The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: No Other Choices

Fighting The Walking Dead may require help, but that help comes with a price

I’ve spent much of the interim between the end of episode 8 and now talking about how much I distrust The Commonwealth. Judging by what we saw in the flash-forward at the end of this week’s episode, I was right to do so. From what we saw, The Commonwealth (Using Daryl as an emissary) seemed to be shaking down Hilltop.

This is precisely the sort of thing I was expecting from The Commonwealth. In exchange for help, the communities have to obey, to one degree or another.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to get overwhelmed in a zombie apocalypse with the mass numbers of zombies roaming around. This and the potential for large groups of hostiles, meaning the likelihood that you’ll need another (potentially larger) group to help you out, is high.

Let’s say that you find yourself faced with many zombies or hostiles bearing down on you. Imagine a horde so large that it completely dwarfs the number of people in your group, and you run into a larger group that offers to help.

What do you do? If you don’t take their offer, your whole group risks annihilation, but you don’t have time to really dig into these would-be benefactors. So, you have no idea what they might ask of you and your group. They could demand total subjugation in exchange for protection for all you know. What do you do then? Fight them? You needed them to help you fight off one threat; you wouldn’t have the means to fight them off in turn.

But, this is the problem: If you can’t deal with a threat without someone else’s help, you’re now stuck with whatever conditions that help may cost, even if those conditions are otherwise unacceptable. If you refuse, you’re almost certainly in just as bad a situation as the one you started in.