Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Tight lips sink ships

If you listened carefully, you’d realize there was a second lesson to learn in last week’s Fear The Walking Dead: Secrets do you no favors.

Back in World War II, the government had a slogan: “Loose Lips Sink Ships”. The idea was not to be a blabbermouth, as you didn’t know if there were saboteurs or spies around. That little bit of advice probably saved a lot of sailors during The War.

However, I’m inclined to think that doing that in a zombie apocalypse will not be quite as helpful. In fact, I’ve come up with a reverse slogan: “Tight lips sink ships”.

Why? Well, let’s look back at the latest episode of Fear The Walking Dead, and you’ll see what I mean.

In that episode of Fear, Naomi revealed how her previous group was destroyed.

Naomi’s daughter, Rose, became sick (Ultimately with pneumonia, but she wouldn’t realize until later). Afraid that she and Rose would be kicked out of the group (Something she’d seen other groups do), Naomi chose to keep Rose’s condition secret.

This would prove to be a fatal mistake.

With Rose’s condition worsening, Naomi went out to search for medicine. Rather than tell the group and get someone to watch Rose, Naomi chose to keep things secret, and hide Rose in a closet.

Unfortunately, since no one knew Rose’s condition, they also were unprepared for her.

Apparently, either because someone heard her after she turned, or simply by accident, but, Rose was let loose and began biting members of the group. By the time Naomi returned three days later…her entire group had been infected.

While Naomi’s logic behind keeping Rose’s condition a secret made sense, she should have known she was playing with fire. Even if she wanted to keep her hope up that Rose would survive, especially after learning the philosophy of “just in case” from her friend, Ellen, Naomi should have taken steps to protect the group if she couldn’t find the medicine in time. By not keeping Rose sealed away, she practically guaranteed the disaster that befell her people.

Don’t get me wrong: Secrets have their place in a zombie apocalypse. When dealing with strangers, it pays not to reveal too much, because you have no idea if they’re hostile or not.

However, when you’re dealing with your own people and your secret can mean their life or death, you have an obligation to clue them in. You need to let them know so that they can be prepared for whatever bad news your secret may bring. If you don’t, and something bad does happen, you’ve got no one to blame for that but yourself.

Furthermore, at what point do your secret(s) go from being merely “secret(s)” to being betrayals?

If a secret costs your group one or more of its members, what will your group think? And, are you willing to deal with those consequences if it does?

In fact, let’s look at this from the opposite direction: If you found out that a member of your group died because another member had the brilliant idea to keep something important secret, how would you react?

I know that there are some thing that it pays to keep secret. If you know something will cause panic (And all the joy and happiness that brings), then, okay, I get it. If things are definitely more destructive than helpful being revealed, I understand.

But, even in such a scenario, you need to be very careful. If the likelihood is your secret will cause more problems than prevent them…what’s the point?

The point of surviving a zombie apocalypse…is to survive, and keeping secrets that’ll leave your group vulnerable is the complete antithesis of that idea.

Having secrets in a zombie apocalypse may be necessary, but, when they’re more destructive than the truth, you’ve lost the plot.

Sometimes, tight lips sink ships.

This is why you follow…The Rules.

Next: Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Just in case

And that’s our survival rule of the week!! Hopefully, it’ll help you give you that mental edge that will prove so crucial once the dead start eating everyone.

If you like this and want to find out more rules to survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can get it on Kindle here and on iTunes here!