The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Two Sides Of Trust

Tale of the Walking Dead episode 3

When you’re too trusting, you let the wolves amongst the sheep.

If you saw this week’s Tales of The Walking Dead, you saw that Brooke’s community was brought down by an attempted takeover of the riverboat by a team of pirates. While pirates are something you need to be on the lookout for in a zombie apocalypse if you’re living on or near the water, the pirates that attacked the riverboat didn’t just appear out of nowhere, they had a man on the inside who was working to make room for his cutthroat crew amongst the relatively good people of Brooke’s riverboat: Billy, the boat’s bartender.

Billy, despite only having been part of the group for about three weeks, was allowed to move about the ship freely on his own. This gave him ample opportunity to send messages and signals to his men waiting along the riverbank, ensuring they’d be ready when he made his move.

This, of course, could have been avoided. Billy was, by no means, forced upon Brooke’s boat or her group; she could have told him to swim to shore, pulled up anchor early, and gotten well away from him and his goons, but she didn’t. Instead, Brooke, in her desire to be trusting and help as many people as possible, didn’t seem to question Billy much at all, or some of the odd things that had begun happening around the boat, or do anything to try to ensure he was actually trustworthy.

A zombie apocalypse will, in large part, be a story of scarcity. There will suddenly be a lot fewer (living) people, yes, but there will also be a lot less food and resources. This means that those remaining people may be forced to fight for whatever is left, and people will become very resourceful in trying to do that with as little “fighting” as possible. Why run the risk of getting into a full-blown battle and dying (Like Billy and his crew eventually did), when you can lie, slip into another group, and just take what you want?

This is why you can’t just trust everyone you come across, because not everyone is going to be friendly or have your best interests at heart, and if you fail to recognize that, it won’t be long before you let the wrong person into your group, and wind up with a knife in your back.