The Walking Dead: World Beyond: Who’s The Worst?

3) Elizabeth Kublek

Ostensibly, everything Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Kublek does is with the intent of protecting the people of the Civic Republic, and the final lingering bit of civilization they’ve managed to hold on to.

However, the things she does…aren’t necessarily the actions of someone trying to protect people.

I think there’s no better example of this than what she did to the people of Campus Colony.

Here, you have a community comprised almost entirely of civilians, scholars, scientists, and students, most of them just teenagers, no different than teenagers were before the outbreak. Frankly, of all the groups we’ve seen across the three Walking Dead series, they may be the least threatening since we were first introduced to the Alexandrians in season five of The Walking Dead, when the community was almost unanimously too afraid to even fight one walker, while armed! So, for Lieutenant Colonel Kublek to order these people massacred seems…excessive, to say the least.

Hell, it was excessive enough that even one of her bodyguards, Sergeant Barca, not only questioned Kublek and her orders, but also, the very notion of the Civic Republic being benevolent at all! She had him taken to the ominous-sounding “CRM Health And Welfare Complex” for his insubordination, when he resisted, it sounded like he got a rifle butt to the face for his troubles, so, that gives you some idea of just how on the level this massacre was.

Earlier this week, I compared Lieutenant Colonel Kublek to The Governor, the reason being that, just like he did, she ordered a massacre of otherwise innocent people, and proceeded to lie about it, even to people you’d think she cared about, like her own daughter.

But…there’s more to it than that. When The Governor did such things, first to the National Guardsmen, and then, to Rick’s group at the prison, he wasn’t lying about protecting people: He was protecting himself. No, neither group posed a physical threat to him when he first met them, as they didn’t even know he existed, but, what they did threaten was his power. Both the Guardsmen and Rick presented The Governor with people who, if his community were exposed to, may become the ones they looked to for leadership, rather than him. This was something he could not allow.

I feel like I see shades of this in Kublek, too. She is by no means a stupid woman, nor does she seem excessively paranoid, so, why, then, go out of your way to massacre, what is, essentially, just a large school? It makes no sense. She’s seeing the Campus Colony, at best having one person contacting them from within a Civic Republic facility (Without providing them any details, I might add) and having no means of actually threatening the CR or even feasibly reaching them, and, yet, Kublek decides they’re “a threat”? Is her plan to bring Hope to the research facility something she wasn’t supposed to do? Is she wiping out evidence of this?

Either way, Kublek is a straight up evil person, one who, even if they’re not proud of the lives they destroy, aren’t stopped from rationalizing it, believing that, because her ends are, supposedly, “noble”, her means are justified.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and what’s better than “protecting the future”?