The Walking Dead: Infected - Five Questions Raised
Tonight's episode of AMC's The Walking Dead is in the books, and it left us with a handful of unanswered questions.
In a world where we still haven't figured out what, exactly, created the zombies or whether there is (or ever was) hope to reclaim the planet, there are a lot of unanswered questions...but every week there are some new ones, and it's always interesting to keep track of them to see how many actually come up again.
Like what? Read on...
Who is feeding the zombies?
My money is on The Governor, or someone working with him from within.
I've long maintained that having last year's finale titled "Welcome to the Tombs" could be a stealth spoiler and that somehow The Governor could have found his way back to the prison and be skulking around the unpopulated areas of the property, enjoying their relative security and planning an attack.
Even if that's a little hard to swallow, surely between all of the people from Woodbury (who had been basically brainwashed last year to believe Rick was a monster) and those who have been picked up on runs and the like, what's to say that there aren't one or more sleeper agents for The Governor in the building?
Robert Kirkman told us at San Diego Comic Con International that he had big plans for the character.
"I think that when you see what we do with him in season four, you’ll be like, 'Oh, yeah, that is a great reason to keep that guy around,'" Kirkman told ComicBook.com. "It’s going to be some really cool stuff."
Who set those people on fire?
Here's the thing: at face value, you would think this one has the same answer as the question above...but I don't.
Someone who's working contrary to the overall benefit of the group would have little motivation to cull someone who's sick from the herd.
The big difference there is this: if The Governor (or, if you please, the perpetrator, whoever s/he is) IS onsite, they could consider people like that as much a threat to them as to the rest of the prisoners.
Still, when you're in a quarantined area and you get killed while sick, the obvious answer is that the finger should be pointing at the other people who are quarantined with you, right?
Will Michonne hunt for The Governor while injured?
She hurt herself on horseback but Michonne has been pretty single-minded about finding The Governor.
And, let's be honest, she's grown a lot in the last year, and that's been a focus of so much of the conversation leading up to the fourth season. The actors and showrunners have made sure we all know that she's invested in the group and she's much less antisocial. That's great! And it suggests she's got more to live for and wouldn't put the group at risk...
...but it also seems like it could be setting us up for something unexpected, when the message has been that consistent. And having her homebound and injured would really be kind of redundant after they did it last year, when she was first introduced to the prison group.
Unless maybe they're trying to build up a motif, and use it for thematic reasons, repeating elements from last year to play them in a different way...
Is Judith sick?
Judith is, a bit like Merle and Daryl Dixon, or Shane in the second season, a character whose personal history in the comics has already been so thorougly rewritten that you can't predict a single thing that's going to happen to her. The prison is a safe space, and they've got a community here. They've got hope. Last year, though, when things were terrible, Judith was the group's symbol of hope, and if she dies? It would send Rick into a spiral (even he talked about that fear) and dramatically affect the inner circle of Carl, Beth, Michonne and Daryl, at a minimum. Losing the baby would have a major impact on the group, possibly to the point of being destabilizing.
Is Daryl sick?
This one would be a potentially major midseason finale cliffhanger: what if they made Daryl a carrier?
I mean, the first episode did feature that "rock star" interaction with Patrick where the boy eagerly clapped onto Daryl's just-licked hand. Certainly the inclusion of that scene could have been built into the first episode, at least to keep people guessing and perhaps to lay the groundwork for him to get sick later.
The problem? Daryl is too popular to be in any serious jeopardy, so they would have to basically stop using the swine flu storyline once he came down with something. The incubation period is too quick to drag it on for multiple episodes, and Daryl is too valuable to let him really die. Maybe they'll do it once they're closer to a cure (or at least have drugs on hand) as a way of raising the stakes just before they find a way around it.