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

The Walking Dead

Brings Out The Best In People.

One of the storylines of this week’s episode followed Negan attempting to coordinate an uprising amongst the prisoners while everything going wrong for him: Annie is being forced to work at the tracks, and despite being pregnant, he gets beat up just for asking to take some of her shifts, he gets crap from Ezekiel for losing the map of the camp during that beatdown, who then tells Negan that he doesn’t deserve to be a dad, then, on top of everything else, the warden tries to convince Negan to rat out whoever is leading the rebellion he smells brewing. Those last two are important because, after Ezekiel burns Negan, it honestly seems like he’s seriously considering the warden’s offer, and as the warden forces all of the prisoners to gather outside Alexandria’s windmill to punish the rebel, it looks like the troopers are singling out Ezekiel until they march out with a bound Negan, who has confessed to organizing the uprising. In spite of everything leaning towards Negan selling everyone (Especially Ezekiel) out, in spite of every incentive he had to rat everyone out, he didn’t do it and, instead, opted to sacrifice himself to protect and motivate everyone else and be a person his child could be proud of.

My point here is that in the kind of environment a zombie apocalypse presents — Where the old rules of society are largely gone, and a person could do anything they wanted — it really shows you who the good people truly are. Anyone can be “good” in an environment where breaking laws and social norms have consequences, but it takes something to be good when there really isn’t anything forcing you to be. In the apocalypse, you may discover that a person you thought was good wasn’t and that someone you thought was evil, someone you hated, turned out to be good.