The Walking Dead, Survival Rule of the Week: People can surprise you

A zombie apocalypse can bring out the worst in people and the best in them, often, as seen in the latest episode of The Walking Dead, when you least expect it.

At the start of this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, everything seemed to be going Commonwealth Governor Pamela Milton’s way: Eugene Porter was facing trial for the death of her son, Sebastian, and, so far as she knew, most of the rest of the Virginia survivors were rotting away in a forced labor camp, hauling away debris from the train tracks in the area, potentially giving her access to the Atlantic Ocean. However, by the end of the episode, things were, unbeknownst to her, very much not going her way: The escaped Virginia survivors had not only reclaimed Alexandria and killed the warden of the labor camp but also, apparently, gotten several troopers to come to their side, and Eugene, rather than being executed, and burying the growing unrest in the Commonwealth with him, had been surreptitiously freed by Mercer, who intended to champion the very unrest she sought to stymie.

How did this happen? Simple: People did things that Pamela was, quite frankly, not expecting. Mercer, Negan, Ezekiel, the Alexandria troopers, and Eugene all did things she didn’t anticipate and will wind up catching her quite by surprise.

That’s why, in this week’s The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week, I’m going to address the fact that people can surprise you in a zombie apocalypse, not simply that it’s possible, but how and why those surprises might come about. My hope is that, should you find yourself in a zombie apocalypse, you don’t make the same mistakes Pamela did and underestimate the other survivors you meet.