The Walking Dead: World Beyond: Who ISN’T The Worst?

3) Elizabeth Kublek

Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Kublek is a complicated woman. She’s a high-ranking member of the Civic Republic Military, an entity dedicated to protecting the Civic Republic and, to a larger extent, the future of the human race…and it’s a job she takes very seriously.

So seriously, in fact, that she will wipe out a community of civilians, scientists, scholars, and students, because two people were in touch with someone inside a Civic Republic facility…even though they had no details about where it might be…

Wait, wasn’t I supposed to be arguing on her behalf? Oh! Yeah…um…

Okay! First, since the whole point of this exercise is to give Kublek the benefit of the doubt, let’s go from this point forward assuming that, when we saw her crying after being confronted by Sergeant Barca in episode three, “The Tyger And The Lamb”, about the massacre of Campus Colony, she was crying because she ordered that massacre.

Second, in order to do this properly, we have to try to look at things from her perspective as best as we can.

We all good? Good.

I think, to truly get a handle on Elizabeth Kublek, you have to understand what the Civic Republic means to her. While her accent is clearly not American, it stands to reason that she arrived in the country well before the outbreak, and raised a daughter there. When the zombie virus struck, she watched as her adopted home fell into chaos, carnage, and eventually…collapse. However, as that was going on, perhaps even out of the ashes of the government of that adopted home, the Civic Republic arose.

When Lieutenant Colonel Kublek told Sergeant Barca that the Civic Republic was “the light of the world”, I think she legitimately believes that. I think that, to her, the Civic Republic is the last true bastion of civilization in the world, fighting a war against the dead and people like the Whisperers, and it needs to be preserved at all costs, lest humanity fall into a dark age. For her, until another community is formally incorporated into the Civic Republic’s web, it poses a potential risk to the CR’s security, and, by extension, the security of civilization as a whole. I think she legitimately feared that, even if unintentionally, either Leo or the girls might have let slip some detail that, in the wrong hands, could lead some hostiles to the location of the Civic Republic, and thought Campus Colony needed to be dealt with to ensure that didn’t happen, even if she wasn’t terribly proud of it.

And, therein lies her redemption. Kublek is not someone like Alpha, who will wipe out another civilization for shits and giggles, she’s someone who, in her own mind, is trying to protection civilization, and even if she sees it as rather justified, does not enjoy the somewhat barbaric things she feels she needs to do in service of that goal.

Is she a good person? I can’t quite say “yes”, but, I wouldn’t, necessarily put her in the same boat as someone like Gregory or The Governor (Even if she does act like him at times). I do believe, however, that she believes in what she’s doing, and in her own mind, believes that everything she does will, in the future, leave behind something that her daughter, and the rest of humanity, can build on, and, therefore, whatever she does, is something that needs doing.