The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Trust And Lies

The Walking Dead season 11

What do you do when you realize how deeply other people’s lies go?

The further along this season of The Walking Dead has gone, the more people within the Commonwealth have realized that people high up within their community have been lying to and hiding things from them, even people who are themselves high up within the Commonwealth, like Mercer.

Those lies have been the off-book arms deals being carried out by Director of Operations Lance Hornsby and the attempted heists of Cooper’s home (using Commonwealth civilians, no less) by Governor Pamela Milton’s son, Sebastian.

None of our characters have really chosen a course of action to deal with Hornsby or Sebastian, many of them realizing that both are too well-connected and powerful within the Commonwealth to stand against, and doing so could result in their deaths with no changes being affected.

But, this raises an important question: What do you do if you realize that you’re being lied to, not by a stranger, but by someone deep within your own group?

Whatever you do, you need to consider what might happen afterwards. Max was fairly quick to chide her brother for not doing something about Sebastian, but Mercer was right: Sebastian, already having proven to have members of the military under his direct control, could easily have him “removed.” This would leave Max, and many other people, completely unprotected from Sebastian and his minions. If you are going to do something about deep-rooted corruption in your group, you need to know that anyone and everyone you care about are either ready to defend themselves or have been taken safely out of danger; otherwise, you’re potentially leaving them to the mercy of the very people you seek to expose.

Back to the question at hand: What do you do when you learn that there are lies and sketchy behavior deep down within your group?

Do you leave? It’s possible, but would you want to sacrifice an otherwise good situation for the uncertainty of the road?

If leaving is out of the question, and the lies are something so heinous that you can’t live with or something the perpetrators would fight to keep covered up, you need to fight it. Now, “fighting it” isn’t so simple as just going to war because if the culprits are that high up, they would have the means of just making you disappear, so you need to get hard proof of the lies and then expose them. Once enough people within your group know what’s going on, even if something does happen you, it will confirm the suspicions you’ve already cast on the liars deep within your group and turn them against the perpetrators. They and whoever sticks by them likely won’t last long after that.