The smartest decisions in The Walking Dead: Part II

Season 7: Ezekiel joins Alexandria and Hilltop’s war against the Saviors.

For a while, I was thinking of choosing Rick’s decision to acquiesce to Negan at the beginning of season 7, knowing that, at the time, Alexandria didn’t have the manpower to fight the Saviors, but, then, I started thinking about how Rick got that manpower he needed, and suddenly, I had a much better example of a smart decision in mind.

When you look back, much of season 7 of The Walking Dead revolved around Rick trying to find a way to fight back against Negan and, one of the big questions regarding that was: Would The Kingdom join Alexandria in their fight?

It wasn’t until the very end of the season that we got an answer, with Ezekiel and Maggie swooping into Alexandria to save Carl from being killed by Negan, driving away the Saviors and their new Scavenger allies, and forging an official pact between Alexandria, Hilltop, and The Kingdom for the purposes of defeating the Saviors.

What makes this such a smart decision is, frankly, the very thing that motivated the Scavenger decision to not join Rick: Ezekiel looked at his community’s situation and realized that, in spite of the (sizable) risk, The Kingdom would be better off in the long run by joining Rick’s revolution than not doing so, as opposed to the Scavengers, who did the opposite.

And, let’s not gloss over the risk Ezekiel was looking at. While some members of his community knew how to fight walkers, they’d never gone to war with other people (Neither had Hilltop, but, Gregory was a “That guy”, so, let’s not bother with him), in fact, most of the community were gardeners and farmers. On top of that, Ezekiel was a just a zookeeper with a theatrical background, he wasn’t like Rick, whose pre-apocalypse job required him to confront armed hostiles, and had no real experience in such situations himself, never mind leading other people into battle!

Yet, after witnessing Jared’s callous murder of Benjamin, and seeing that, no matter how obedient he was, the Saviors could and would attack them unprovoked (Ironically, the very thing Richard, whose ploy was what caused Jared to shoot Benjamin in the first place, wanted him to see), he realized that, as risky as war was, it would become riskier over the long-term to continue bending the knee to the Saviors, as their demands would eventually grind The Kingdom down to starvation.

Rather than let his fear of the losses The Kingdom would suffer in the war (Which would turn out to be painfully high) stop him, Ezekiel realized that war was the only way to ensure his community’s long-term survival.

In a zombie apocalypse, you have to realize that there is no reward without risk. If you want peace, you need to be ready…for war.