The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Your Apocalypse Family

The Walking Dead, you go to the ends of the earth for family

In this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, Pope recounted to Daryl what he and the Reapers went through when the outbreak hit. If I understood it correctly, the Reapers, all being military veterans, were hired by the U.S. government to try to maintain order and protect civilians from the dead and potential rioters (Maybe even the people depicted in the mural Daryl found in the Metro tunnels), much like we’ve seen with the National Guard in L.A. in Fear, or Lieutenant Dawn Lerner and the Atlanta Police Department in season five, and, much like the latter, were present when the government threw in the towel, and firebombed the city.

Furthermore, Pope and his team braved the searing flames to find all of their comrades and bring them to safety, ensuring they were together as they rode out the destruction cascading around them.

Between this and the fact that The Reapers had, apparently, been searching high and low across the Virginia countryside to find Leah, one thing is evident: Pope would do anything to bring his people together. This isn’t something you do for just any old chump you picked up along the road; no, this is something you do for family.

Now, we could argue about the nature of Pope’s relationship to his team, but I instead want to focus on the level of devotion to one’s group that sort of behavior suggests. This is the way people in a group of survivors should be in a zombie apocalypse, that, even if separated by hellfire and miles of dangerous, zombie-filled wilderness, they search high and low to bring them home safely.

If members of a group know they can expect that kind of loyalty, it bonds them together and makes their willingness to fight for one another (And thus survive) that much better.