The Walking Dead, Survival Rule of the Week: The worst of times

The Walking Dead – Family

Against the Walking Dead, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

In what might have been one of the biggest own goals in the entire series, Governor Pamela Milton decided, in a ploy to disperse the angry crowd of protestors gathering outside her offices, decided to have troopers loyal to her intentionally lead a horde of walkers to the Commonwealth’s walls, giving her the excuse to order a lockdown for “safety”, and, in her mind, give herself time to let the heat die down. She’d done this before and figured it would work this time, too…but she would be wrong.

What Pamela didn’t account for was the emergence of smart walkers in the herds her men were gathering, which were capable of feats of intelligence no walker the Commonwealth had seen before could muster, allowing them to hang onto and pull themselves into vehicles (Instead of just paw at them), and even scale walls. This dramatically changed the game, catching the troopers off-guard and allowing the massive horde to breach the walls and threaten the entirety of the Commonwealth.

If this wasn’t bad enough, her earlier decision to have Mercer arrested just before this happened deprived the troopers of experienced leadership at a moment when such leadership was crucial to getting the dire situation in check.

Basically, every move Pamela made in this week’s episode backfired on her, even her attempt to help her goons kill the group wound up with her shooting Judith, which left her visibly shaken at committing such a horrific act, which will probably make her future decisions even worse.

That, of course, is the point: In a zombie apocalypse, things have a nasty habit of getting worse just when you don’t need them to. This, in fact, goes a long way towards why I said you should hope for the best but expect the worst: Because it is something that will not only be frighteningly easy to have happen but will also do so with frightening quickness. If you’re already prepared for the worse, should a bad situation get worse, it won’t catch you with your pants down.

Remember: In a zombie apocalypse, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.