This show is, so far, much better than Fear - a low bar, but one this clears quite easily.
I like Maggie and Negan both more in this than I did in the later seasons of the OG Walking Dead. Their uneasy alliance is actually playing out quite nicely thus far. I like that Maggie still doesn't trust Negan and keeps him at arms length at all times, while Negan clearly is trying to find some kind of redemption for himself in her eyes.
They seem to be heavily foreshadowing Negan's eventual sacrifice to save Maggie and Hershel - with Maggie likely going on to adopt Ginny. I hope this isn't the direction it takes though because it would be extremely cliche and predictable.
Anyway, this episode is not without its problems. The issue here is that they just go too far trying to explain various things that don't need explaining - and everything just ends up being silly as a result.
1. The girl, Ginny, would have *never* been able to use an insulated camper cooler as a makeshift boat to row herself across the Hudson River to Manhattan. She would have probably immediately sunk, and if she somehow didn't then she would have easily capsized because her center of gravity would have been above the water line and the cooler itself wasn't wide enough to prevent capsizing. That's not even the most ridiculous part of her little journey though - the idea that she rode a dirt bike all the way to Manhattan, or that she was somehow able to stumble upon Negan's group in a city that size, that's crawling with walkers, is just absurd.
2. The Croat explains that he's generating power by capturing the methane released from the decomposing human bodies in the sewers and compressing it into a liquid form (which would take more energy to do than he would be able to extract - but let's not worry about that detail). This is comically ridiculous. Capturing that methane would be astoundingly difficult without proper equipment and facilities to do so - a sewer, which is not air tight and not even possible to make air tight - would not be the "perfect conditions" he describes in this episode. The show tries to explain that he could do this by showing all these vats with decomposing bodies in them - don't try to think about how he acquired all that equipment though or you'll get a headache - especially considering it's stated that he didn't even come to NYC until many years after the apocalypse. Did he just bring all that equipment with him?
3. Furthermore, even if you could capture that methane a decomposing body produces only a very small amount of methane (about 0.38 grams on average but we'll call it 0.5 grams to be generous and make the math easy here). Assuming you're able to capture 100% of that methane (no chance of that - but I'm being generous here) that's about 25 KJ of energy per decomposing human body. 25 KJ is about 0.007 kWh per decomposing human body. It takes 0.42 kWh to power a 60 watt light bulb for 1 hour - meaning it would take you 60 decomposing human bodies per 60 W lightbulb per hour. There are a whole lot of walkers in Manhattan but not enough to power even a fraction of what we see the Croat with. To make matters worse, methane is released over time as a body decomposes - but new methane is not produced - so all those walkers would be half-dead "batteries" at best when he finally tried to harvest them.
4. The maggots in the Croat's meat are still alive - even after being cooked. I could understand maggots being in the meat if it were rotten, but there's no way they would have survived the cooking process.
I like Maggie and Negan both more in this than I did in the later seasons of the OG Walking Dead. Their uneasy alliance is actually playing out quite nicely thus far. I like that Maggie still doesn't trust Negan and keeps him at arms length at all times, while Negan clearly is trying to find some kind of redemption for himself in her eyes.
They seem to be heavily foreshadowing Negan's eventual sacrifice to save Maggie and Hershel - with Maggie likely going on to adopt Ginny. I hope this isn't the direction it takes though because it would be extremely cliche and predictable.
Anyway, this episode is not without its problems. The issue here is that they just go too far trying to explain various things that don't need explaining - and everything just ends up being silly as a result.
1. The girl, Ginny, would have *never* been able to use an insulated camper cooler as a makeshift boat to row herself across the Hudson River to Manhattan. She would have probably immediately sunk, and if she somehow didn't then she would have easily capsized because her center of gravity would have been above the water line and the cooler itself wasn't wide enough to prevent capsizing. That's not even the most ridiculous part of her little journey though - the idea that she rode a dirt bike all the way to Manhattan, or that she was somehow able to stumble upon Negan's group in a city that size, that's crawling with walkers, is just absurd.
2. The Croat explains that he's generating power by capturing the methane released from the decomposing human bodies in the sewers and compressing it into a liquid form (which would take more energy to do than he would be able to extract - but let's not worry about that detail). This is comically ridiculous. Capturing that methane would be astoundingly difficult without proper equipment and facilities to do so - a sewer, which is not air tight and not even possible to make air tight - would not be the "perfect conditions" he describes in this episode. The show tries to explain that he could do this by showing all these vats with decomposing bodies in them - don't try to think about how he acquired all that equipment though or you'll get a headache - especially considering it's stated that he didn't even come to NYC until many years after the apocalypse. Did he just bring all that equipment with him?
3. Furthermore, even if you could capture that methane a decomposing body produces only a very small amount of methane (about 0.38 grams on average but we'll call it 0.5 grams to be generous and make the math easy here). Assuming you're able to capture 100% of that methane (no chance of that - but I'm being generous here) that's about 25 KJ of energy per decomposing human body. 25 KJ is about 0.007 kWh per decomposing human body. It takes 0.42 kWh to power a 60 watt light bulb for 1 hour - meaning it would take you 60 decomposing human bodies per 60 W lightbulb per hour. There are a whole lot of walkers in Manhattan but not enough to power even a fraction of what we see the Croat with. To make matters worse, methane is released over time as a body decomposes - but new methane is not produced - so all those walkers would be half-dead "batteries" at best when he finally tried to harvest them.
4. The maggots in the Croat's meat are still alive - even after being cooked. I could understand maggots being in the meat if it were rotten, but there's no way they would have survived the cooking process.
