The Walking Dead: Who are the Reapers and are they a real threat?

The Walking Dead episode “Home Sweet Home” sheds some light on where Maggie has been during her absence. We learn about her time with Georgie and the work they did. Georgie and the twins eventually went their own way while Maggie and Hershel visited the ocean and enjoyed some quiet time.

After that, Maggie ends up with a new community that was destroyed by a group who call themselves the Reapers. In the middle of “Home Sweet Home,” as Maggie and the others are walking through the woods, they see smoke near the rendezvous point with their people.

When they arrive and see the structure has been burnt, Cole says, “Shit, it’s them. They found us,” leaving the viewer to wonder who “they” are. The look on Cole’s face and the tone of voice give us the impression that this group means bad news.

We find out that the Reapers are responsible for destroying their village and killing many of their friends. They have followed them to a place they thought would be safe and killed two more of their people.

Who are the Reapers? Will they be a threat to Alexandria?

There is always going to be a group who are the villains. But, our communities have just gone through a major battle with the Whisperers, they have lost Hilltop, and Alexandria was damaged. If this new group attacks them, they will be unprepared.

Angela Kang shed some light on the Reapers in an interview with Den of Geek. 

She explained that the Reapers aren’t a comic book group, so there isn’t much information about them. Even though the series doesn’t always follow the comic storyline, it does give the viewer a basic idea of who the villains are. These new Reapers are still a mystery.

In the scene where Daryl and Maggie come into contact with that enormous gilly-suited man, who the viewer can assume is a Reaper, we see that his group is formidable. He was an expert at camouflage and tracking and picked off quite a few of Maggie’s people with ease. He tossed Daryl like he didn’t weigh more than a leaf; he was calculating and loyal until his end.

He gave the impression of a military-trained individual when he wouldn’t give his name or who he was with. The only thing we found out was that Pope marked Maggie. This leaves us to believe that Pope is some leader of the Reapers who wanted Maggie and her people dead. Although we don’t know the reason behind this, Maggie wasn’t ready to talk about this with Daryl yet, but the hope is we will hear more of the story.

"“We’re seeing that this person knows a lot of really pretty intense fighting techniques,” Kang says of the Reaper and his group. “There’s this sort of militaristic aspect to them. We’re trying to figure out how does this prove to be a unique challenge to our people? We start imagining the type of people that fill that group and why they have taken the tactics that they use today. From their perspective, it has to make sense. There has to be an internal logic to the group and how that’s worked for them in order to get 12 years into apocalypse and still be alive.”"

There will always be villains in an apocalypse. It is a survival of the fittest world, and people living in this world must always be on guard for what the next threat will be. When you imagine living in that type of world, you often only think of the undead being the threat, but people can be worse than some rotting corpses who want to devour you.

Note: The man playing the Reaper, Mike Whinnet, did play an unnamed Savior in season 7 but is cast as Unknown Assailant in this episode. 

The Walking Dead releases the second bonus episode, “Find Me,” on March 7 on AMC.

If you are an AMC+ subscriber, you can view the episode on Thursday, March 4.