The Walking Dead covers much ground in the horror genre. Aside from the standard weaving of slasher, gore, and survival themes, the show masterfully subverts the traditional zombie blueprint with the nuance of psychological horror.
After all, one only needs to watch beyond the pilot episode to see that the story of the zombie apocalypse becomes more and more about the shaping of mankind throughout.
Each character’s fight for survival reaches past the dead, past the living villains, past even the elements. At their lowest lows, the survivors must also confront and conquer themselves, which often leads to an unreliable point of view for the audience.
Be it hallucinations, ghosts of past losses, or simply the show’s deliberate ambiguity, viewers are frequently left with their own interpretations of a character’s story. The following is a deep dive into some of the most head-scratching events from the show to question what was real for a character and what was real for the viewer.
Pilot episode: opening scene
The show wastes no time challenging the audience against the true version of Rick’s arrival at the end of life as he knew it. The scene opened with him pulling up to an abandoned gas station and removing a gas can from his patrol car. He tentatively walked through a smattering of empty cars and campsites, discarded items, and the occasional corpse. Based on his calm observations, he seemed to be concerned not for the scene before him, but rather what he would do about the sign reading, “NO GAS.”
Enter the girl shuffling along in her robe and bunny slippers, stooping to pick up a teddy bear before shuffling along again. Certain that a moving body denotes a living body, Rick called out to her, offering help and assurance. When she turned around to reveal the plague-characteristic eyes and half-eaten face, Rick’s face conveyed both apprehension and understanding. He hesitated slightly as her pace quickened towards him, but his faculties quickly returned, and he put her down resolutely.
Rick’s response to this encounter is worth noting because in the scenes that follow, he confronted the undead with a weaker constitution and, on a couple of occasions, stronger emotions. Such was the case with the top half of a former woman dragging herself across an open field. The two encounters seem to conflict with each other, almost as if the opening scene reflects a different version of Rick, perhaps a Rick with influences of Shane, one might argue.
The more obvious distinction between the opening scene and the rest is the circumstances around Rick leaving his car with a gas can. Some argue that the opening scene logically takes place before the scene that comes later. However, there are a few points that lend to an opportunity for interpretation.
Point the first: if Rick needed a gas can in the opening scene, how far could he realistically have driven before having a completely empty tank, as he seemed to before arriving at the farmhouse? Sure, this point is largely conjecture, but it stands to reason that one of the many cars at the gas station would have had gas to offer, or perhaps the ability to start up and drive away. After all, Rick did turn to the truck at the farmhouse and upon finding no key, started back toward the house before seeing transportation in the form of a horse.
Point the second: the big bag of guns. After leaving his car down the road from the farmhouse, he elected to take the bag with him. Why not also do this at the gas station? The chances of needing ample weaponry were just as great around the abandoned cars, if not greater. Also, as previously stated, he might have brought the bag to make a quick getaway in one of the other cars.
Point the third: until the final season of the show, it was widely understood that zombies did not possess the precise motor skills of the living. Namely, none showed the intent or ability to pick up an object. Yet, the girl Rick encountered in the opening scene displayed the ability convincingly enough to suggest that she was a living body. Was this an anomaly? An ability of only the early stage walkers? Without a clear explanation throughout the rest of the show, it’s hard to say for sure.
One explanation for these points is that the opening scene never actually happened. Could it have been a coma dream induced by the chaos both inside and outside Rick’s hospital room? Might Rick have dreamed it the night Morgan and Duane enlightened him to the new reality? Even after multiple views of the pilot episode, the truth behind the show’s opening is not absolutely certain, and that fact sets the stage for many ambiguous events to follow.
Season 9 episode 5: What Comes After
On the surface, most characters’ journeys through the subconscious or unconscious mind serve as a form of self-guidance because humans tend to retreat inward when coping with reality seems too great a task. Take, for instance, Rick’s struggle to make sense of Lori’s death shortly after securing the prison.
He isolated himself so completely that he could only accept counsel from unknown voices on the other end of a phone that could neither make nor receive calls. As he attempted to sway his unknown callers to take in his people, they persistently urged him to talk about the loss of his wife. Only when he received his final call from Lori did he learn that he’d been speaking to fallen members of his camp. Thus, he recognized that his own psyche was at the helm and began healing, if only marginally.
Going into Rick’s final episode of the show, the same assumption stands. After un-impaling himself from the bit of rebar his horse bucked him onto, Rick began losing blood at a rate that sent him in and out of consciousness on his way back home to his family. Each journey into his mind was accompanied by pivotal members of his community, past and present, and each of them offered a bit of wisdom before urging him to wake up at just the right moment.
Shane
Unsurprisingly, the first visit during Rick’s compromised state was with Shane – brash, antagonistic, fierce Shane. They sat in the patrol car, looking out at the overturned runaway car in which the unknown third assailant set the motion for Rick’s journey into the apocalypse. The two shared some playful banter, as if nothing at all had changed, before Shane altered the tone of the conversation, recalling the crux of their conflict: “It had to be me.”
Forever working to toughen Rick up, Shane urged, “Find it, Rick – the rage, the hatred. Find it. The loyalty that’s in there…it’s the only way this gets done, and this has to get done.” He poked and prodded Rick, psyching him up, ruffling his feathers the way only Shane could. When Rick responded by waxing apologetic, Shane gave one final, exasperated push, yelling at him to “WAKE UP” just in time to fend off incoming walkers and push on towards survival.
Hershel
Rick’s second visit was with the man who lifted him up the most – in this case, quite literally. Standing in the loft of Hershel’s barn, Rick carried on with the theme of the episode: “I need to find my family. I need to keep ‘em together.” As with Shane, Rick received an opposing response, “No you don’t. You only think you do.”
With weight sagging and eyes misting, Rick admitted that he was tired, that maybe he could find his family and rest there with Hershel. Placing his hand on Rick’s chest, Hershel responded simply, “No, Rick. You have to wake up.” He applied more pressure to Rick’s chest, waking him up, and suddenly Rick was hunched over on his horse, fleeing a horde of walkers.
But the remarkable thing in that moment was the brief appearance of a clean hand, still on Rick’s chest, pushing his body upright. The camera panned out to show Rick gripping the reins in one hand and clutching his wound with the other, both hands bloodied. Of all the moments in the show left to interpretation over the line between the psychological and physical realities, Hershel’s clean hand propping up Rick’s bloodied body was perhaps the first undeniable proof of some lasting connection between the two realms.
Michonne
As Rick neared the fateful end of his journey to his family, he seemed to have expended all the stamina he could muster. As if resigning to the swarm of walkers in pursuit, he collapsed just before reaching the bridge he fought so hard to build. Just when it looked like he was ready to accept his death, his community emerged from the other side of the bridge to fend off the horde. Michonne kneeled before him, urging him to push on, reminding him that he’s a fighter. Rick’s expression changed from one of exhaustion to clarity before responding, “You’re my family. I found you…But this, this isn’t real.”
After witnessing multiple conversations with Rick’s fallen family, the audience would likely be tempted to believe him. Yet, Michonne’s response, “Yes, it is. Now wake up,” triggered one final push in Rick to cross the bridge in time for his family to rush in, exactly as they did in his vision. It seemed at that moment, as it did with Hershel, that all of it was indeed real.
Season 10 episode 3: Ghosts
In perhaps the most frustrating example of the show’s ambiguity, Carol found herself grappling with a powerful combination of sleep deprivation and the haunting of her past failures. After losing yet another child under her care, Carol struggled to keep her cool during a confrontation with Alpha and her Whisperers.
After departing with a fire fueled by vengeance and caffeine pills, she broke off from her group and pursued a few Whisperers that only she could see, according to the knowing glances between Daryl and Michonne. In an effort to force a bit of sleep on Carol, the three find a building to hole up in.
Inside, after watching Carol take another caffeine pill, Daryl told her a story about his dad, a truck driver who, one night, saw and hit a girl that ran into the middle of a road. When he got out to look for her, there were no signs that she was ever there, because “see, my dad didn’t sleep much either…you stay up that long, you start seeing things.” Ever the stubborn one, Carol shrugged the tale off. When the shift-change timer sounded, out came the pills again and she ignored Daryl’s plea to get some sleep, throwing empty bottle across the room.
After Daryl’s exit, Carol heard a noise in the adjoining hall and followed it to find a walker situated suspiciously in a sitting position. She turned away from it, distracted by the sound of Henry’s voice calling from the door behind her. Seeing that nobody stood there, she turned back around to see a Whisperer, thrusting a knife at her and abruptly woke up. At that point, the viewer could not be certain about when she had fallen asleep. Enter Daryl.
After telling Carol she’d been gone half an hour, she assuaged his concerns of sleep deprivation, saying “I’m fine. This isn’t your dad seeing a ghost…The story of the girl, when your dad was a truck driver.” When Daryl responded that his dad wasn’t a truck driver, Carol appeared shaken (as viewers were likely to be).
Without more than a moment to process, the shift-change timer sounded, and Carol found her pill bottle in her pocket, not empty, not thrown across the room. She looked in confusion to where she had thrown it before taking another pill, again ignoring Daryl’s insistence against it.
Once again, upon his exit, Carol was alerted to movement outside the room and ran to investigate. She was led to an open door recently unchained, judging by the chain’s gentle swaying. In the middle of the gymnasium beyond the door, the silhouette of a Whisperer backed away, luring her in until she stepped into a rope snare and dangled from her tied foot, calling for help.
The Whisperer shuffled away while a small horde of walkers filtered inside. Carol managed to fire off a shot with the one chambered bullet she had, but the Whisperer had already disappeared into the masses. After eventually cutting herself free, Carol fended off walker by walker until the camera cut to her standing among the pile of them.
Again, the true nature of how she came to stand there was unclear. From the perspective of Daryl and Michonne, who rushed in and hurried her to medical treatment, “she fell [and] cut her arm real bad.” Their disbelief continued through the end of the episode, despite her insistence that she saw them.
Yet, in the final seconds of the episode, the camera followed a trail of blood from the gymnasium to a supine Whisperer with a bleeding wound in their gut. Just before the end credits, the Whisperer’s eyes flew open, characteristically clouded like those of a walker. With all the twists and turns of Carol’s psyche throughout the episode, even the final reveal felt less than certain, letting linger the question, “Did that really happen?”