The Walking Dead World Beyond, Season 2: Who ISN’T The Worst?

Dr. Lyla Belshaw

If I’m being honest, poor Dr. Belshaw got a raw deal. Firstly, her daughter became infected early in the outbreak. Then, her daughter infected her unwitting husband in turn. Then, in an attempt to use her medical expertise to help her family, she conducted experiments on them, all of which were in vain.

She then found herself in the employ of the Civic Republic Military, who hoped that, with their greater resources, she could do for them what she couldn’t do for her own family. Of course, all their resources couldn’t generate volunteers for the battery of tests on fresh walkers any attempt at a cure would require, so they began making volunteers.

Despite how things looked last season, Dr. Belshaw took issue with this. We could see her be visibly bothered by seeing Sergeant Barca arrive as a test subject, and we could see how bothered she was by Iris’s condemnations of her choosing to work for the CRM.

In my Worst list, I pointed out how she didn’t do anything about the CRM’s means of acquiring volunteers, but what could she do when you think about it? She saw what happened to Dr. Abbott, and without knowing who she could trust inside the facility, who could she have told? Someone in the Civic Republic Government, but when was she ever going to get a chance to get there without raising alarms from the CRM? If she had succeeded, then what? It wouldn’t have made the chances of her experiments succeeding (And therefore, her chances of coming up with a cure) increase. It would have just ensured that things got delayed further. Meaning that if a cure could be found, it would have taken even longer to achieve, meaning countless more people would potentially be killed by walkers.

All Dr. Belshaw wanted was to help humanity the only way she could. She couldn’t fight the CRM, she had no means of ratting them out to the civilian government, and the most help she could provide people was by using her expertise to keep working towards a cure, whether she liked the methods of her benefactors or not.