survive for 18 minutes without any oxygen at all.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/the-science-facts-that-blew-our-minds-in-2017/549122/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 6 years