The Walking Dead: The Season's Five Worst Decisions

Part of the baggage that comes with telling stories of survival horror is exploring and becoming invested in characters who are struggling to survive in dangerous, untenable situations...and acting like total morons while they do so. It's that old joke, right? The plucky heroine in a slasher film always runs up the stairs from the bad guy, effectively trapping herself on the second floor.Every zombie movie seems to have at least one person who, exasperated with the group's decisions, decides to go it on their own and dies almost immediately. Basically, in order to heighten the drama and make the consequences more dire for the characters (and so more compelling/exciting for the audience), characters in a show like AMC's The Walking Dead have to do mind-numbingly stupid things that leave virtually every member of the audience at home yelling at the screen.

How did nobody shoot The Governor? Okay, so it might not have saved Hershel (and Michonne who, you've got to figure at that point, was a goner) -- but had somebody just picked off The Governor before the siege on the prison began, it would have started things out on the right foot. The fact that prior to Hershel's death, nobody was hysterically screaming and running away while they fired probably would have improved the accuracy of the potential kill shot while creating no additional threat to Rick's group of survivors. The moment the first shot escaped from Rick's Colt Python, everything unfolded exactly the way it would have if somebody had taken out The Governor beforehand, except that Rick wouldn't have been beaten to a bloody pulp by Ol' One-Eye and maybe Tara wouldn't have defected to Team Prison (although by that point it was pretty clear she was not cut out for the fight Phil was picking). The instinct to err on the side of caution and reason is an admirable one and on some level an understandable one -- except that by this point, The Governor had already tried to kill them all, failed, succeeded in killing dozens of his own men/soldiers/friends and then somehow raised another army of a--holes try to "kill them all" a second time. Does anyone seriously believe that Rick's down-home country charm is going to be able to persuade The Governor to act like a better guy? At least taking the first shot -- even in a worst-case scenario where you don't kill the guy -- gives them a bigger priority than chopping the head off the old man, and maybe puts your "front line" of survivors by the tank in a position to make a move or escape. Okay, so this one falls firmly into the area of My Opinion, rather than an objectively stupid decision, but since they were all standing there lamenting not having done more to put a stop to this jerk after the last time he did exactly this, I stand by it.

Leaving Rick defenseless If the justification for not taking Rick on a supply run in "Claimed" is that he's too injured/in recovery to be useful, how do you then justify leaving him completely defenseless by allowing Carl to take his gun? Is there anything on the road to traveling with a knife and Michonne can't give him just as good a chance at defending himself from, as a firearm that will draw the unwanted attention of walkers if it's actually fired? Now -- not that they know it yet, but still -- they've got a herd of semiliterate thugs after them, all angling to kill Rick for the crime of having been noticed under the bed before he killed his way out of the bathroom. And don't get us started on the fact that Rick didn't take the gun off the bed while he was making his escape, or kill Tony, who had seen his face...!

Daryl and Beth burn down the house The metaphor of Daryl burning down his past is clever enough and all, until you realize that the apex predators basically only respond to light and movement...you know, like a GIANT FIRE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS. This is a beautiful, symbolic gesture that in practice would draw walkers from miles around and endanger the pair...and everybody else who happens to be traveling through this part of the woods. Also, there's the fact that

What kind of idiot goes through that tunnel? Okay, so Glenn's stubborn refusal to take the extra travel day makes a little bit of sense. Given the fact that the blood on the sign was dry, it means he's got a legitimate reason to wonder whether Maggie and company were trapped in there, and if he makes it to Terminus without her, he will always regret that he didn't go in and check all the walker faces. But once he got halfway in, his hobbled traveling companion in tow, and realized that there was basically zero chance of survival and that Maggie was not among the undead...well, what remaining justification is there for wading into certain doom? Even at the end, I kinda get it, because the priceless "don't be an ass" advice apparently resonated with him and so he decided to stay and take responsibility for Tara, whom he had dragged along on this suicide run, but prior to that moment, you had plenty of time to retreat back away from the army of oncoming corpses through the downhill slope of the portion of the tunnel you had already cleared. Seriously, Glenn. Just...THINK.

SO MANY TIMES, people didn't kill the dying or undead. So it's been a while now since our survivors learned that "we are all infected." That's a pretty key piece of information going into item #3 here. In "30 Days Without An Accident," Rick gives in to the wishes of a crazy woman who just tried to kill him, who asks him not to shoot prevent her from reanimating so that she can be with her zombie husband, who is so frail and small that we have assume (having never seen him on camera) that he's either a disembodied head or emaciated and dehydrated. Let's go back a couple of seasons: who was it that killed Dale? Oh, that's right -- a walker that Carl couldn't bring himself to kill. But it wasn't just Rick that did this, and it wasn't just once. Tyreese spared a walker on the railroad tracks because Lizzie begged him to. Of course, that walker couldn't hurt anybody, right? I mean, it didn't have use of its legs and was just crawling pathetically around on the ground. You know -- like the one that took Hershel's leg. It almost makes it seem tame by comparison when a dying man that Tyreese and Carol don't kill (or even offer to), in spite of the fact that the last moments of his life before he died and reanimated were spent mourning the just-then loss of his family, becomes an undead ghoul and attacks Daryl and Beth. Well, at least there was no loss of life or limb. Bonus: Falling For Obvious Traps Daryl and Beth don't stop to think for a second that the totally empty, well-maintained house with a fully-stocked pantry, an animal trap in the woods behind it and basically everything else you could think of to make it perfect...might be a trap? Are they f---ing new at this? Seriously? Take that for the whole Terminus thing and double it. As Sasha said, "If it's too good to be true..."