Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Striking The Balance

Fear the Walking Dead

Expectation vs. Reality

In an unexpected twist, Wes became the villain of this week’s Fear TWD, staging an attempted coup of Strand and successfully getting the rangers to support his cause.

His reasoning? He believed that Alicia, Luciana, and Morgan were being hypocritical, not actually living up to the promises they made back when they were trying to recruit fellow survivors back in season five, and that Strand, brutally pragmatic though he was, was at least honest about his worst tendencies. When Alicia had agreed to stay at the tower in exchange for Strand turning off the beacon and letting the rest of her and Morgan’s group escape, Wes believed that Alicia was trying to con Strand and protested. When Strand attempted to assure Wes that he knew what he was doing, Wes insisted that he couldn’t count on that and turned on his former boss, getting the rangers to side with him.

Wes clearly had an idea of what he thought Strand was, and when Strand’s attachment to Alicia took him in a different direction, Wes didn’t like it and decided that if Strand wasn’t going to be the leader he expected, then he’d have to be that man, instead.

I feel like this is a battle of what Wes expected versus what he wound up getting and taking matters into his own hands to ensure he got the former, regardless of what it took to get it.

We all have expectations of what a zombie apocalypse would be like and how we’d be in one. If you imagine the apocalypse as anything less than a tough, brutal, horrific existence, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re deluding yourself. Between the comforts of the pre-apocalypse world disappearing, having to actively struggle to get food and water, the environmental threats, hostiles, and the dead, plus all the affects these things will have on you and those you care about, it will be a hard road, and if you expect to be some kind of superhero in it, you’re still deluding yourself. Keep it up, you may not take it well when you realize those expectations were wrong, if you get that far.

Conversely, you can’t let yourself fall into the mistaken belief that the apocalypse is a death sentence. If you’re tough, resilient, intelligent, adaptable, and a little bit lucky, you can make a life for yourself, a rough one, but not one that wouldn’t be worth living.

You need to be realistic in what you expect out of the apocalypse and what you expect out of yourself. Having overly-positive illusions about either is a recipe for a hard failure. At the same time, you can’t let the grim appearance of reality suck you into the abyss; at that point, it’s just as (if not more) likely to be fatal. The one thing the apocalypse won’t change is this: You have to take the world as it comes to you, it won’t be perfect, but you can improve on it.