Fear The Walking Dead Villains: Who’s The Worst, Part 2

Celia

Early in a zombie apocalypse, the line between living and dead will get kinda murky. Many people (Like Hershel in The Walking Dead) won’t necessarily be able to tell the difference.

If they know that some disease is going around, they may assume that the dead are simply sick, and that, eventually, they’ll improve and come to their senses.

Others may look at the undead and see them in a more spiritual sense, believing them to have become something divine or supernatural.

In either such case, people who care about those who’ve turned may decide to keep the afflicted. Hershel did it. And Celia did it.

Now, I imagine this might make one ask: “Then, how come Celia is on this list, yet, Hershel wasn’t on the corresponding Walking Dead list?”

Well, the difference is that, while Hershel kept the dead, he didn’t make a point of making people dead. Hershel believed the dead were simply “infected”, and didn’t actively try to “infect” them.

On the other hand, Celia didn’t seem to see the infected as “dead”, more like…“changed”. This is fine and all, until you realize she used “changing” as a weapon.

Do you recall the parishioners in the church in “Sicut Cervus”? Do you remember how they were dying as Thomas attempted to talk them out of killing the infected Celia was keeping?

I do. It damn sure didn’t look very pleasant, did it?

Of course not. They were poisoned. They were clearly in pain, clearly suffering, and clearly died a grisly death.

If Celia saw being “changed” as some kind of good thing (Which, her care and reverence of them would suggest), then…why “change” the parishioners, painfully, against their will?

By doing so, it seems like Celia’s reverence for “the change” is rather selective.

She had this sort of spiritual view of the infected when it was her son, or Thomas, or her friends, but, not for outsiders.

Celia knew she was poisoning the parishioners. She knew they would suffer. She knew they would die.

Where was the reverence for them? I mean, they’d “changed”, right? Why not grill the group for killing them?

Was their change somehow different than Thomas’s would have been (Which, incidentally, “changing” the people at the church caused)? Or…was it because they were a nuisance to her? Because they threatened those who’d “changed”?

Call me cynical, but, her lack of concern for the parishioners, and making sure their deaths were miserable seems incongruous with her beliefs. It makes it seem like her beliefs only extended to her friends and family. She didn’t see them as dead, but, everyone else? Screw ’em.

Oh! And, while we’re on the topic of killing everyone in the church, let’s address her reaction to that.

…Or, should I say “Lack thereof”.

Her lack of concern for the parishioners is bordering on Martin levels of apathy. Not the cruel kind, like Reed, but the abject absence of any real reaction whatsoever to killing dozens of people.

Celia had more concern about Daniel thinking she might have spiked the pozole than about killing the congregation.

People’s beliefs are important to them. Often times, when things become chaotic (Like in a zombie apocalypse!), they may fall back to them for stability.

However, when those beliefs cause their practitioners to behave like some deranged death cult, they can prove to be a problem. Celia wasn’t simply practicing an unorthodox set of beliefs, but, seemed to be leading such a cult.

She tortured Daniel, she planned to apparently indoctrinate Ofelia, and callously (And despicably) murdered dozens of innocents because they recognized and tried to neutralize the very real threat the infected she kept posed.

Having beliefs in a zombie apocalypse is fine, but, when those involve you being a mass murderer, you’re just as much of a threat as the dead.

Next: El Mal Nunca Cambia