Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Bad For Good

Fear the Walking Dead – Sonny Boy

When does “doing bad to do good” go too far?

Let’s be honest: In a zombie apocalypse, many of the normal rules of behavior go out the window. You may have to steal food to stay alive. You may have to leave people behind to keep someone you care about alive. You may have to kill other people to protect yourself. This is just the nature of survival in the apocalypse.

However, it’s inevitable that people will attempt to coalesce together again as the apocalypse wears on, and people see that being in larger groups is a better strategy than trying to go it alone. Once this happens, some of the old rules will come back around again, or at least a little bit. If you go around killing people within your group, you can bet that the rest of your group will react to this just as they would have before the zombies arrived.

Throughout this week’s episode, first, with the tower residents Strand had thrown off the roof for having walkie-talkies. Later, with Howard, we saw people being rather callous about other people being killed so that they could carry out some long-term plan.

As we’d learn near the end of the episode, June was leading a resistance inside Strand’s tower to attempt to overthrow him, meaning that the three people we saw get chucked from the tower were likely members of it. Did we even once hear June mention them? Did we even hear their names? No. We never heard who they were to the resistance. It was like they didn’t even exist.

Then, we have John, who framed Howard so that Strand would distrust him, allowing John to supplant him as Strand’s right-hand man, eventually leading John to throw Howard off the roof at Strand’s order.

What sets these actions apart from much of the other bits of carnage we’ve seen is that June and John (and, in John’s case, literally) threw people away in service of a nebulous goal without even giving them a say in it. It was like they were choosing someone else to make a sacrifice for them. They were causing relatively innocent people (except for Howard, who was doing the same thing) to die in the hopes of achieving something that was very much a pipe dream.

If what you’re doing requires throwing away innocent lives needlessly or pursuing something ultimately impossible, you haven’t “done bad to do good.” You’ve just done bad.