Connecting The Walking Dead: ‘Madman Across The Water’

2) The Origins Of Campus Colony

At the end of Elton’s flashback to the day the outbreak hit, we see him find a flyer notifying anyone alive enough to read it of a government evacuation order for the city, which directed people to Nebraska State University campus, which, as we know, would become Campus Colony.

Now, while that is a nice little detail to learn, it actually has bigger implications than we realize.

What do I mean? Well, firstly, from what we see at the end of season one of Fear The Walking Dead (And seems reinforced by Travis’s meeting with George Geary in season two), it looks like the government just…gives up, abandons L.A., and sets it ablaze as a desperate effort to slow down the horde.

However, seeing that what we now know as Campus Colony was, originally, a government safe zone shows that they, in fact, did not give up trying to hold things together. This might explain how Portland, Omaha, the Commonwealth, maybe even the Civic Republic, all formed, as some of the few government safe zones that managed to hang on after things went from bad to worse.

Additionally, this revelation may explain why we hadn’t seen much evidence of Cobalt in Nebraska: Maybe, because Campus Colony was secure and holding firm, the government didn’t feel the need to destroy it.

If we continue on this line of thought, it’s possible that what we were seeing in L.A. was the government legitimately trying to hold things in the city, but, after the arena fell, the military fell back to Plan B: Cobalt.

It’s amazing what one little detail can reveal about what was going on in the Walking Dead universe that we may have not realized before.