Everything wrong with Black Summer S2 Ep3
I've been going off on a bit of a tirade about this show recently because I think that it is executed in such a poor manner. I've long since fallen out with zombie apocalypse shows and movies and only watched this because there is so little worth seeing on Netflix recently.
The show obviously has a decent budget and good production value. I am not going to try to point out any flaws in that. The CGI, the costumes, the settings.... this is all solid. Where they truly fail as a show is in the writing and a complete lack of consistency as far as the scenarios that the various characters find themselves in and also just how the world in general works. Some major aspects of the show aren't explained at all and we are just left to wonder why the hell certain things are happening.
One episode in particular bothered me a lot in season 2 because it is just completely rife with inconsistencies and rather stupid happenings. I'll attempt to explain some of the major ones here.
There are massive spoilers ahead
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The episode is called "Card Game" and it unfortunately involves an all-too-common situation that happens in all zombie-oriented features: A group that has a safehouse starts to infight until it results in violence.
First off, and I pointed this out in the previous rant about Black Summer in a general sense, is that this house they are in is probably the worst "safehouse" I have ever seen, structurally speaking.
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The house sits on top of a hill... ok, great..... The property has a fence on most sides of it... also good but not something the zombies can't get through as this has been established in previous episodes that they do climb stuff.... The real problem I have is that there are ceiling to floor windows all around the property and the people inside the house have done nothing to fortify them. The zombie visitors could easily crash through these. It's just stupid that they would introduce a house like this when a real "safehouse" could have been easily established in some sort of cement warehouse or something like that.
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Next up is the radio that is on the 2nd floor that is meant to have some sort of importance to the entire story. This causes some problems because there are 2 rather insane residents of the house that insist that the one woman who knows how to use the radio.... do so so frequently despite the fact that all of her attempts have been in vain. Eventually, this strange anger at the radio operator results in one of the crazies shooting and killing her. Then when said crazy attempt to use the radio himself, he gets the same null result as the woman did and now his solution is to rage destroy the radio. It's just dumb
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Another bizarre argument that takes place is over someone needing to go out to the shed to get more firewood for the house's singular fireplace. Nobody wants to do this because of one zombie that lurks on the property constantly. A single zombie that it has already been shown many times in the show is rather easily dispatched especially when there are multiple armed people in the house. They could easily just kill the damn thing. This also brings me back to the window situation where if that zombie really wanted to get at you, he could do so but instead he just endlessly bangs on the wooden door that is directly next to massive windows.
Anyway, they get into an argument that results in guns being drawn over who is going to get more firewood while in the meantime they are sitting in a massive house filled with wooden furniture that they are not using, do not own, and it has already been determined that everyone in the house will be leaving in the next few days.
They later end up burning the furniture anyway but it is just stupid that they would get into such a heated argument over something that has a much easier and obvious solution.
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Then there is this guy named "Boone." He is shown lurking in the shadows on the 2nd floor at various intervals during the episode. None of the other inhabitants of the house know he is there and they don't find out until much later. The thing that is so stupid about this is that Boone claims to have been living up there for a "long time" but no one has ever seen him. The house is big, but it isn't so big that he would be able to hide for this long. He is also wearing boots, and the house is old and made of wood. Multiple times in the episode you can hear the floor squeaking whenever someone walks somewhere. Yet they never hear Boone walking around when all of them are in absolute silence and on high-alert constantly? Give me a break.
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Then there is this guy who is just referred to as "Sonny" on the left there. That is his mother on the right. They are the cause of all the infighting inside the manor and there really isn't any logic to why it is that Sonny gets so worked up and aggressive towards everyone else. No matter how crazy a person is, I think that the shared threat of what lurks outside might make dude calm the hell down a little bit. There is no explanation to his erratic behavior other than them hinting at the fact that he had a rough childhood. You see, they needed a reason for the fighting to happen in the house even if it doesn't make any sense. Enter Sonny. He just keeps poking the hornet nest until eventually we have ample reason to execute him... which was something anyone could see coming from a long way away.
There are many other inconsistencies in the overall story such as us being told time and time again that there is no food in the house yet in the VERY NEXT EPISODE some sort of battle breaks out in the basement and there are literally hundreds of cans of food on the shelves. This wasn't a hidden basement and the people next to the fire didn't just arrive. They have been there long enough that they definitely would have gone down to the basement to look for supplies. There is also the groups copious use of lanterns that are just parked all over the house. They clearly aren't very concerned about preserving what is bound to be an extremely limited resource.
We are also told that the entire house is freezing cold and this is why everyone must hang out in the same room next to the fireplace. Yet at the end of the exact same episode we see two of the main characters sleeping side-by-side on a second floor bed far away from the fireplace. They weren't even under the covers!
I never really thought that The Walking Dead was a brilliant piece of storytelling but compared to Black Summer 's writing TWD is a masterclass in consistency. I can't help but look at Black Summer and kind of feel like the writers don't really care about having a coherent story that connects in a meaningful or logical way. At least in The Walking Dead their "safe zones" were places that actually were safe such as a prison or a walled city and not just some mostly glass house in the middle of a wide open field.
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I continue to watch this show simply to look for more and more stupid mistakes and poor writing. I'll be talking about this place next because things get even more absurd once we arrive there.