The Walking Dead, Survival Rule of the Week: The worst of times
By Liam O'Leary
Just as things were looking up in The Walking Dead, everything’s gone south for EVERYONE. This week’s survival rule is about being ready WHEN that happens.
This week’s episode of The Walking Dead was a disaster for literally every character in it. No one came into the end of that episode in a better position than they were in at the beginning of it.
The group had this big plan to bust into the Commonwealth with all the community’s political prisoners, link up with Mercer and his guys, and overthrow Pamela Milton. That blew up in their faces when Pamela was waiting for them at Union Station in ambush, killing several of the prisoners they’d just freed. Pamela, meanwhile, had this great idea to lure a horde of walkers to the Commonwealth so that she could use it as justification to initiate a citywide lockdown, effectively putting everyone on house arrest, to throw cold mud on the burgeoning fires of discontent recently being directed at her. This was all falling neatly into place until the horde she had brought in started climbing the walls and breached their perimeter. Mercer was hoping to gather up his loyalists and, using the prisoners the group was bringing back as witnesses against her, formally and legally remove Pamela from power, only to be arrested for treason just before confronting Pamela’s horde. And even Judith had this hope of fighting for what was right, the way her parents and brother had before her, but, in trying to protect Maggie from being shot by Pamela, took a bullet herself and, as of the end of the episode, was clinging to life with a bullet in her chest.
As I said: A disaster for everybody.
The thing is: That’s the way a zombie apocalypse probably would be. It would be a series of worst-case scenarios piled on top of each other, all trying to ensure you don’t make it out alive. That’s why this week’s The Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week will be all about being ready for such situations so that, when the worst of times is upon you in the apocalypse, it doesn’t catch you by surprise.