A Plot Hole in The Walking Dead(TV Series)

[Vausch]

Well the standard idea for zombie stories goes like this:

The virus or cause of the zombie is infecting the dead, IE it only affects things that are dead but does not mean it's not in living things.

Zombie bites may not quite spread the infection itself in this case because it's in everybody, but instead they cause a rapid and dangerous infection that kills much quicker by causing it to lead to an infection in the heart or brain, let's say. It's a similar effect to how the komodo dragon kills.

This again is assuming we're talking Day of the Dead style, where you become a zombie simply by dying. I wouldn't know, I don't watch Walking Dead.

As for why it just now activated, well viruses can mutate very rapidly. It's why we can't cure the common cold or flu yet.

 

[AntiChri5]

I think it's like the commodo dragon effect; the bite is toxic enough to kill within hours plus there are such things as anti-biotic resistant bacteria which may result as a byproduct of being bitten by the equivalent of a corpse (whom, of course, has who knows what else festering in its mought for days/weeks/months).

Seems plausible to me, a much better transmission method than simple bites alone (seriously, how many of you would let the average person close enough to bite you, let alone a shambling undead one?)

You want to know the real plot hole? How do they keep finding and using ammunition against the undead horde when a spear and shield would be far more effective? Why do they wear simple civilian clothes when they can fashion some primitive armor to stick between them and the teeth of certain death?

Actually, in season 3 they are relying much more on melee combat (one of the characters is even using a spear and shield) with guns as a fallback emergency. At one point, when talking to a group who has been long out of the loop the leader of the group says not to shoot unless out of other options. And they......aqcuired a type of armour. At least a few of them.

 

[Mr.Pandah]

Robert Kirkman has said that the bite is fatal due to the number of diseases that a rotting corpse has. It infects with bacteria and what not. It doesn't trigger the virus, so much as allows it to have a chance to turn you once you die from other diseases. Once again, the bites are fatal due to the diseases they carry! Not the virus being triggered!

I understand that much, but the infection, those diseases, would be bacterial, which is why antibiotics should be able to save a person.

And it does save people...It's just that antibiotics are in severely short supply and that the infection spreads SO fast. Antibiotics aren't some super drug.

 

[Olrod]

His name's Edwin Jenner [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner], huh?

I see what they did there. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeaningfulName]

 

[Jfswift]

The walkers may have a mutated strain of the virus which is still dangerous. That's my best guess.

 

[NinjaSocks333]

Because the writers didn't think that far in advance? Kind of a simple explanation.

 

[espilcEkraD]

I assume they went with the normal zombie movie logic where a bite causes a Fever and that ends up killing you. You still turn into a walker when you die but the bites are supposed to kill you faster.

 

[Arakasi]

I'm going to have to assume that the airborn infection is different to the one that manifests once the person becomes a walker.
As such, when someone is bitten, this strengthened version then takes over the bitten one.

 

[CheckD3]

Just because you're a carrier doesn't mean that it's strong enough to overtake you. We all carry small diseases in us I'm sure, but our bodies can fight them off and don't require the need to make us feel ill, or are overtaken by them. The bite from the Walkers come from the disease being too over powering probably, which is why healthy people take longer to turn that either extremely injured people, or dead people, who have no immunities at all. Could also explain how an airborne disease only overtakes a few when it first takes shape and infects.

In short, the virus infects everyone, but only a few don't have the immune system to fight it off. When bit by the Walkers, the disease is strengthened, and body can't fight it back. It easily explains why virus started slow and grows and grows.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

I agree that the 'bites/scratches are fatal' thing is a bit of a plothole.

For one thing, the survivors get splashed with Walker blood so often they all would certainly be exposed to any viruses or bacteria common to Walkers (anyone remember that scene from 28 Days Later where the guy gets a single drop in his eye and is screwed?).

And if it IS just a matter of bites/scratches being dangerous solely due to standard infection, it seems like all you'd need is a bottle of iodine or a heap of salt to immediately rub into the wound and you'd be grand. Or hell, even a bottle of urine would serve as a disinfectant. If amputation works, it seems like any of those other options would.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

In short, the virus infects everyone, but only a few don't have the immune system to fight it off. When bit by the Walkers, the disease is strengthened, and body can't fight it back. It easily explains why virus started slow and grows and grows.

That doesn't really make sense. If you're HIV positive, and you're exposed to HIV again, you don't become more HIV positive.

Plus, there's been otherwise healthy characters who get a little nick and then inevitably turn. It doesn't seem to matter how much of an exposure you get (huge chunk ripped out of your leg, or a scrape on the arm), you're buggered either way.

 

[Olrod]

The virus is suppressed by a living person's immune system, so it's dormant although still there.

When the person dies the virus is no longer suppressed, and so it becomes superactive, reanimating the corpse.

Being bitten by a Walker infects the victim with this already-superactive virus, which then proceeds to kill the person.

 

[CheckD3]

In short, the virus infects everyone, but only a few don't have the immune system to fight it off. When bit by the Walkers, the disease is strengthened, and body can't fight it back. It easily explains why virus started slow and grows and grows.

That doesn't really make sense. If you're HIV positive, and you're exposed to HIV again, you don't become more HIV positive.

Plus, there's been otherwise healthy characters who get a little nick and then inevitably turn. It doesn't seem to matter how much of an exposure you get (huge chunk ripped out of your leg, or a scrape on the arm), you're buggered either way.

I can only assume all diseases/viruses are different, and HIV is just that strong a virus that your body has a very low chance of fighting it off. The zombie virus could be weak enough that your body can fight it until more is added.

And who knows how much the disease needs to take over. If you think about the remake of Dawn of the Dead,

Spoiler

the pregnant Russian woman gets a small scratch and it takes her months to turn, where as that dick Steve gets bit bad and turns pretty quickly

I re-read your post, and probably worded it wrong, and agree. Any amount could overpower the virus, hard to tell really without it being actually happening, in which case I think why it's happening would be least of our worries

 

[FrozenCones]

This is a bit of an off topic post but is about The Walking Dead so it has some relevance to this thread.

Question: How much time has elapsed between the second and third series?

 

[Caedus]

IMO, the series is great. Though there's something that's been bothering me for a while.

In the first season, Rick's all "don't let their blood touch your pores, you'll absorb the bad shit in it and turn walkers". But very quickly, they start bashing them almost happily, getting spatters on the face and such.

Why don't they turn zombie? I know they're all infected but when bashing open the head of a walker, there's bound to be a drop of blood going into your eyes/nose/mouth. Just like in 28 Days Later with the crow drooling fresh zombie blood.

Other than that, the CDC thing and "y'all contaminated" makes a nice goal for the overall story. I'm less bothered by that than the infection thing.

 

[Scarim Coral]

My mate came up with a theory with one of your plotholes-

Spoiler

He theories that the reason why you become a walker as soon as you died is because of your immune system which is what keeping you at bay from becoming a walker. As you died or get biten, your immune get weaker and weaker until it's gone therefore you become a walker.

I guessing with the first plothole you mention-

Spoiler

I don't know maybe the amount of the virus in a person blood in different from one another since a dead/ biten person has different amount of time to become a walker. Maybe that sample that got decontamination was the perfect about of virus in it?
Maybe for the intended cure, it suppose to cure the right amount in a infected person but too much of it would be an overdose?

 

[tendaji]

The virus becomes airborne, but when it infects a human, it basically goes dormant. It stays in waiting, instead of activating and turning everyone who breaths it in into a walker. With the bite, there are viruses, bacteria, and fungus that is all assaulting your body, and getting directly into your bloodstream. By that point, most immunology pills will be mostly ineffectual, due to an overload of the body's immune defenses.

Now the virus waits until the synapses within the brain ceases, because that's when it takes over and creates its own synapses, and jumpstarts the brain to turn them into a walker. To be honest, I really don't see much of an evolutionary pathway that would lead to this, sure we have some fungi that do take over ant brains to get them to go somewhere the fungus can grow, but not to the extent of walking corpses that only feed on more things, without any real reason to.

As for Jenner, he's been alone for a long time now, it could just have been a hypothesis of his, so he took the samples to test it, and then confirmed his hypothesis.

Captcha: "It's Super Delicious" Thank you for informing us about that Captcha, I'll just take your word for it.

 

[Starik20X6]

Everyone is infected, but the virus remains dormant in your system until you die. Once you die, the virus takes over your brain stem and uses rudimentary impulses in your cortex to control the body. The virus' reproductive cycle requires more dead bodies to take over, so it tries it's damnedest to kill any survivors to better spread the disease. Bites, as has been said, cause major bacterial infection that's almost universally fatal, thus are a perfect way for the virus to reproduce. Destroying the brain removes the virus' control center thus 'killing' it.

Better yet; why haven't they looked for motorcycle suits? Those kevlar babies are modern day armor, perfect versus biting.

Shhh! You're giving away my zombie survival plan!

IMO, the series is great. Though there's something that's been bothering me for a while.

In the first season, Rick's all "don't let their blood touch your pores, you'll absorb the bad shit in it and turn walkers". But very quickly, they start bashing them almost happily, getting spatters on the face and such.

Why don't they turn zombie? I know they're all infected but when bashing open the head of a walker, there's bound to be a drop of blood going into your eyes/nose/mouth. Just like in 28 Days Later with the crow drooling fresh zombie blood.

Other than that, the CDC thing and "y'all contaminated" makes a nice goal for the overall story. I'm less bothered by that than the infection thing.

I guess they were still learning the nature of the infection. When you've got no idea how it spreads you'd want to take every precaution you could. Once they realise a little splash on you won't make you turn, they can be more hands-on with their walker-slaying.

 

[PH3NOmenon]

I haven't watched the show since season 2 somewhere, so I might be missing things, but I do know some things about viruses.

"The virus is in all of us." schtick can actually be true. Humans carry an awful lot of non-protein-coding DNA. Seriously, an awful lot. Considering all possible splicing effects, it might be there, but lacking the needed transcription activators or translational factors to have any effect.

At the same time, it's never mentioned what kind of virus it is. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_classification for those curious.) Some viruses can actually infect people and then bury their genetic information in the host's genome, laying dormant for however long they want. The triggers for re-activation can be so diverse that anything the show writers want to dream up should be feasible.

Blood tests could be useful to determine if people are just carrying the viral DNA or if they're actively producing viral protein (meaning the virus is "switched on").


They're not necessarily plotholes, I suppose. But somehow I doubt that the writers actually care or if they have any real idea about how their virus works. They're probably plotholes-that-aren't-plotholes-by-sheer-luck, or something.

 

[Bloodtrozorx]

"No, not the ones they put down. The ones they didn't - the walkers, like the one I shot today. C'ause he'd have ripped into you, tried to eat you, taken some flesh at least. Well, I guess if this is the first you're hearing it, I know how it must sound... But listen, one thing I do know - don't you get bit. I saw your bandage and that's what we were afraid of. Bites kill you. The fever burns you out. But then after a while... you come back."- Morgan Jones Season 1 ep. 1.

I would assume that its an incredibly fast acting bacterial infection that results in a fever that kills you then you're reanimated by the virus. At least based on this explanation from season 1.