The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Zombie World

The Walking Dead -The more you exacerbate divisions, the worse those divisions become

In this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, we got a look into the simmering class tensions that exist within the Commonwealth, with those on the lower rungs of the community feeling left behind by and inconsequential to those at the top.

This problem is that it is entirely a monster of the Commonwealth’s own making.

Did you ever see these issues at Alexandria? Or Hilltop? Or The Kingdom? No. The one community where you did see something like this was the Sanctuary because the Saviors had a tendency to mistreat the workers; In fact, the only reason why Simon, Regina, and the other lieutenants didn’t have a full-scale insurrection on their hands when Daryl and Tara blew a hole in the Sanctuary was because of the timely arrival of Negan, whose presence and leadership calmed the tensions between the increasingly angry workers and the Saviors.

Even as bad as things were there, they seem even worse in the Commonwealth, perhaps because they’ve had so much longer to simmer and an even more obvious disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

In all of the other communities, there were divisions, yes, but they mostly boiled down to the leaders, the people who were good enough at specific things to be trusted in charge of them, and everyone else. Day-to-day, the life of everyone else in Alexandria, or Hilltop, or Kingdom, was no worse than Rick’s, or Maggie’s, or Ezekiel’s.

But, in the Commonwealth, those at the bottom live in small, cramped, loud, and crappy apartments that look like they’re only a step above dilapidated, like the Commonwealth just took the buildings reclaimed by Eugene, Princess, Ezekiel, and Stephanie, cleaned up the blood, and then just stuffed people in them. Meanwhile, the people at the top have fancy parties, commission paintings, and drink vintage wine, not knowing or caring about the people living hand-to-mouth beneath them.

This approach has not only served to accentuate those divisions, but magnify them, and, with all the time that so many have had in the Commonwealth to stew over the grossly unfair nature of their society, and with there being so many people in that same boat, it creates a powder keg, just waiting for the spark to ignite it.

What will happen when that spark comes? My guess: Carnage.