Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Who Can You Trust?
By Liam O'Leary
Fear the Walking Dead, don’t trust everyone
At the beginning of this week’s episode of Fear The Walking Dead, we had a mini-montage of Strand getting calls from potential “intakes” (As he and Howard call them), all of whom he rejects. One of them is Arno, the man who would become (Or perhaps, already was) the leader of the Stalkers. Not long after Morgan arrives looking for medical help for Mo, Arno launches a siege of Strand’s Tower, complete with a catapult.
After Arno reintroduces himself, Strand immediately comments that he was right to reject him, and he was.
It’s a sad reality, but dishonesty is something every person is capable of. Some people will omit inconvenient facts, others will tell small lies, and others still will tell big lies. The likelihood of these lies being told increases the more desperate a situation people find themselves in. Each day a zombie apocalypse continues, it increases the chance that people will lie to you too, if not scheme against you outright.
Because of this, the decision of who you take into your group and who you don’t is extremely important. It requires that you develop a way of weeding out the people who intend to do you harm and those who don’t. If you noticed, Strand questioned everyone who asked to enter his Tower, wondering where they were before the nuclear warhead was launched and how they survived out in the wasteland. The reason he was doing this was to try to find holes in their stories. People who might have been far outside the wasteland or people who might have an explanation for their survival in the wasteland that doesn’t make any sense, suggesting that they may be trying to hide something. If the people who came to him had inconsistencies in their stories, they could have hostile intent.
When it comes to trusting people in a zombie apocalypse, it’s about getting answers and knowing the right questions to get the real answers, not just what people think you want to hear. When you know the right questions, you can get the right answers without the other person even realizing they’ve told you.