Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Who Do You Want To Be?

Fear the Walking Dead Mourning Cloak

Do you want to be you or let the apocalypse change you?

Of all the characters we’ve met so far in Fear The Walking Dead, I think that, next to Dakota, the one who’s transformed the most from when we first met them is Howard, Strand’s right-hand man at the Tower.

When we first met Howard at the end of last season, he was little more than a mild-mannered historian, living out his life alone in the Tower with the historical artifacts he had managed to save from certain destruction.

However, since becoming Strand’s minion, many of his new boss’s worst traits are rubbing off on him. Strand is, at this moment, staying pretty well in-character. He’s always been a bit of “That Guy” — Prone to detrimental flashes of selfishness, deceitfulness, hyper-pragmatism, and a slight Machiavellian streak — so what he’s doing in the Tower is rather consistent with that. Howard, however, while his past is a mystery (though this week’s “Episode Insider” implied that that will not remain so for too long), he had, initially, seemed like just a chill bookworm who saw the moves Strand was making as something ultimately beneficial to humanity, even if he didn’t agree with all of them.

As the season has progressed, though, a very dark side of him has come to the surface, one more amenable to Strand’s worst tendencies, and becoming more of heavy for his boss, culminating in this week’s episode, wherein he threw Ali off the roof of the Tower for attempting to turn off Strand’s beacon, because “it’s what Strand would do.”

All of this brings me to this question: Do you want to be you, or do you want to let the apocalypse change you?

Rest assured, the zombie apocalypse certainly has the ability to change you, with its gruesome nature, necessity for violence, and forcing you to have to survive. It could easily turn you into someone completely unrecognizable if you let it, if you wanted it to.

It will take a lot of active effort to resist those elements of the apocalypse pulling you into a different direction. You have to commit yourself to staying morally centered, or, as much as you can, at least, refraining from delving into the excesses that the unrestrained and pragmatic world of the apocalypse can foster.

Greed, violence, lust, and callousness will be easy to fall into in the zombie apocalypse, if you let it. The question is: Who do you want to be?

And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! A zombie apocalypse will be an experience unlike any that anyone has ever seen, and because of that, it has the ability to transform us into monsters just as terrifying as the ones trying to eat us if you let it. It’s up to us to be the people we want to be, whoever that is. If you want to survive in the apocalypse, regardless of who you are, 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!