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

The Walking Dead – to ensure survival, others may die

If there’s one big thing that came out of this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, it’s that Maggie has turned a corner, becoming about as close to a “Crazy Beard Rick” version of herself as we’re ever going to see. This is evidenced by her almost immediately reneging on the deal she struck with the Reapers, and brutally murdering all but Leah.

The thing is, considering the circumstances, she wasn’t entirely wrong to do it.

From Maggie’s perspective, the Reapers were even more brutal than she had been. The schoolroom where Daryl killed Austin had fresh paper chains, signifying that it was being used as a school by Maggie and the Wardens. Yet, the only child Maggie brought back to Alexandria with her was Hershel, implying he’s the only child who survived. Worse still (If Carver was anything to go by), they were reveling in it. They wiped out nearly her entire community for something they easily could have gotten or built themselves in another part of Maryland, Virginia, or West Virginia and sought to hunt them down even when they weren’t a real threat. With their advanced training and skills, Maggie couldn’t afford to leave them alone to come back to reclaim Meridian again or follow her and the team back to an already crippled Alexandria and bring the total war to everyone there.

In short: Maggie needed to wipe out the Reapers to ensure that Alexandria and the remainder of the people she brought there survived.

On the other hand, her decision was clearly not approved by everybody; Both Daryl and Negan were bothered by how quickly Maggie could break her word and unleash brutal violence on people. Since Lance Hornsby’s arrival interrupted any further discussion of what Maggie did, we don’t know if there will be fallout from it further down the line.

Though, if you were to do something like that in an actual zombie apocalypse, you could expect a reaction similar to Negan’s, with people in your group asking the hard question: “If you could do that to them, who’s to say you wouldn’t break your word like that with one of us?”

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that it’s equally (If not more) likely in an actual apocalypse, you would be presented with people who, even if they didn’t pose an immediate threat to you and your group, you’d know that they would pose a serious threat eventually.

What would you do? Would you murder them in cold blood, the way Maggie did? Would you let these enemies pose a risk to your group in the future? Or, would you deal with this problem (Perhaps brutally), but also, effectively, tell your group that your word may mean nothing and that you have a capacity for violence they may find unsettling, even in the brutal world a zombie apocalypse would be?

These are your choices. I told you that they were going to be good ones.

And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! Surviving a zombie apocalypse will require you to make many choices, and many of those choices are between what’s bad and what’s worse. If you want to decide which is the better choice, 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!