Tales of the Walking Dead Survival Rule: The Unlikeliest Things

Tales of the Walking Dead spinoff series

If you hear “Tales of the Walking Dead,” it won’t be from the government.

Something kind of subtle that I really liked about this week’s episode of Tales of TWD was Gina’s co-worker, Joel, mentioning details of walker attacks that, to the general populace, were little more than rumors. This was a nice contrast to Blair’s attempts at reassurance, which was clearly her just reiterating the party line coming from the government and media about the increasingly dire situation.

Later, during one of the iterations of the gas station incident, Blair learns from a Homeland Security agent that the government was preparing to lock Atlanta down, something he clearly wasn’t supposed to tell her.

As Joel later said before another iteration of the gas station incident: “They’re not telling us everything.”

And that is why this is part of this week’s survival rule, because, in a zombie apocalypse, the government most likely won’t tell you what’s going on.

This is, honestly, not a bad idea on their part: If something like a zombie apocalypse were to happen and the government couldn’t get it under control, the last thing they’d want is for the general populace to know about it. If they or the media turned around and said “The recently deceased are coming back to life, attacking the living, and their bites cause those bitten to die and reanimate, in turn,” mass panic would ensue, guaranteeing that, whatever chance the government did have to get control of the situation, would plummet to zero. From this perspective, it makes sense they wouldn’t tell us how bad things were really getting.

But, obviously, from our perspective, this is terrible. Yes, people aren’t panicking yet, but it also means that many will just keep on behaving as normal while interacting with people who might be only minutes away from becoming a zombie and attacking them. The panic may be held off for the time being, but that will only last until things get so bad that it would be impossible to ignore.

This is why, if you hear rational people talking about hearing stories of people going randomly crazy, wildly attacking people with no rhyme or reason, or biting people out of nowhere, you should listen up and start preparing if you haven’t already; what little head start this might get you could mean the difference between life and death.

At the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, the unlikeliest thing you’ll hear from those in charge will be the truth about just how dangerous things really are.