The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Old Rules Don’t Apply

Life is a gamble in a zombie apocalypse, and not everyone wins

In this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, we saw the unfortunate end of Gage, who, after losing confidence in Maggie’s leadership, tried to abandon the mission to Meridian. Only to be chased back to the rest of the group by the very herd everyone else met after he abandoned them. When he reunited with the group, it was behind a sealed train door, with a large concentration of walkers slowly encroaching upon him. He acknowledged his mistakes, and begged Maggie to help him, but Maggie, realizing that the walkers were too numerous, the group’s ammo (Especially since Gage lost it all) was too limited. The door leading out of the car they were in was blocked, and Gage’s resolve, just too shaky, decided to leave him to his fate.

Alden wasn’t too pleased about it (Negan probably wasn’t, either, his own airing of what he saw as Maggie’s disregard for Gage’s safety the reason Gage bailed in the first place), but because of the predicament they were in, Maggie wasn’t left with much choice.

The point here is that, in a zombie apocalypse, sometimes, the survival of your group may sometimes mean that some people just plain aren’t going to make it. People often rail against times in history when governments or leaders had to make true “lesser of two evils” choices — Doing something bad to prevent something that they saw as objectively worse — but, in a zombie apocalypse, the ability to do that is, frankly, a luxury. There will be times where you, or your group, or your leader, has to make a choice to protect the larger portion of your group, even if it means that some people have to die.

Is it good? Absolutely not, but in an apocalypse, when the choice is between losing a few people and losing everyone, you have to make a choice, even if the result isn’t pretty.