The Walking Dead Season 4: 7 Huge Contrivances That Led To Great Scenes

5. Unsupervised Quarantine (4.2, "Infected")

After the disaster of Patrick's death led to the cell block massacre, the Council investigates how he could have died. They soon realize that he had perished from a mysterious illness rather than from foul play. When Karen develops a cough, they decide to quarantine her away from the rest of the prisoners. Karen immediately rats out "David from Decatur" as also showing symptoms, and the two are taken to an empty cell block. It should be noted that, at this point, neither are doing more than coughing. Later, Tyreese wanders into the quarantined area with a bouquet of flowers for Karen, only to find a heavy trail of blood leading out of her cell. He follows the trail until it takes him outside, where he discovers the smoking corpses of his lady love and David. Whoa. Well, that certainly is a memorable way to end an episode. Unfortunately, as striking as it is on screen, it doesn't say much for the intelligence of the Council. For one thing, they seem to be a bit fuzzy on how the whole "quarantine" thing works. Merely keeping sick people in a different area of a barred prison wouldn't really do much to contain an airborne infection. Plus, the entrance to the quarantine wasn't even locked. The Council was lucky that two such cooperative souls were the ones to fall sick. At the end, Tyreese just sauntered on in with his flowers, presumably planning on sauntering back out again after exposing himself to the disease. Most contrived of all, however, was the fact that nobody was supervising the quarantine. They had just finished dealing with the disastrously reanimated victims of the disease! Also, Carol never would had been able to kill Karen and David if there had been any supervision. The murders weren't exactly in-and-out affairs. She had to kill them, drag them outside, and set them both on fire. Despite her magical ability to do all of this without covering herself with blood and gasoline, it would have taken her more than a few minutes to deal with their bodies.