The Walking Dead Villains: Who ISN’T The Worst? Part 10C

1) The Commonwealth

In my “Worst” list, I made a big deal about the duplicitous manner in which the Commonwealth soldiers interrogated Princess, using the old “Good cop, bad cop” routine and inferring that their tactics suggest they’re hiding their true, more insidious, nature.

The thing is, we don’t know that yet. I mean, yes, some of us have some idea of how the Commonwealth is in the comics, but there’s been plenty of things throughout the series that have differed between the show and the comics.

All of that is irrelevant for this season because if the Commonwealth is or isn’t good, we won’t find that out until next season. We need to focus on what we saw and heard in this season, and what we heard is that the Commonwealth has something to protect.

Even if Princess’s guard hadn’t said that they had a population to protect, or if we assume he’s lying about it, the Commonwealth has to have a large population. If they can afford to send a detachment of heavily armed troops out to the middle of West Virginia, it means that they have a lot of soldiers at their disposal. If they have many soldiers, it also means that they have a lot of people to pull from to get those soldiers.

When you realize that, suddenly, the behavior of the Commonwealth soldiers makes a lot of sense. They have many people counting on them for protection, so when meeting new people, they can’t afford to just let in any old riff-raff. For all they know, they could be letting in someone like Dante or Alpha or some other kind of murdering scumbag; therefore, they need to be very thorough in interviewing them, lest they let in such a scumbag, who rampages through their community.

In light of that, I can’t blame the Commonwealth soldiers for their interrogation methods because they need to be sure the people they take in aren’t a threat to their people if it takes a little trickery to weed out the hostiles, more power to them. Besides, so far as we can tell, they didn’t torture anyone so, anything short of that, in the pursuit of ensuring you’re not bringing hostiles into your community, is okay in my book.

Also, something needs to be said for Princess’s guard, who, despite getting beaten by a slightly deluded Princess, realized she wasn’t really a threat. He gave her the chance to answer the interrogator rather than legitimately cut her, Eugene, Yumiko, and Ezekiel off, as he threatened. That was pretty cool of him.