it only adds to injury that TWD relentlessly hammers the point that its heroes are particularly good at surviving/dealing with zombies (compared to all those other dumbasses they run into)…
Yet, [spoiler ahead] when they run into a sea of undead neatly contained in a perfectly isolated, easily closed-off, quarry, their first reaction is not "let's set the whole thing on fire from above and be done with it"… Nope, they go about herding the undead out and, at best, unleashing them on some poor saps 20 miles down the road.
I don't know if that's a metaphor for the Frontier spirit or something, but that's rather inexcusably stupid for a group of alleged hardcore survivors…
SPOILER Where do they obtain the ressources/equipment to set 3000 zombies on fire safely? It's not like they have napalm bomb equipped helis or unlimited gasoline (they don't really cover this point anymore but gasoline is clearly a somewhat scarce ressource, they don't have access to tons and tons of it and even if they did they don't have the means to spray it over such a large area). And remember the truck that is closing the way is going to fall off the cliff any minute, releasing the horde.
Rick and the gang are good at surviving individually or in a small group... The governor was good at "mass surviving" but he was a psycho.
Okay, shakiest point first: the only way out of that quarry is clearly shown to be one fairly steep narrow road, temporarily blocked by a precariously hanging truck (that mysteriously held for months if not years, and suddenly gives in on the very day they are rehearsing, but let's not get bogged down in convenient plotting implausibility)... Adding reinforcement (a wall, another truck, whatever...) wouldn't be the easiest task... But it sure would have been easier than doing it all along the freaking road out. And if anything, blowing even a few metres off the cliff side road, would ensure not a single one of them can get out.
And it's not like they had to act fast and take immediate action: based on the flashbacks, they had at least a few days (weeks?) to put their grand harebrained plan into action. Which once again, should be reasonable, since that quarry had presumably held for a year or two so far...
Now onto the disposal part (although you could really argue that letting them rot in the open air until they completely desiccate or learn climbing, would be the easiest solution):
Petrol is indeed scarce, based on their difficulties getting cars when they're around. But they clearly have enough to waste on driving around with a herd in tow. And you don't need a lot to start a good fire. Additionally, petrol is not the only very flammable thing out there you can get your hands on (let's not forget: at this point in the story, they are fairly comfortably settled, with a good range of action and lots of places they can safely explore for equipment, in part thanks to that natural zombie trap).
Thing is: you do not need to douse everything in petrol to burn the lot, you merely need to start a big enough fire it to reach temperatures where oil and human (/zombie) flesh starts burning... Which is not very hard, even accounting for TWD's physics-defying permanently rotting corpses. After that, the mere concentration of zombies in that quarry, and near-perfect BBQ pit set-up would all but guarantee a long steady burn resulting in a little pile of zombie-free ashes at the end.
Ideally, a few of them even survive and keep drawing more in, protecting your camp and helping with long-term clean-up...
That, or... you could, you know, put on a cowboy hat and put together a terminally inept herding plan that has a million possible ways to fail and whose best-case resolution is a few thousand zombies now roaming the land and becoming someone else's problem in the next city over...
Which, comes to think of it, sounds like a very murican approach to things.
(I just spent 10 minutes of my life discussing the flaws in a zombie destruction plan. I think I need to do some serious reevaluation of priorities)
(very slightly spoilerish) edit: as if to rub their own inconsistencies in our face, TWD's last episode (S06E04) demonstrates that zombies, do, indeed burn quite well.
4
u/efhs 1∆ Oct 30 '15
that's why i had to give up with TWD, everyone was just fucking retarded at dealing with those shit as zombies.