The Walking Dead Villains: Who ISN’T The Worst? Part 10

Beta

I can honestly say that, in this season of The Walking Dead, Beta really surprised me. Last season, I described Beta as a “henchman”, but, I feel like in this season, he truly came into his own as a villain, and cast his own large and menacing shadow over everyone he encountered. As surprised as I was by how loathsome he was, what really got me was something I absolutely never expected to have towards him: Sympathy.

It’s the craziest thing! Who would ever imagine feeling sympathetic for a monstrous dude who goes around killing just about everyone he encounters? I certainly didn’t. Throughout this season, though, we got bits and pieces, showing us that, like so many villains in The Walking Dead, Beta didn’t start out a monster, he had to be made into one.

Our first look into Beta’s past was during a flashback in the season’s second episode, “We Are The End Of The World”. In that flashback, we learned that Alpha and Lydia first met Beta inside the rehab center of an abandoned hospital, where he maintained a constant vigil to protect the walker of his best friend, a rehab counselor, being unable to bear the thought of putting him down.

Later, in this season’s second-to-last (technically third to last, but, well…) episode, “Look At The Flowers”, Beta finds his way to an abandoned bar, seeing posters on the wall, and records strewn about the bar’s stage with his face on them. It turns out Beta was, actually, a famous country singer before the outbreak, something he seemed to violently reject whenever possible.

Yet, in spite of this, after conferring with Alpha’s head (And violently reacting to seeing his posters), Beta chose to play one of his records, blasting it across the abandoned town which held the bar, amassing a large herd of walkers. As Beta stared at this warped mirror of his old life, he was…crying. At that moment, I realized just how much Beta had lost.

His old life as a singer, using his God-given talents to make millions happy, was destroyed. Watching him cry as his music played to a literal dead audience, it looked like Beta was really coming to grips with the idea he could never get back what he had.

There was something else we learned about his past, though: The mask Beta wears is not the face of any ordinary walker, but, of that his best friend. Beta wears his best friend’s face, to keep him wherever he goes.

Think about it: If you lost the ability to do what you loved and lost your best friend to the zombie apocalypse, don’t you think you would start to go off the rails?

I think losing everything, especially his best friend (Who I’m thinking may have helped Beta through his own battle with addiction) absolutely broke his psyche, and…I don’t think he’s really been right ever since.

Now, I’m not saying that Beta is not in control of his actions (In fact, I’m certain he’s very much in control of his actions), but, what I am saying is that the apocalypse, and what he lost because of it, have made Beta an extremely disturbed man (Disturbed enough to talk to his dead leader’s severed head). I think, like Shane when it came to Lori, losing his friend deprived him of purpose and deprived him of something he could anchor himself to, and, I believe Alpha’s philosophy filled that void, making him totally devoted to her and that philosophy. Everything he does, every attack, every murder, is because it serves the greater aim of Alpha’s philosophy, and, that philosophy is now the most important thing in his world…it is the only thing holding him together, and he can’t lose it.

I think Beta does possess some redeemability. I believe that his actions are the result of severe trauma, trauma that may have taken some underlying emotional problems (His friend was a rehab counselor, how much you want to bet he was Beta’s rehab counselor?) and drove them off a cliff. That, combined with Alpha’s philosophy right after that trauma, created a perfect storm of circumstances that turned this once beloved country singer, into a pitiless killing machine.

And here I was thinking Brandon was tragic…