Watching Dead - A Walking Dead Podcast - 811 – Dead or Alive Or

“Dead or Alive Or” crash lands back to Earth after the pleasant surprise that was last episode, and there’s no “Jadis makes chunky beef chili” aspect to take your mind off things.  It’s the saddest traveling road show you’ve ever seen starring Father Gabriel and Dr. Carson.  It’s Carol and Morgan morgalize over a young boy’s soul.  It’s Daryl losing control over his refugee group because of arguing about the loyalties of Dwight.  And Maggie making hard decisions on the Hilltop, which is the most interesting thing about the episode and so of course serves as the “C” plot.  Can we get a second helping of that Zombie chili, ya’ll?

Watching Dead - A Walking Dead Podcast - 810 – The Lost and the Plunderers

Jim is off traveling the world this week, but Nina Perez from Project Fandom joins the lonely A.Ron to talk about the latest episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead which… isn’t half bad as far as these things go.  Lots of Simon, an effective Rick vs Negan scene, and one of the most disgustingly awesome set pieces in all of The Walking Dead history combine to make for an entertaining episode.  Sure, Rick’s back to being a loon, the garbage people are still garbage, and Oceanside has clearly lost their collective minds, but that’s why we said it’s “not half bad” instead of “pretty good”.

Watching Dead - A Walking Dead Podcast - 809 – Honor

Jim and A.Ron are here to say goodbye to Carl, and to have the debate about whether or not we should be saying goodbye in the first place.  While acknowledging this is an above par episode of The Walking Dead by AMC Studios standards, it commits several offenses, chief among them the decision to undercut a fairly effective scene of a father and surrogate mother saying tearful goodbyes to their son with yet. More. Morgalizing.  Everyone involved is too good for what they’re doing, perhaps even including us, but we’ll be here to continue to catalog the decline of a once great television empire.

Bald Move Pulp - Altered Carbon Season One Wrapup

We spin up Netflix’s Altered Carbon after we’ve decanted it for a few weeks, to see what we make of it in our final analysis.  Cool concepts, excellent design, and decent sci-fi action are slightly undercut by sometimes silly and hammy execution, and a failure to take ideas to their logical conclusion.  Still, we’re always down to ponder futurism and human singularities, so we dig it.  It will be interesting to see if and how they decide to proceed with future seasons!