TWD, Survival Rule Of The Week: Good People And Bad People

3) Good People Can Go Bad.

It feels like one of the major themes at play in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead was that, go long enough in a zombie apocalypse, and even otherwise, good people can become bad.

This was, for the better part of season five, the theme of the entire show, but, felt like it was being revisited in this week’s episode through the prism of Mays, who went from a staunch defender of his extended family to their jailer. His brother, who (According to Mays, at least) went from devoted family man to backstabber, attempting to murder his own twin brother for a few scraps of food.

This betrayal left Mays convinced that people were inherently selfish and that, when push came to shove, they would always pick themselves over even the people closest to them. Sadly, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

There will be people, even otherwise good people, who go bad in a zombie apocalypse. Why? Well, there’s a couple of reasons.

1. Desperation. When left with going hungry or attacking someone, some people will choose the latter and attack anyone they come across who has food.
2. Distrust. When they have a traumatic experience in the apocalypse (Not at all an unlikely scenario), some people may do like Mays and assume that everyone is hostile and try to be preemptive about it, getting the drop on “enemies” before the drop is gotten on them.
3. Corruption. This is the worst one. There are some people, once removed from a world of order and law, which may give in to their worst elements and do things they would never have considered doing before the world fell apart. What makes this so bad is that, while you might be able to get through to a person who’s turned bad because of the other two reasons, a person who’s become corrupted, you almost certainly can’t, because this wasn’t necessarily the result of a need to survive, or, because they don’t believe they can take the risk of trusting people, but, because they chose to walk this path. They saw that they could have done things differently and chose not to.

Once again, I tell you this so that you have a good idea of what you’re up against. Especially as things wear on, the likelihood of otherwise good people going rotten increases, and you need to be aware of this, lest you let your guard down at the worst possible time.