The Walking Dead, Survival Rule of the Week: Never Assume

Tales of the Walking Dead

Never assume that just because you knew someone before the apocalypse, they will be good. 

In a sad twist to the end of the first episode of Tales, Joe discovered that his potential love interest, Sandra, a woman he connected with over Ohio State football and doomsday prepping before the outbreak, turned out to be a paranoid, crazy, serial killing lunatic. Sandra, after drugging Joe and while wearing Joker-style face paint, attempted to murder him, chasing him through her bunker whilst armed with a cleaver. Really sad way for their story to end, if I’m being honest.

What made it worse was how Joe, a man who prided himself on being prepared, was completely blindsided by Sandra’s heel turn, believing that, because she was a friend he’d made over the internet before the outbreak, she was someone he could trust, maybe even build a future a with.

This was a mistake on Joe’s part. Even if you take out the relative (high) sketchiness of meeting someone you only know via an internet message board, the fact remains that this sort of thing could happen with anyone in a zombie apocalypse. Between the horror of watching the zombie outbreak unfold or the lack of social order as a result of said unfolding, it’s easy for people to either go off the deep end or reveal that they’d always been there.

It’s sad, but even people we know and love may reveal a frightening side of themselves in the apocalypse. For some, the horror of the apocalypse or dealing with hostiles might make them snap; for others, the breakdown of society might open the door for them to reveal that, deep down, they’d always been a bad person, just waiting for the chance to get out. What’s important is that even if you know them, if you haven’t seen them for a long time (If ever before), you need to proceed with caution when meeting them because they could easily turn out to be someone very different (And dangerous) than the person you thought you knew.