Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: It’s All About Trust

5) Trust Can Be…Misplaced.

One of the more interesting things to come out of this week’s episode of Fear was the questions raised during the meeting about the perpetrator of the attack on Tank Town. Luciana seemed certain that the attack was conducted by someone among the workers at the facility and reasoned that that meant The Beginners had infiltrated it, which made Charlie realize that, if The Beginners infiltrated Tank Town, it’s entirely possible that they already had a spy within Morgan’s community, which is, obviously, bad news.

This is why you need to be careful who you put your trust in in the zombie apocalypse, because, if you’re not, you could wind up trusting not only someone who doesn’t have you or your group’s best interests at heart but someone who actively wants to destroy you.

How do you weed them out, then, you might ask? Well, firstly, you need to question how you met them. Look at the more prominent people the group met as they formed the convoy in season five: Tess, the Cackleberry kids, Rabbi Kessner, and Wes.

The group met Tess (And her son) at her home…which was laden with land mines. If she or her husband were with The Beginners, wouldn’t they have gone to them when the outbreak hit instead of hunkering down and setting land mines? The kids were stuck in an irradiated area of Texas, cut off from everyone. I don’t even think The Beginners could have reached the kids, much less recruited them. The rabbi was held up in his temple and had been since the outbreak hit, trying to keep the Ner Tamid lit. Would a man so devoted to God that he spent years inside his temple alone, trying to keep a representation of Him alight if he’d joined The Beginners cult? No.

Then there’s Wes. When he joined the group, it was after rescuing Janis from a gang of walkers. Would a group as violent as The Beginners have members just randomly join a group of people being pushed into the desert (And further away from The Beginners’ apparent base of Dallas) by saving the life of a stranger? Unlikely, seeing as how they sicced plague rats on a whole building full of total strangers.

But, the others at Tank Town? We don’t know who they were. They could easily have been someone scooped up by Virginia long before and were working to sabotage the Pioneers for months, and, so long as they grumbled about Virginia, it’s entirely possible Luciana just accepted them as a friend, another person forced into service by their mutual enemy, and didn’t pay them any mind or bother asking anything about them, allowing them to scheme unnoticed.

You need to really do what you can to know the people in your group, know who they are, know what they believe, and know what they do. Once this starts becoming a routine, you’ll learn to do it for everyone in your group and learn to be wary of randos that show up one day or whose story doesn’t feel right, or feels too right, like someone was telling it with the express intent of garnering pity or sympathy.

You have to be very careful where you place your trust in the apocalypse. Put it in the wrong hands, and you’ll discover all too late that you’ve let a viper into your midst, whose presence may make you start to question everyone and destroy the delicate trust your group has built. Once all that crumbles, it’s nearly impossible to reconstruct.

And that’s your Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week! I’m hoping I’ve got you to realize the value of trust in a zombie apocalypse and of making sure that the people you put your trust in are actually worth it. If you like this and want something else to help you survive the 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!