The Walking Dead: Beta’s Whisperer mask gets a much needed upgrade

In The Walking Dead episode “Look at the Flowers,” Beta discovers Alpha’s zombified head, which allows him to upgrade his damaged Whisperer mask.

In The Walking Dead’s episode “Look at the Flowers”, Carol puts Alpha’s head on a pike in true poetic justice, Daryl and Negan have a showdown, and Beta, finding Alpha’s reanimated head goes off on a solo reflective journey. It is this journey which allows him to repair his damaged mask.

Everyone knew that Alpha’s number two, Beta, would not handle her death well. He especially didn’t like seeing her decapitated head on the very pikes they set up as their land boundary and also used to display their enemies’ heads. Beta made it very clear that he is not the Alpha. When the Whisperer who was with him knelt at his feet proclaiming him the Alpha, Beta forced his head close enough to Alpha’s bodiless head to be bitten. He told the two Whisperers that were with him that “our Alpha can still hear us.”

Beta then cradles what remains of Alpha, and he begins to hear instructions from the head. With Alpha’s still bleeding head in a burlap sack, Beta heads off to deal with his loss.

The building that he travels to is an abandoned hotel. The room he enters has guitars, a bed, albums and a poster that has a familiar face on it. There has always been a mystery about Beta and his story before the outbreak. Hints in Fear the Walking Dead lead to speculation about his past, and perhaps he was a musician. These posters confirm that he was indeed in a band called Half Moon.

Initially, Beta has a freak-out moment, and then he has some quiet moments with Alpha’s head. After he plays one of his band’s albums loud enough to bring walkers from miles around, he shares what looks to be a smile and proceeds to kill what is left of Alpha.

In “Walk with Us” when Beta killed Gamma, she reached up and tore off part of his mask. In 1014, you can see evidence of where he tried to repair it, but evidently, that wasn’t good enough. Remembering back to when Beta and Alpha met, she killed a walker that was someone special to him, someone who he didn’t have the heart to kill. He was distraught and wanted to kill Alpha in his rage. Beta didn’t want to leave his now dead friend, so Alpha hands him a knife telling him that he doesn’t have to leave him. Beta then cuts off his friend’s face and has been wearing it ever since.

Beta made his original mask from the face of someone he didn’t want to be without, so it only seems natural that he would repair the mask with part of Alpha’s face since he doesn’t want to be without her either. Right? In Beta’s mind, the answer is yes.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Angela Kang explains why Beta used Alpha’s face in his mask,

"…we wanted to tell the story of: What happens to somebody like that when that charismatic leader is gone? We were just thinking for Beta, he wants to carry on the name of Alpha and he’s uncomfortable just calling himself the Alpha. He wants to be the Beta, but he wants to carry her with him. So in his own kind of twisted way, this is his way of reminding everybody that even as he’s Alpha, he can never replace the Alpha, but he is channeling the Alpha…"

Now we have The Walking Dead version of Phantom of the Opera’s musical genius. Perhaps he will take up living in the tunnels below Alexandria?

Although, with his newly created army of walkers and any Whisperers that will follow him, I don’t think that is his plan at all. Nothing good can come of this new horde and Beta wanting revenge on the communities that are responsible for the killing of his beloved Alpha.

We only have one more episode of season 10 until sometime later this year when we will get the official finale as a stand-alone episode. Tune in Sunday at 9 pm EST on AMC to find out what happens next.