Tales of the Walking Dead sheds new light on Alpha’s story

Tales of the Walking Dead just gave the fandom a fantastic new chapter in the life of Alpha, former leader of the Whisperers. Samantha Morton reprised her role as Alpha in the third episode of Tales of TWD. This story gave an interesting twist to one of the most feared villains from The Walking Dead series.

This article contains spoilers for Tales of the Walking Dead season 1, episode 3, “Dee.” 

The episode began with the voice of Alpha stating, “Let me tell you how I died.” Hearing that voice again gave viewers chills, knowing who it belonged to without even seeing the character. This episode was written by Tales of TWD showrunner Channing Powell who also wrote the flagship series episode “Omega,” which tells Lydia’s (Cassidey McClincy) remembrance of events early in the outbreak.

During interviews at SDCC, Morton shared that she was shocked at the twist in Alpha’s story and reminded fans that everything they have learned about Alpha and Lydia up to this point has been from the POV of a scared, young child. Not all of those memories prove to be true.

Tales of the Walking Dead – Dee

In this episode, Alpha is known as Dee, and she and Lydia (Scarlett Blum) take refuge with a group that lives on a river boat. The group is led by a woman named Brooke (Lauren Glazier), who begins questioning Dee’s parenting, which doesn’t sit well with her.

Dee doesn’t trust anyone and is very observant, noticing two occasions when she believes signals are being sent to people on the river bank and she was right. One of the men has a crew who tries to take over the riverboat. Dee’s true nature comes out, and she skillfully kills one of the men by slitting his throat. She escapes with Lydia in a  dinghy.

This puts the pair in the woods to fight the element and the undead. She begins to show Lydia how to survive in this world, but she is young and doesn’t want to kill the walkers. This will eventually lead to Dee knowing she must kill the both of them as they can never survive.

Then she hears whisperers that Lydia believes are coming from the trees. A group slowly reveals themselves to the pair whispering for Dee to “spare her.” The Whisperers emerge led by a woman who introduces herself as Hera (Anne Beye). This is when viewers learn that Alpha wasn’t the one who started this group.

Throughout the episode, viewers see and hear Alpha telling her stories as she stands in a cave with heads on pikes and large strips of human flesh hanging from above. She tells of how she killed her father, and he deserved it. Of being stuck in the basement with Lydia’s father, Frank, and how she went mad and killed him. This is also where viewers hear her say, “I was keeping myself from my nature. But that, that was the end of Dee and the beginning of me.”

As viewers watch, they see that Alpha took the skin of Hera to make her flesh mask.

The story shows that Alpha was always Alpha; she just suppressed this side of her when she needed to. This episode also reveals that Lydia had a very skewed memory of her father and mother during the early days of the outbreak. It was an amazing backstory of a character viewers thought they knew, not realizing there was much more to the story.

More details about Alpha: Tales of the Walking Dead sheds new light on Alpha’s story

Tales of the Walking Dead returns to AMC Sunday, September 4, with episode 4, “Amy/Dr. Everett.” 

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