Though after watching the first two episodes of season 2 the other night, I found them to be much quicker paced than I remembered. In my memory, the entirety of season 2 blends into the searching for Sophia, Darryl being bitchy as a teen in puberty, Andrea being stupid then getting kinda awesome, Dale's descent from good character to annoying whiner, and Lori's continuance of being annoying, pointless, and aggravating every issue beyond its proportions.

In reality, there was a lot more to it than just that, and those were the moments and events that made the season good, which indeed it was, even with all my above complaints. I actually liked the attempts at political correctness, at maintaining "humanity," and other philosophical debates, because I don't want to watch a zombie show just for the sake of watching people fighting zombies. I want it to be treated in the most realistic way possible, as though this could actually happen. And that means both them being more sensible when scavenging for supplies (rather than letting military and hospital vehicles go undisturbed), and fighting and arguing over the issues that exist in our society, which would not immediately disappear, even in the face of zombies.

That said, I'm very happy to see how they have all matured and adapted to their environment. Those moments of seemingly pointless bickering were necessary, because if they acted this way from the start, we would have had to wonder if they were all robots, sociopaths, or specifically trained for such conditions. But now that their humanity and fairly realistic characters have been established, they can grow and develop into the efficient and intelligent people they need to be to survive, and seem to have become. I have no doubt some such issues will still exist once they are cooped up in the prison long enough, but I also do not doubt that there will be a marked difference between their season 3 attitudes, and their season 2 attitudes. Issues of fairness, equality, freedom, etc, will still arise, but they'll all be tempered by many months worth of experience and pragmatism.