Connecting The Walking Dead, Season Two: Konsekans

World Beyond Lieutenant Colonel Kublek is a fountain of information

A good chunk of this week’s episode of World Beyond focused on Elizabeth Kublek trying to, in a very roundabout way, coax Hope Bennett into seeing things the Civic Republic’s way and get her fully on board with what they want.

This entailed dropping Hope off in Elizabeth’s old home city of Albany, New York, and letting her roam around on her own. This was to see if she could survive alone, or if she wanted to come to the Civic Republic.

As Hope left, Elizabeth warned her that the only way out of the city was the Dunn Memorial Bridge, which she advised Hope not to take.

Now, having long warned people about bridges in a zombie apocalypse, I could assume that Elizabeth was giving Hope a general warning about the bridge for the same reason I would: They’re too easy to get trapped in. It’s logical. It’s equally logical that flying around in helicopters all the time, she could see whether or not the bridge had collapsed, like the one the group saw when they tried to cross the Mississippi River.

The way Elizabeth sounded made it seem like she was speaking from experience. Since she obviously escaped the city before its destruction, she saw what was happening when the outbreak hit. Did she see a crash happen on the bridge, or see someone turn while driving, or see a traffic jam on the bridge turn into a roadblock, and eventually, an impassible wall, trapping the populace inside? Until we get a flashback from her, we sadly won’t know.

There was one other thing, though: While lying about the destruction of Campus Colony and Omaha, Elizabeth starts talking about “columns”, the Civic Republic’s name for large groups of walkers. I specifically say “large groups of walkers” because the lieutenant colonel begins discussing the various terms used for them, saying how Hope called them “mega clusters”, that some groups call them “hordes”, while other groups call them “herds”.

Now, it’s entirely possible that other groups the CRM have encountered have what, I guess we could call, “linguistic convergent evolution”, whereby peoples of different parts of North America both happen upon the same term for the same phenomena (Hell, Carol used the term “horde” specifically for describing herds with populations ranging in the thousands, so, it’s not impossible).

But, it does seem a little bit odd to me that, now that we know the CRM have in their custody people from both Morgan’s group and Rick’s group (Including Rick himself), Elizabeth just happens to specifically mention the terms for large groups of walkers used in both The Walking Dead and Fear (“Herds” and “Hordes”, respectively), and even acknowledges that those terms are used by different groups of survivors. This isn’t a coincidence or error born out of people working on a show within a shared universe. This is someone in that universe, whose group now holds members of both main groups in the other two shows of that shared universe, saying “Yeah, we’ve met people who call lots of zombies these things”.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.