7 things I want to see from Tales Of The Walking Dead

6) “The Fall And Rise Of Terminus”

I remember watching Talking Dead across season five of The Walking Dead, and hearing the producers (Perhaps even Scott Gimple himself, I can’t remember) say how the theme of the season was “good people going bad”. They weren’t wrong: The whole season was hammering home otherwise good people (Even Rick) becoming bad people.

However, I think the best case-study in this was the first one we saw: Terminus.

In the season five premiere episode, “No Sanctuary”, we learn that the people of Terminus didn’t begin as a community of depraved cannibals, and that the signs leading people to them weren’t always an insidious trap: They used to be a normal community who legitimately invited weary survivors to find sanctuary at their community, until, one day, they invited in the wrong people.

We caught glimpses of this dark period in Terminus’s history, wherein they let in members of The Crazy Guy’s group, who, it turned out, were a gang violent rapists, who murdered several members of the community, imprisoned the rest, and began raping the women, all the while rubbing it in the face of Gareth and the rest of the community.

We also learned that, somehow, the people of Terminus got free, and exacted a terrible vengeance upon The Crazy Guy’s gang, killing or capturing them all, and systematically reducing their numbers…by eating them. Eventually, only The Crazy Guy was left, having been sentenced to a life of solitary confinement, likely after watching the rest of his cronies be taken away to be eaten, and probably being forced to do so himself (He was alive when Rick’s group got there, soooooo…they had to be feeding him something).

What I want Tales Of The Walking Dead to tackle is how this all happened. In “No Sanctuary”, we’re only shown a minute or so of flashbacks in the midst of The Crazy Guy’s reign, with no real indication of how long it was from when he and his goons took over nor how long before Gareth and company would reclaim the community.

I feel like this could be a great horror tragedy, with us initially sympathizing with the people of Terminus, becoming introduced to them when they were normal and seeing how much they’re suffering under the yolk of The Crazy Guy’s tyranny, then, cheering them on as they defeat their enemies, then, watching in horror as they become the monsters, first by eating said enemies, and then, turning their evil outward, luring in their first innocent victims.

In a series that’s, ostensibly, a horror show, I think this might be the most horrific story we could see, well, almost…