You have to give the fellow credit: playing "Pied Piper" for a herd of zombies takes bravery, and he was quite lucky they weren't too fast, or that the facility in which all the zombies had been stored for future plot developments wasn't better guarded. In the long, honored tradition of "creating a diversion," it stands alone. You might also wonder why our heroes would want to destroy the only facility that appears to be functioning in their area, if you can call "Home Depot chain-link fences and guards who are channeling the crow's-nest duo from 'Titanic'" functioning, but again, if the compound was fortified and defended by weapons that would do the trick - napalm sprayers, grenade launchers, and so forth - then we wouldn't have had the obligatory Collapse of the Last Refuge that "Walking Dead" requires once a year.

It's a cliffhanger, all right. Will our blended band get to the ship, only to realize it's very bad CGI?

"But - but - it looked so real from up there, through the telescope!"

"No it didn't. You only wanted to believe it was real so the audience would feel a sense of hope!"

"We have an audience?"

"We're down 30 percent, but yes, there's an audience."

To repeat previous tweets you may have missed because they were sent at 1 AM and you also don't care, the producers missed the chance to do the sequel as an anthology, following a different set of characters every six episodes. Now we're stuck with these people. It would have been a better show if it was set up in these parts, just to see if Midwesterner rural communities and small towns do a better job at social cohesion than atomized, balkanized, sprawled-out big cities. Winter, you'd think, would make for an interesting challenge, if only for the writers. Do the zombies make it through the cold season? (No, of course not.) Does anyone feel up for Christmas? Would people get used to snowplowing the drive and running over a zombie? Probably, but it would take time.

But they wouldn't do that, because anything set in this part of the world on a cable station has to be quirky and thanks to "Fargo."

Oh geez, the dead are walkin'. Well, let's go talk to them and see what their deal is.

MPLS HISTORY This showed up at Hunt & Gather, the Southwest Mpls antique store and cultural museum.
Where has this been hiding?

If I had to guess, I'd say it's the maitre d' stand from the Chateau de Paris, the restaurant that was the chic spot for a night out, until it wasn't. The hotel, in case you can't quite place it:

City Center stands there now. It had a spectacular last day.