Is there nothing that's not stupid about The Walking Dead?

Here is the actual cover art for the first season DVD set of 'The Walking Dead', which, if I recall correctly, was also used as a promotional image.

Seems like an attempt to create an iconic image, but it's one that crumbles into idiocy if you think about it for a second. Let's say there's a zombpocalypse going on, and everyone needs to escape from Atlanta as quickly as possible-

Does it really seem likely that staying on the correct side of the road is going to be a huge priority? Why not use the other side of the road? After all, it's not like there's anyone headed into Atlanta to get in their way.

Also, not for nothing, but how did that train get derailed?

Zombies? Cars swerving off the road, sure, I can get behind that. Zombies are scary, people crash cars over gophers. Not a stretch. But a train? It's on rails. And is heavy. And Zombies, as far as I can tell, are neither of those things.

The Walking Dead Persists in Disappointing

So anyway, I watched the rest of this week's The Walking Dead and... well, yikes.

On last week's Avod the DiveMistress and myself got into a discussion about how terrible The Walking Dead's second episode was - most notably because of the character of Merle, the racist sexist violent redneck stereotype who everyone left to die on the top of the building. This week opens well, with a glance at Michael Rooker's desperate struggle for survival, in which he proves more intelligent than either character in the film Saw:

By using his clothes to grab the item of his salvation. Which would lead me to give the character (and by extension, the writers) a lot of credit. If the next scene featuring Merle's predicament wasn't so ungodly stupid. Here, in three images, is the crux of that stupidity:

This is, of course, a reference to Saw/Watchmen/Mad Max. So let's see just what The Walking Dead got wrong by taking a look at those scenes, shall we?

The Walking Dead is Also Poorly-Written

Here's a question I'd like to pose: if bad writing from the source material has been preserved in the finished product, is that better or worse than something just being badly written? Does faithfulness to the source material excuse the stupidity, or does the fact that years have passed without anyone noticing the problem, or bothering to fix it if they did, make the mistake even more contemptible?

I'm referring, of course, to the big reunion scene from episode 3 of The Walking Dead (it appeared in issue 2 of the comic).

That's TVRick, gleeful to discover that his family has survived.

This, of course, is comic Rick at the same moment.

What's wrong with both of these scenes? Simply that, while Rick's surprise at discovering that his family is alive is heartwarming (and needlessly profane, in one redacted case) it could not have happened this way in the context of either story.