The Walking Dead Villains: Who ISN’T the worst? Part 3

In a season of The Walking Dead replete with villains, who ISN’T the worst? Who is the most redeemable? Are any of them? Today, we find out.

At the beginning of the week, I jumped into the deep end of the pool, and began assessing the cadre of villains we were introduced to in season 3 of The Walking Dead; Well, today, I’m going to take on a larger challenge: Trying to find out who, if any, of these insidious characters, is in any way redeemable.

Now, while some (Well, okay, one in particular) might be fairly easy to determine if they’re redeemable or not, the others, not so much, but, I intend to argue on behalf of these individuals and hope that maybe, just maybe, you may reconsider your original assessment of these characters and decide whether or not they’re as “villainous” as we all may have initially thought. Just as we did at the beginning of this week, we start with…Tomas.

Tomas

I’ll admit, Tomas is a tough case to argue, but, not one I believe to be impossible. When we first meet Tomas, we are not greeted by the violent psychopath who butchers poor Big Tiny in cold blood after he gets scratched by a walker, no, what we are greeted with is a man who just watched three people hold down an old man while a fourth hacked off part of his leg.

At that moment, Tomas was just a guy, expecting  the cavalry to eventually arrive and liberate he and his fellow inmates from the walkers; Instead, he’d learned that no rescue was coming, and that these random people who’d burst in his cafeteria were the closest thing to rescue any of them were going to get.

The hostility we see from him later seems to to stem from his territorial nature about the prison, though, to be fair, Axel describes him as having been violent on more than one occasion. All this begs the question: If negotiations on how the prison would be divvied up had gone a little smoother, would Tomas have been so intent to kill Rick? Despite having the gun, and certainly the willingness (As we witnessed with Big Tiny), he never killed either Axel or Oscar, meaning he has the capacity to coexist with people, even people he may not necessarily like.

If clearing out Cell Block D had gone smoother, could he have coexisted with Rick? He certainly seemed to put aside his more violent tendencies when The Group first arrived, being awash in the shock of learning the world collapsed, if made to face the world they were now in, could he continue to do so? I’m willing to say…maybe, though only just, and if I were Rick, I damned sure wouldn’t have trusted him.

Next: More season 3 redeemable villains