Tales Of The Walking Dead Theory: Dee’s Alternate Reality

Tales of The Walking Dead’s latest episode was confusing: Alpha MET the Whisperers. But didn’t she START them? Is this a Walking Dead ALTERNATE REALITY?

Okay, I’m going to come right out and say this: I know that this is weird. I never thought I’d be talking about alternate realities in a Walking Dead show, but here we are.

To get everyone up to speed, at the end of episode three of Tales of The Walking Dead, Dee (better known as Alpha) met the Whisperers. I’m not just talking about a group of people who used walker blood to hide from the dead and whispered to communicate, who would eventually become the Whisperers, but the actual Whisperers, complete with walker skin masks. They even had their own (Presumably original) leader, a blonde woman named Hera, who would, apparently, either eventually lose her mask to Alpha or become Alpha’s mask.

This is all well and good, except…wasn’t it already established that Alpha created the Whisperers? That she came up with the idea of wearing a walker’s face and convinced Beta to be the first to do it? If so, then how can we reconcile that with Alpha meeting the Whisperers?

Tales of The Walking Dead Theory: Dee’s Story Takes Place In An ALTERNATE REALITY.

What we saw at the end of this week’s episode of Tales was Dee (Excuse me if I bounce between calling her “Dee” and “Alpha”) and Lydia coming upon the idea of using walker blood to mask their scent from the dead. Desperate, alone, and having just escaped a gang of walkers, Dee realizes that Lydia simply isn’t capable of surviving in the apocalypse and that she isn’t capable of surviving without Lydia. As she herself recounts it, Dee was planning on killing Lydia before killing herself but was stopped by what Lydia assumed were “fairies”, voices whispering to Dee to spare her. Realizing it must be someone, Dee calls out for the people behind the voices to show themselves, which they do, revealing a group of people wearing walker masks. While they don’t name themselves, we know that they’re the Whisperers.

You might think that this origin doesn’t conflict with the backstory we know for Alpha, but if you really think back to that backstory…it does.

In the second episode of season ten of The Walking Dead, “We Are The End Of The World”, we witness Alpha and Lydia’s first meeting with the man who will become Beta. Before that, though, the mother and daughter, in an attempt to flee pursuing walkers, hide in an abandoned hospital. We see that they are alone, Alpha has already shaved her head, and they are without masks. In fact, in this episode, it is established that Beta was the first to wear a walker mask, being encouraged by Alpha to take his best friend’s face so that he could “Always be with him”.

This does not jive with what we saw in Dee’s Tales episode. If we’re to assume her meeting with Beta was after being taken in by the Whisperers (Which would explain her giving the idea of the walker mask to him), then why doesn’t she and Lydia have walker masks of their own yet? It didn’t take Alpha, who was shown to be extremely distrusting, to have Negan making his own walker mask, so why wouldn’t she and Lydia have their own by that point? Come to think of it, if they’d been taken in by the Whisperers, why would they have even been alone in the first place?

These two backstories do not match. Out of the story, this could easily just be assumed to be a continuity error, which is fine. In the story, however, how exactly are we supposed to reconcile this? My only idea? Alternate realities. We’re seeing a different version of Alpha, who has a slightly different backstory than the one we met in The Walking Dead.

This might seem like an extreme place to go, but remember, just a week ago, we saw two women die something like a dozen times as they repeated the same incident at a gas station over and over and over again, so is the idea of an alternate Walking Dead reality that far-fetched?

If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this sort of thing in Tales of The Walking Dead. I mean, with this sort of relatively self-contained format, isn’t Tales perfect for this? Telling stories that they couldn’t tell within the main Walking Dead series because it wouldn’t fit within the story, they’re trying to tell in a particular season? I think it is, and I could be up for more of things like this, where relatively familiar elements and characters are slightly altered, leading to completely different stories, showing us different glimpses of the Walking Dead universe or, more accurately, the Walking Dead multiverse.

But what do you guys think? Do you think Dee’s backstory gels with what we know of her future? Do you think that it’s too different from what we know to be reconciled? Do you think that what we’ve seen in Tales is an alternate history for her? Let me know! I’m curious to hear! If you enjoyed this and want to learn how to stay alive in a zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!