Connecting The Walking Dead, Season Two: Who Are You?

Dr. Belshaw’s Unhappy Backstory, Part II

While Dr. Belshaw’s backstory was tragic, it also gave us another glimpse into how the breakdown of civilization was in New York, and I couldn’t not talk about it. Firstly, the way she described how her daughter, Mia, became infected, initially, sounded so strange to me: She said Mia was “…bitten by a man who had gotten into our backyard.”

I say “initially” because, when I took a step back, it hit me: This is probably how many people saw the first encounters with the infected. Remember, at this point, the world didn’t know what they were dealing with. There weren’t “walkers” or “empties” or any of the dozens of names for the dead yet, because people didn’t know they were dead yet, so encounters would be seen as “bitten by a woman on the street” or “by a man who had gotten into our backyard.”

Also, it seems like either Lyla hadn’t seen or heard about any other attacks in New York or the rest of the country. The way she talks about the incident makes it seem like she wasn’t in any way on alert about “sick people” or anything like that. If Fear The Walking Dead was anything to go by, videos were going around of infected attacking people, so you’d think she’d at least be a little wary of strangers shuffling around the area. The way she describes the attack makes it seem like (At least in her part of New York) that the outbreak just came out of the blue, which is odd, as she later said that most of her neighbors were gone by the next day, implying they evacuated, something people only do when they have advanced warning.

The final interesting detail about Lyla’s backstory is that, within what I can assume is about twelve hours of Mia being bitten, the phone lines went dead. This suggests that when things collapsed in New York, they collapsed fast. Maybe things in New York City mirrored what we saw in Los Angeles in Fear TWD, and the breakdown in things there caused a cascading effect in the rest of the state.

Whatever the case was, all of this comes together to form a picture of how ordinary people saw the outbreak unfolding in front of them, a confusing mixture of surprise and horror.