Chapter 46-2: Under Pressure

[Gnex]

Every time the into music starts up now I get sad.......

[Gnex]

Never gonna let us down.... never gonna run around or desert us?

I do think he will make me cry when we have to say goodbye.

Your just trying to get Saul out of the way so you can have victor all to yourself!!!! Wait.... What?!?!?

[Litmaster]

Concerning Why Skittles Was Not Munched When Dunbar Fell:
This point, I am admittedly having a hard time with. So we are supposed to believe that, due to his Zombie-Stealth Sweat (and yet unjustified explanation insofar as why his sweat and no other has this particular effect), the Ink-led Zeds charged the castle, running hog wild over all the Dunbar inhabitants but one-- the lonely Skittles, standing petrified by the door as they all flooded past.

We know that Zeds are attracted to not only sweat, but also movement and sound (as testified by the car alarm Saul set off). So why was he not captured then along with the rest? I find it hard to believe that simply having a different scent would suddenly give one a Predator-like invisibility cloak to all things Zed.

Anyone else having trouble with this?

[Gnex]

Concerning Why Skittles Was Not Munched When Dunbar Fell:
This point, I am admittedly having a hard time with. So we are supposed to believe that, due to his Zombie-Stealth Sweat (and yet unjustified explanation insofar as why his sweat and no other has this particular effect), the Ink-led Zeds charged the castle, running hog wild over all the Dunbar inhabitants but one-- the lonely Skittles, standing petrified by the door as they all flooded past.

We know that Zeds are attracted to not only sweat, but also movement and sound (as testified by the car alarm Saul set off). So why was he not captured then along with the rest? I find it hard to believe that simply having a different scent would suddenly give one a Predator-like invisibility cloak to all things Zed.

Anyone else having trouble with this?

We know that Skittles let Ink into Dunbar..... Ink & Co. then spare skittles..... We have seen a few times where Ink has left someone. My thought is there is either something special about the people that Ink leaves, or....... Ink being a scientist before the outbreak, still has a scientific mindset and wants to leave certain people to see how they react, etc, etc..... Skittles and Puck and CJ were all left after almost everyone around them had been killed......

[LiamKerrington]

Concerning Why Skittles Was Not Munched When Dunbar Fell:
This point, I am admittedly having a hard time with. So we are supposed to believe that, due to his Zombie-Stealth Sweat (and yet unjustified explanation insofar as why his sweat and no other has this particular effect), the Ink-led Zeds charged the castle, running hog wild over all the Dunbar inhabitants but one-- the lonely Skittles, standing petrified by the door as they all flooded past.

We know that Zeds are attracted to not only sweat, but also movement and sound (as testified by the car alarm Saul set off). So why was he not captured then along with the rest? I find it hard to believe that simply having a different scent would suddenly give one a Predator-like invisibility cloak to all things Zed.

Anyone else having trouble with this?

He's got the zombie-agent in his system/ blood. Actually he "is" a zombie, but did not change the way most others did. In fact he may be a smart one, but did not step over the "edge" to become a full blown puppet of the monster hordes.
As I understand it the Smart Ones are accepted as semi-pack-leaders - not really Alpha, but close to it. So standard zombos won't attack Smart Ones, because they simply submitted to Skittles not knowing that he has not changed 100%.
And since Skittles was under his human side's control, his mind got wacka-dee-wack, and now he is a sole "survivor" in that way that he is recognized as a human in the eyes of humans and as a zombie in the eyes of the zombies.

This would explain why the zombies are not alert about Michael, Victor, and Saul showing up as humans, but smelling like "one of them". And since it is Skittel's sweat they use, they don't feel the urge to eat them. But this may change as soon as they encounter one of the Smart Ones who may "see" or "understand" the difference ...

Best wishes!
Liam

[MrRedBeard]

Redbeard, woodgas is a different process than biodisel. It uses a controlled fire to produce a smoke that can be used in the engine as an explosive gas. I would much rather see them try a woodgas conversion. Not as versatile or power dense as biodiesel, but easier logistics

Sorry about that I wasn't clear enough. The process of creating Woodgas is very similar to creating methanol plus the process to create methanol is more efficient than woodgas. Lye is sodium hydroxide used in the wash. I'm just saying that eventually stored resources will dwindle and these are two things you will likely end up creating anyways. Sounds like jobs for the colonist that have moved out near the lake.

[LiamKerrington]

Liam,

I think Saul's and Victor's first trip to ground zero described uncollected dead. People seemed to have died there, but were not collected like the other five million people in LA

I find it interesting that whatever the gas haze was melted through the body bag. If it was a real body bag, they are designed to contain body rot. Even if it is not, plastic does a good job resisting biology. Was it a strong exothermic reaction (heat) that melted it?

I think we must keep an open mind. It could very well be a chemical gas, but I would not rule out a spore cloud. We could have a fungus that throws spores, infects people, manipulates the host and then converts the host into more spores. I do not like to go too in depth with this stuff. It used to be my day job... But, I will allow myself another piled higher and deeper... Lol

There is a class of microbes that produce methane. It could be possible to harness this process and combine it with the spore life cycle. For dispersal, low density is better. Dandolines put those big pompom hats on to help the wind disperse them. Spores are pretty dense, but what if the microscopic spore had a methane balloon two or three times the size of the spore? It would still be microscopic, and much easier to disperse. We can milk this a bit more and have the spores sit in the methane deep underground and is disturbed by the hydrolic fracking technology that is now being used to vastly increase the amount of natural gas we can pump out of the ground. In real life they are fracking at ground zero.

I can go further down the crazy train, the slime molds normally do there own thing, but when a few of them think the growing conditions suck, they start pumping out a chemical signal to other slime molds to team up and produce spores together. I do not think KC has gone this route, but we have hard science that a single celll microbe can send out a signal that causes them to organize into a multicellular organism. Scifi can take the same concept and push it world wide to have multiple outbreaks.

#28-3 - No zombies, no living thing, even the dead were brown; that's what Saul states at the start of #28-3. And later, when they reach the target are near/ at ground zero, Saul and Victor observe "blood everywhere" and "a couple of bodys over there. "Rotting bodys were scattered all over." 6:14. And that while there was this "haze" Victor took a picture of with a camera. And there are all "those left over bodies" - at roughly 8:19+. I wonder: bodys of zombies or humans?

And all that months after Kalani and Pegs had their trouble at the area near the end of season #2. I think it is a safe assumption that back then those bodies were there as well. So, consodering the state of the dissolving/ decomposing zombie-body in the Mortuary I have some trouble seeing how the gas has come from the body, because Tanya's body was half as ikd as the bodys at ground zero when Saul and Victor were there.

What next: When Victor and Tanya visit Ground Zero in #40-1 and #40-2 the haze is gone at first and they can breath normally. The bodies were gone, too. But then the haze comes back through a crack in the ground, although there are no dead bodies around on the surface. What does this imply? Either it is true and piles of dead bodys in the underground keep evaporating the gas in unsteady eruptions and it does not matter what's going on on the surface, or the gas has a different source.

In the most recent episode of #46-2 we have this description provided by Tanya:
When Pegs appears, Pegs starts coughing and has trouble breathing the moment the door to the Mortuary is opened.
Then Tanya checks the trays and finds the bodybag of the oldest body in one of the trays. The body bag has melted away, and there was this yellow haze Tanya has recognized in Inglewood.

Ok. Check. The gas comes from the body - probably as kind of a product from the decomposing body of a zombie.

Mh ... That changes my theory in some regards, I guess. Thanks for pointing me towards it.

Best wishes Liam.

[HardKor]

Alright I've got a bit of a theory here:

The "facts":
Whatever the source of the gas is (either the remains of large numbers of zombie corpses or some sort of other natural deposit) it does seem to be contained underground.
Ink and his army are also located underground.
The gas seems to have a strange quality whereby it can both change humans into zombies but also drives zombies away in large concentrations (since no zombies were seen at ground zero while the haze was there.)

So here's my idea:
What if the haze is not only the cause of the outbreak (possibly) but also the key to defeating Ink. If a large concentration of gas were to be released to flood Ink's tunnels while the zombies are trapped inside (seal up the entrances that Michael, Vic, and Saul are ferreting out) it could kill them. And this could explain why Michael is going back over his journal, he's preparing himself to make a sacrifice by releasing the gas that will trap him as well.

OK you can all take off your

[Osiris]

[Storm]

Alright I've got a bit of a theory here:

The "facts":
Whatever the source of the gas is (either the remains of large numbers of zombie corpses or some sort of other natural deposit) it does seem to be contained underground.
Ink and his army are also located underground.
The gas seems to have a strange quality whereby it can both change humans into zombies but also drives zombies away in large concentrations (since no zombies were seen at ground zero while the haze was there.)

So here's my idea:
What if the haze is not only the cause of the outbreak (possibly) but also the key to defeating Ink. If a large concentration of gas were to be released to flood Ink's tunnels while the zombies are trapped inside (seal up the entrances that Michael, Vic, and Saul are ferreting out) it could kill them. And this could explain why Michael is going back over his journal, he's preparing himself to make a sacrifice by releasing the gas that will trap him as well.

OK you can all take off your

You know... Now I really want to see Michael dead at the end of the series...
Imagine them going Down the tunnels when the gas is gone, finding the corpse of Michael just sitting on the floor leaned up against a wall with his journal in his lap. It would feel quite weird to have him die since he seems to be the main character, but since we've had other points of view it's not really impossible.