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

Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Kublek

Lt. Colonel Kublek is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting villains in the Walking Dead universe, because she is so gray of a villain.

What I mean by this is that while she did many awful things, she was never someone who was either so vicious as to revel in what she did or so detached that she lost touch with the human cost of what she was doing.

What she was doing, of course, was ordering the destruction of whole communities and using the peoples of those communities as test subjects in a mass experiment to try to find a cure for zombification.

Even though this was horrific, that horror wasn’t lost on Elizabeth. She even said as much when she was confronted by Jadis about the downfall of the research facility. As Jadis laid out Lt. Colonel Kublek’s “crimes” regarding the facility, it became apparent that she attempted to maintain a modicum of humanity in the face of the horrors she oversaw that led to the facility’s downfall. Allowing the Perimeter to exist outside the facility, using Civic Republic medical equipment to keep Indira alive, and having Hope and Iris brought to the facility for Leo’s benefit.

In so many instances in the Walking Dead universe, the villains often become so entrenched in the evil they do that they can’t or won’t go back, like The Governor. Or, they go the other way, being so disconnected that they don’t care one way or another, making them arguably worse, like Martin. What makes Lt. Colonel Kublek so different is that she was enthusiastic enough about what she was doing to keep doing it. While at the same time, she never became enthusiastic about it, always trying to treat it as a necessary evil to leave a better world in the aftermath. She did this while balancing the evils she was doing with as many little bits of good as she could accommodate.