In The Walking Dead, there are plenty of great villains we’ve all come to know and love. The obvious ones are Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the Wolves in season 6, or even the Governor (David Morrissey). Yu want to know the one villain we don’t talk about nearly as much? The actual zombies.
The zombies — otherwise known as walkers — are the reason this whole universe exists. At first glance, they were terrifying and hard to avoid, but by the end of The Walking Dead, they felt more like a hindrance than a villain. Every season of The Walking Dead showed them slowly becoming less of a threat.
You’d think in the grand scheme of things that would be okay, because the main characters are survivors. They’re supposed to learn how to interact with these creatures and take them out easily as the weak ones die off, but we didn’t really see the zombies evolve. Until now.
In the latest clip from The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, we finally get zombies with superspeed. Granted, they were clearly experimented on in a lab, but they are fast, and now people are more interested in the show than ever. This is the biggest reason these zombies should have existed long before this show.
The walkers became essentially placeholder zombies
Were the walkers still a threat? Yeah, to some degree. If you want a true experience where you are utterly terrified of zombies, you’d have to stick to the first few seasons of The Walking Dead. As the series goes on, they really become useless. I mean, even in The Whisperers, the walkers aren’t seen as monsters or things to kill. Alpha (Samantha Morton) and her whole crew find ways to use them and live among them. At least they found a use for them.
The fear, however, was gone. No survivors feared the walkers. No one was caught behind a herd and had to find a clever way to escape. No one had a super graphic and disturbing death unless they were maybe left behind purposefully by someone or shoved into something. It just wasn’t scary.
That’s where much of the show's horror element vanished. When your main enemy becomes just a placeholder for other enemies to fill the void, it feels like we’re just wasting space. At this point, it wasn’t even a zombie apocalypse show; it was just a post-apocalyptic, dystopian series when the Commonwealth came into play.
Evolved walkers raise the fear factor
With quicker zombies, people are actively scared. In that clip from The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, we see both Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride) are genuinely scared for their lives as they run when they spot a massive cloud of zombies heading straight for them.
When was the last time we saw anyone look that terrified in this show? A show that began with the creation of these monsters? I’ll tell you — back in season 11, but it had nothing to do with zombies. It was the episode “On the Inside,” where Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Virgil (Kevin Carroll) were trapped in a house, trying to escape feral cannibals.
They weren’t walkers, but that’s what the show had to do at the time to make it scary — they made the humans scary, and it became one of the season's best-reviewed episodes. But if you can’t even do something to your walkers at that point, you have a problem.
Now, we’re finally seeing a fast version of these zombies, ones that look utterly horrifying and can easily kill someone within seconds if they hit you head-on. Do you know how incredibly useful that would have been in the main story? I could almost guarantee some villain would have found a way to round them up and use them as an avalanche against a group. That’s the kind of power these things have.
It’s a shame that we’re only getting this now, literally four-plus years after the mainline series ended. And now, there’s a decent chance these zombies could easily take out Daryl and Carol’s group, because that’s my luck. Even so, it would at least make the zombies something they haven’t been in a long time: a threat.
I’m eager to see how it plays out for Daryl Dixon season 4, and I personally can’t wait until February 2027 when it comes back on air.
You can check out all 11 seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix. You can also watch all three seasons of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon on Netflix.
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