The Walking Dead villains: Who’s the worst? Part 10

Beta

Last season, based on what we’d seen of him, I’d said that Beta was bad because he was okay with all the evil things Alpha did. Well, this season, Beta is his own villain.

No longer is his villainy tethered to the actions of his leader. No, this season, Beta cast his own ominous shadow, with a rap sheet as long as he is tall.

This season, Beta, by himself, killed almost twenty people. Most of them, including Alfred and Laura, was during his raid into Alexandria, which resembled something more like an 80s slasher movie than a episode of The Walking Dead!

The other portion of his body count were his own fellow Whisperers!

One he killed for the heinous crime of giving Negan a piece of pork, another he killed for daring to recognize him without his mask, and a third he killed for presuming the Whisperers’ order of succession, and thinking Beta would become the new Alpha after the original’s demise.

His masterstroke, though, may be using a record of one of his pre-apocalypse live performances to amass a new horde, gather the rest of the Whisperers, and attempt to slaughter the peoples of Alexandria, Hilltop, and Oceanside with his new army in tow.

What makes Beta so much worse this season than last season, isn’t his crazed zealotry to Alpha’s philosophy (Which puts even Dante to shame), but, the sheer ruthless brutality of the man. Earlier, I compared his rampage through Alexandria to a slasher movie, because, quite honestly, I can not think of a more apt parallel. This season, the way he murdered people reminded me of watching Halloween or Friday The 13th, where Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees would just impale someone, or snap their neck, and then, stomp away like they had an appointment to get to. Beta would (And did) kill literally a dozen people and not give one iota of a damn about it.

I could simply chalk this up to the fact that Beta is a considerably damaged person, the way he reacted to the loss of his best friend at the rehab clinic, to seeing reminders of his life before the apocalypse, and to the loss of Alpha, made this quite clear, but, that would be ignoring just how callous he was. When Beta killed most of the people we saw him kill this season, he wasn’t in some deluded, blind rage: He just killed someone, turned around, killed another person, and then went about his merry way — As natural to him as breathing.

Especially as the season came to a close, Beta’s evil was, largely, independent of Alpha; This man wasn’t a loose cannon deck, some mindless weapon that was going haywire, no, this was a killing machine, doing what it was always going to do. What makes Beta so scary is that we know he used to be a good person.