Connecting The Walking Dead, Season Two: Returning Point

Typically, when I do one of these articles, I have at least a few different things to discuss that happened in the most recent episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, but for this week, I have one big thing to address: Jadis.

It would seem that, since Jadis has joined the Civic Republic, she’s learned to emulate one of The Walking Dead’s worst villains.

With her playing such a key role in this week’s episode, we got to see a good deal of the woman we once knew in The Walking Dead and what kind of person she’s evolved into since she disappeared from that show. If this week’s episode of World Beyond is anything to go by, it seems like Jadis took the wrong lessons from the massacre of her former group and became the very person she hated.

What am I talking about? Well, let’s go back a bit first, shall we?

For those who may have forgotten, during season eight of The Walking Dead, Negan’s right-hand man, Simon, in an attempt to remind Jadis who she was supposed to be allied with, decided to kill her two lieutenants. This was before he ordered the Saviors assembled with him to massacre the entirety of the Scavengers except for Jadis.

As you might expect, this left Jadis rather angry and resulted in her kidnapping Negan with the intent of exacting revenge on him. After Negan managed to get through to her (And inadvertently caused her to miss getting picked up by the CRM), she relented and set him free. However, while she may have let Negan go, I’m not so sure she ever forgave him.

Fast-forward to the present, and it’s clear that Jadis believes she learned, in the abstract, why the Saviors destroyed her community. While talking to Indira (Who was pleading with her to spare the rest of the Perimeters), Jadis, somewhat sympathetically, told her that she too once led a community of artists. That, like Indira’s, it was doomed, because (As she said): “Larger, more powerful communities overtake smaller ones. It’s become their responsibility to do this. They’re ascendant because they’ve adapted, equipped themselves for survival, not just in might but in seeing the world for what it is, and what it must be.”

It would seem that Jadis thinks that larger communities in the apocalypse will, inevitably, either absorb or eliminate smaller ones because of their outlook on the world. They need to understand that they have to be willing to do what the Saviors or the Civic Republic Military have done. It almost seems like, after all this time, Jadis has come to admire what Negan was doing and sees the CRM as doing what he had been doing in Virginia, but on a much larger scale.

Of course, while it would appear Jadis understands to some degree why the Saviors wound up destroying her community. Again, I can’t quite say she’s forgiven them. When Huck, attempting to covertly spare Indira and her community, suggested Jadis shouldn’t have them killed because the Perimeter community was a “resource,” you could see Jadis get visibly annoyed with this and then order the CRM unit sent to the Perimeter to carry out the execution.

Finally, it would appear that one last thing Jadis seems to have learned from the Saviors was their mentality about the question of forcing compliance. Once she’d realized that Dr. Bennett had recruited most of the CRM’s research scientists in his insurrection, she told her subordinate, Corporal Pierce, to shoot Leo, Hope, Iris, and the scientists to “make them remember.” This was not only the same mentality the Saviors had when it came to forcing compliance from new groups but was primarily championed by none other than Simon, the very man who ordered the massacre of Jadis’s people back in Virginia.

In the years since Jadis left Virginia to join the Civic Republic Military, despite apparently never forgiving the Saviors, it appears that she has come to see the righteousness(?) of their approach and their outlook, and taken on much of both. It makes her a great asset to the CRM, but it also seems to have turned her into the very thing she seems to hate.

So what did you think?  Were there any connections that you felt I missed? Let me know in the comments! Suppose you like this and want to see something different from me, specifically my tips to survive the zombie apocalypse. 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!