The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Hard Choices
By Liam O'Leary
When dealing with The Walking Dead, all your decisions have consequences
Let’s take a look at how well things have gone for Maggie and her team on their mission to resupply Alexandria with the stockpile at Meridian. First, they lost their supplies when Maggie’s mildly cavalier attitude towards Gage nearly being bitten by a walker convinces him to bail with their supplies, which he winds up misplacing. Then, Gage dies because he gets trapped by a herd and Maggie has to leave him to his fate to protect the rest of the group. Next, the group gets scattered, Gabriel, Elijah, Negan, Alden, and Duncan all get injured when they get ambushed by The Reapers, and Roy and Cole get killed. Next, Maggie loses her flashlight while fighting a walker inside the Wellhaven Plaza, and Alden gets injured further by an attacking Reaper. After that, she, Negan, and Alden find Agatha and Duncan, who dies of his injuries, and while trying to escape a growing gang of walkers, loses Agatha to walkers while arguing with Negan. Finally, she’s forced to leave Alden behind in an abandoned church so that she and Negan can try to complete their mission.
All-in-all? Not too good. Of the twelve people on the mission, nearly half have already died, and they haven’t even gotten to where they were going yet! They still need to collect the supplies at Meridian and bring them back to Alexandria without leading The Reapers there!
The underlying connection here is that Maggie chose to take the team to her old base at Meridian for supplies, and everything I just listed is the result of less than half of that mission being completed. The thing is, I’m not saying she shouldn’t have chosen to do that, because, well, as I laid out in the last entry, if they didn’t get the supplies, Alexandria would starve! Basically: Maggie’s damned if she does, and damned if she doesn’t.
That is how things work in a zombie apocalypse: Because of how dangerous zombies are, because of how dangerous people are, and because of how scarce supplies are, everything is life-or-death, and as such, every choice you make has consequences. No choice is easy, because, make the wrong choice, and it might become the last one you or anyone in your group ends up making, so, before you do something, think carefully about what those consequences are. Sure, there may be times where you don’t really have a choice, but, that doesn’t mean you should be careless about the consequences of the choices you make.
Next. The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Old Rules Don't Apply. dark
And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! Everything, every choice we make in a zombie apocalypse, will be a life-or-death one, and thus, they will all have consequences we have to live with, and that means that all of our choices will be hard, no matter what. If you want some more information about making those choices a little bit easier, 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!