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

The Walking Dead never abandon family

Now, I know I talked about the opposite just last week, but let’s get one thing straight when I say abandon; I mean, leave a person to die when you have the ability to save them or get them to safety.

The reason I bring this up is near the end of this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, we saw Pope, who by all accounts, sees his team as his family, grab Bossie, one of his subordinates, and throw him into a damned raging bonfire!  Obviously, these two things are incongruous. I mean, how can a man who claims that his team is his family brutally murder one of them without so much as a second thought?

Well, the answer is simple: He believed Bossie had abandoned a brother-in-arms.

Earlier in the episode, we learn that Turner, another group member, had apparently been grievously wounded, presumably by someone on Maggie’s team as they were trying to scatter. Upon examining the wounds Bossie had also suffered, he noticed that, while Turner’s wounds were on the front, Bossie’s were on his back, indicating his wounds were suffered whilst running away.

For Pope, this was a huge betrayal: Turner was wounded doing his job — Running into battle — while Bossie was trying to escape. Basically, Pope saw it as abandoning Turner in the midst of battle out of cowardice.

While Pope’s response might seem extreme, from his perspective, Bossie actions make him untrustworthy: If he can abandon one teammate while under fire, he’ll do it to others and risk good people dying who didn’t need to because he’s too afraid to do something he’s been doing at this point for over a decade. For Pope, in a world so filled with death and horror, he can’t waste time or resources on someone who won’t risk his life for those he fights alongside.

As bad as Pope’s punishment for Bossie was, his sentiment wasn’t wrong: In a zombie apocalypse, a person who isn’t willing to stand with another group member in times of danger is themselves a danger, as they leave their comrades exposed because they can’t be relied on to watch their back. A person like that is not someone you want because they will get good people killed.

And, if they do that…then what? You can’t trust them anymore, can you? How many more people would you need to lose before you decided such a person was a liability? In the apocalypse, any loss is huge, and people who cause such losses, you don’t want around. I’m not suggesting doing what Pope did, certainly, but you need to make people like Bossie either shape up or ship out.

Never abandon family. Never.

And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! If you survive with people long enough in a zombie apocalypse, they can become as close to you as your family (Assuming, of course, your group doesn’t already consist of them). You should treat them like family so that each of you sees the person’s life next to them as important as they would their own flesh and blood. If you want some more information about protecting your family from zombies, 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!