The Walking Dead, Survival Rule: Actions Have Consequences

Tales of the Walking Dead – La Dona

“But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the Lord: And be sure your sin will find you out.” — Numbers, 32:23

This perfectly sums up what happened to Idalia and Eric in the Tales of The Walking Dead finale: They did something (Well, several things, actually) wrong, and it turned around on them.

Just because a zombie apocalypse is a survival situation doesn’t mean that concepts of “right” and “wrong” just disappear. If you meet someone in the apocalypse who tells you they escaped a crowded safe zone by trapping their friends and neighbors inside with the dead, you’re not going to want them in your group. This isn’t just because you’d question that person’s trustworthiness, it’s because, deep down, you’d know that what they did was wrong. Trapping your friends and neighbors in a confined place with zombies is a cowardly, heartless, deplorable thing to do, and that doesn’t change just because civilization has crumbled.

Now, am I saying that, as what happened to Idalia and Eric, ghosts are going to haunt you or find some way to get revenge on you in the zombie apocalypse? No. What I am saying is that the misdeeds you do in a zombie apocalypse can (And, in my opinion, probably will) boomerang on you at some point. If you’re the kind of person who goes around unnecessarily attacking other survivors for no good reason, the day will come when you come across someone who will do the same to you. If you’re the kind of person who betrays their companions, eventually you’ll encounter too many zombies for you alone to handle, but might have if you hadn’t betrayed people. And, if you’re the kind of person who lures other survivors in to ambush them, you’ll one day be met by a person or group who doesn’t trust anybody and ambushes you first.

Of course, there’s always the chance that, if you do any of these sorts of things, you fail and leave someone behind. If you were to do like my original example and abandon your friends and neighbors, and trap them with the dead, if anyone survived, they would likely make it their mission to seek you out and make you pay for condemning them to a gruesome death.

Oftentimes, the reason people resort to doing the wrong things in the apocalypse is that it’s a quick way, the easy way, to get ahead. Why work hard when you can just take from another survivor? The thing is, doing things that way opens the door for either the conditions your actions created to bite you (Literally, in some cases) or for someone to want to pay you back in kind and set about doing it.