The Walking Dead: 10 reasons why the Whisperer hype is real

The Walking Dead has been hyping the arrival of the Whisperers as a villain like nothing that’s been seen before. Here’s a few reasons why that’s actually true.

The Walking Dead’s winter hiatus is finally almost over and there have been a lot of teasers featuring the Whisperers, the latest villains that TWD survivors will be facing.

They first arrived in the last couple of episodes in season 9A, when they terrified Eugene who insisted that the walkers were hunting him. Jesus unfortunately found out about the Whisperers’ secret the hard way, that they move among the walkers and are almost impossible to detect when they’re surrounded by walkers.

Some fans who are not familiar with the comics are wondering if the hype about the Whisperers is real, and why people who are familiar with the comics have been waiting for this story arc for a long time. Are the Whisperers going to be as scary as the hype suggests?

They really are. The Whisperers are in many ways the exact opposite of any other villains that the survivors have faced. Always before the villains that they ran into were similar to themselves in that they were trying to protect the people they loved and hang onto some semblance of humanity in order to build communities and rebuild civilization. Even Negan, who did some terrible things, did them so that he could lead his people and save people because of the idea that’s been a mantra for all the survivors: that people are a resource. The Whisperers don’t believe that.

Here are 10 reasons why the Whisperers hype is real:

10. The Whisperers have huge numbers. They are the largest group of adversaries that the survivors have ever had to face. Now that the communities are much smaller than ever before they really don’t have the numbers to face off against such a huge group.

9. They have an army of the undead. Because they can move among the walkers so easily they can pad their huge numbers with even larger numbers of walkers by directing the walkers by moving as part of the herds.

8. They don’t want the communities. Even when the survivors were facing off against Negan they knew that the communities were relatively safe because Negan and the Saviors wanted what the communities had. They wanted the grain, livestock, and other necessities for survival that the communities could produce. The Whisperers don’t, and that means they have no interest in keeping the communities intact.

7. They don’t want to rebuild civilization. The Whisperers think that the walkers represent the next step in the evolution of human beings. They think that the civilizations of the past and the spirit of community that the survivors have been clinging too is a weakness that has been bred out of humans by the arrival of the apocalypse.

6. They have no humanity. The Whisperers survive together out of necessity but they have no loyalty, empathy, or shared feelings of humanity. They gave up their names in order to get rid of the vestiges of humanity that were left. They operate like a pack, where the strongest leads. At least, until someone stronger kills the leader and takes over.

5. They’re predators. Their belief in the survival of the pack and in surviving on instinct means that they are predatory and won’t hesitate to kill anyone and anything that strays into their territory or threatens the pack in any way.

4. They do terrible things with no remorse. Negan also did terrible things, but there always a point to Negan’s actions. The Whisperers will rape, kill, leave the weakest of the pack to die, leave babies to be killed by walkers if they cry, and never have a moment of remorse over any of it.

3. Alpha is cruel in ways that the survivors have never experienced before, not even under Negan’s rule. She’s emotionless, cunning, and the fact that she was able to seize control of the pack means that she is a cold blooded killer that survivors should be terrified of. Andrew Lincoln called Samantha Morton’s performance as Alpha “terrifying”. If Rick Grimes called Alpha terrifying that says a lot.

2. Fighting them is almost impossible. At this point in the apocalypse the survivors are mainly using swords and knives to kill walkers. But killing a walker and killing a person require totally different strategies and approaches.

The survivors won’t know if a walker is really a walker or a Whisperer until they are already engaged in the fight and by then it could be too late, as Jesus found out when what he thought was a walker ducked and killed him. Faced with a herd of walkers that could be walkers or could be Whisperers armed with their own blades it’s going to be very difficult for the survivors to fight them.

1. They wear masks of human skin. Masks. Of. Human. Skin. If they can cut the faces off walkers and sew dead human flesh into masks and then put those masks on their faces and not have any feelings about that there is nothing they won’t do. And an enemy with no boundaries is definitely an enemy to be terrified of.

The Walking Dead returns February 10 at 9pm on AMC.