Second, there is no implied sexism in the scene between Shane and Rick that you discuss other than showing us some characters who are flawed people. If I write about a racist, does that make my writing racist? Nope. Including that discussion you referenced doesn’t make The Walking Dead sexist either. Plus Lori, you will find out, is not a good person, and Shane certainly isn’t.

Third, we don’t know how long people hung around that hospital to actually take care of Grimes; he wasn’t necessarily alone for a whole month at all, or even a whole week, that we know of for sure. In the comics that scene where he wakes up in the hospital also shows how the last people to leave him there only left him after trying to hold out longer, and even left him a note apologizing for what they had finally done. Admittedly the show should have made more of a deal out of this, but really, the show is not all about the time someone spent in a hospital bed – it is about what happens afterward, which is a helluva lot more.

Fourth, and maybe this is an age/experience issue for me having been in a relationship with someone a long time now, but the fact that the man finally tries to kill his zombie wife, and that he has so much trouble doing that, all rings true for me. It’s the thing holding him and his son back; he needs to do it, and though it’s not his wife anymore, it is still wearing her face, and that is not something easily overcome. He certainly couldn’t bring himself to do it up close with a baseball bat, but he felt he could at last try at long last at long range with the rifle. Makes perfect – though very sad and dangerous – sense to me.

Fifth, well, this one has several problems: 1) The show had in fact established that Rick had ridden horses before – he says so, as in, “it’s been awhile since I did this, so work with me” or something along those lines that he says when he was talking to the horse as he tried to prepare it to be ridden. 2) Why a horse? He ran out of gas. A horse would have been fine too if he had stayed out in the open countryside and only had to outrun a few straggling zombies. But, as established earlier as well when the other man warns him about it, Rick doesn’t yet take seriously the threat of the zombies in a group, and so he ends up rashly maneuvering himself and the horse into a spot where he is surrounded and hemmed in. 3) I don’t see the point of wondering how the zombies get the horse down. Have you watched Dawn of the Dead (’04) or the original or most any other zombie movie since Night of the Living Dead? The undead always go ripping into people with preternatural strength; real people don’t have that kind of strength, living or, well, dead, of course. Zombies have pretty much always been portrayed in the major material onscreen as more physically powerful than any living person, and definitely much more powerful than any actual decaying corpse has the right to be, so no problem having a horde of them bringing down a horse when any one or two zombies can tear into and yank apart a human ribcage or rip someone’s head clean off. Plus, it’s fiction, man – they could fly and shoot fire out their asses if the writer wanted them to. That, and in real life horses can most certainly be taken down; it used to happen on battlefields all the time.

I think these things need to be considered carefully, and really, if you stop watching or anyone else doesn’t watch because of this description you’re giving out, I think that will be a shame, because I expect this show will hit great strides down the road if it is anything like the comic books in the long haul. They’re some of the best things I’ve ever read in any medium. They’re really about complex and brutal character interactions more than the undead, and they’re all the more powerful for that. If nothing else, you and your readers in agreement with your review should do yourselves a favor and seek out the comics to read even if you ultimately dismiss the show, especially after only one episode.