The Walking Dead, Variant: Things To Note

The Walking Dead Variant

9) This episode marks the first appearance of a “smart” walker in the main Walking Dead series, though this was heavily implied to be a phenomenon in France (And, likely, the rest of mainland Europe) in the World Beyond post-credit sequence.

10) Though if that phenomenon was, indeed, in Europe…how did it make its way to the U.S.? While we did see walkers swept into the Pacific wash back up at the Rosarito Beach Hotel in season three of Fear The Walking Dead, there’s no way a European walker could have made it across the Atlantic, so…how is it possible?

11) In a funny twist, when the group first encountered the Whisperers, they feared that they were smart walkers. Yet, now, as they actually encounter smart walkers, Aaron, Jerry, Lydia, and Elijah assume them to be Whisperers.

12) As Aaron and Jerry are discussing the smart walker, Aaron uses long abandoned terms for the dead (In the show, at least), like “lurker” and “roamer”, the latter of which being the Alexandrians’ original word for the dead, until Rick’s group made “walker” more prevalent, it was also Rick’s group’s term for the dead in the comics, with “walker” being the Alexandrians’ term.

13) While I said this episode marks the first appearance of a smart walker, Aaron does mention how they’ve all seen the odd walker which returns to a place they remember, finally retconning the relative aberration of Jenny Jones, Morgan’s wife, returning as a walker to the house she, Morgan, and their son, Duane, were staying in Rick’s neighborhood, in the very first episode, “Days Gone Bye”, something no other walker had really done before or since. This establishes that behavior as a known walker anomaly and could be seen as, technically, the first instance of a legitimate smart walker.

14) This episode gets its name from the fear Jerry and Aaron express that the smart walker might be “another kind” of a walker, or, in other words, a variant.

15) Despite the revelation that Sebastian had a brother who’d died some time ago, at no point does Pamela mention this mysterious favored son, something you’d think might come up as she now loses her remaining son.

And that ends our installment of Things To Note for this week! Was there anything you missed? Was there anything I missed? Let me know! Suppose you like this and want to read more of my writings about surviving a zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! And you can get it from Amazon here, and on iTunes here!