The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Follow The Leader

The Walking Dead season 11

Who’s your loyalty to? Your leader or your group?

If it weren’t for her face turn near the end of the episode, Colonel Vickers nearly swooped in to take a spot on my “Who’s The Worst?” list for the final season of The Walking Dead. If you’re wondering why, look no further than the fact that, when ordered to dedicate her troopers to protecting Pamela Milton and her cronies and funneling the horde to the poor neighborhoods to buy her time, Vickers asked for clarification, then…complied.

Loyalty and trust are important things in a zombie apocalypse, but you need to make sure that those things aren’t misguided. You don’t want to devote them to someone who will simply have you doing their dirty work, being their bagman, a little better than a tool. Rest assured, if that is your relationship with the leader of your group, it won’t be too long before you learn the hard way that your loyalty will not be reciprocated. At the first sign of serious trouble, they will throw you to the wolves, hoping you’ll serve as their scapegoat.

Which brings me back to my original question: Who’s your loyalty to? If the leader of your group is telling you to basically throw large swaths of your group under the bus to save their worthless ass, who are you going to side with? Are you just going to do what they tell you? Are you just going to “follow orders”, even if you think those orders are wrong?

Or are you going to recognize that your leader is a piece of garbage and stick by your group? As I imagine, should you be far enough along for this to even be a question, you’re going to have some relationship with the rest of your group, and therefore, if you chose the leader over them, it would be something of a betrayal. Even if they were total strangers, though, would you just sell out or attack them because the leader of the group told you to? If you would, what would that say about you?

Unless you’ve thrown your lot in with a bunch of backstabbing jackals, if you’re part of the group in a zombie apocalypse, your loyalty should be to them, the people you’ve survived alongside, and not to a leader who’s willing to abandon or betray them for selfish reasons.