The Walking Dead Theory: Mays Wasn’t As Innocent As He Said

If you saw this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, then you also saw Mays, the rather frightening man Aaron and Father Gabriel met during their search for supplies.

Mays and his twin brother were played by Robert Patrick, who is well known for his role in Terminator 2: Judgement Day but has an extensive catalog of films and shows to his credit.

Despite his grisly appearance, Mays had a rather tragic story: The reason he was so cynical and angry was that, despite going out of his way to protect his brother and his brother’s family, his brother stole his last can of food and tried to attack him, resulting in the massive scar on the left side of his face.

This week’s Walking Dead introduced us to Mays, who was tragically betrayed by his twin brother, but what if he WASN’T the one who was betrayed?

After this betrayal by the person he was supposed to trust the most, it made Mays see only the dark of humanity, assuming that everyone was only out for themselves and that anyone who said they weren’t was lying. To prove his point, he even made Aaron and Father Gabriel play Russian Roulette, expecting that one of them would turn the gun on each other rather than on himself.

After seeing that neither Aaron nor Gabriel are willing to gun down his friend, Mays stopped the game, convinced that people were not as selfish as he had come to believe…just before Father Gabriel killed him stone dead with Aaron’s mace arm.

After realizing that Mays had to have been hiding somewhere in the warehouse, Aaron and Gabriel searched, discovering an attic. This is where they found Mays’s twin brother chained up, next to the dead bodies of his wife and daughter, bullet wounds in their heads.

…Wait, what?

The Walking Dead Theory: Mays was the one who betrayed his brother, not the other way around.

Yeah, after watching this weeks episode of The Walking Dead and seeing the AMC+ extra, wherein showrunner Angela Kang explained that Mays had forced his brother to play Russian Roulette with his wife and daughter, resulting in Mays’s brother killing them, I started to take a second look at Mays, and things didn’t quite make sense.

For example, why would Mays make his sister-in-law and niece play Russian Roulette if his brother betrayed him? He didn’t say that they did anything to make him distrust them, so why punish them?

When Mays’s brother commits suicide, he looks down at his wife and daughter’s bodies before he does so. Initially, I thought this was him lamenting killing them first, and he realized that his brother was right about him being selfish and killed himself to atone for it. However, once this thought that Mays might have been lying came into my head, I gave his brother’s suicide a second look, and a new thought occurred to me: What if Mays’s brother killed his family out of mercy? What if he was trying to spare them from whatever horrible fate Mays might have intended for them, making their deaths as quick and as painless as possible and leaving himself to suffer the apparent years of imprisonment that Mays inflicted upon him.

Also, just because Mays said that his brother betrayed him doesn’t make it so. Sure, Mays had the scars, but he just as easily could have gotten them if he was the one trying to steal the food, couldn’t he?

I’m beginning to think that Mays may have been the one trying to steal food from his brother, got his face slashed up in the process, but succeeded in overpowering his brother and imprisoning him, his wife, and his daughter. Now bent on violence, he forced his brother, sister-in-law, and niece to play Russian Roulette, figuring this would cut down on the number of mouths needing to be fed with the limited amount of food they had. It’s even possible that the cars riddled with bullets that Aaron and Gabriel found may have been victims of Mays and his AK-47 while he searched for food. I think his brother, rather than have his wife and daughter starve to death, remain imprisoned, or turn, killed them in the game, believing it to be a quick and relatively painless alternative to whatever his brother planned. When confronted with Aaron and Gabriel, he saw his chance to escape his brother’s clutches and took it.

Is this Mays’s true story? I don’t know, but, seeing the other things we know he did, I don’t think everything he told Aaron and Gabriel is true. I don’t doubt that the events he described took place, but I doubt his role in those events. Sadly, we’ll never know for sure.

But, what do you think? Do you think Mays was telling the truth? Do you think his brother betrayed him? Or, do you think he was the one who betrayed his brother? I’m curious to hear! If you enjoyed this and want to learn how you can stay alive in a zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!