Watch ‘The Walking Dead’s Alpha Assert Dominance in Gory Punishment Scene

AMC has published Alpha’s (Samantha Morton) standout scene from The Walking Dead 912, ‘Guardians,’ which sees the Whisperer leader punish two members of the pack when they challenge her leadership.

Alpha sniffs out the first challenger, speaking in hushed tones, who steps up when pushed by his girlfriend — a manipulator who is swiftly decapitated by Alpha before she twists a knife into the boyfriend’s guts, a graphic scene that left viewers recoiling in horror and disgust.

“A big part of the philosophy of the Whisperers is they have this survival-of-the-fittest thing. They take a really animalistic approach to the way that their group works,” showrunner Angela Kang told EW in a post-mortem of the scene.

“And so you can challenge the Alpha, as animals sometimes do when there’s an Alpha animal of attack. And so I love what the writer, LaToya Morgan, came up with in this sequence because it’s not just like, ‘Okay, here’s this one challenger and I’m going to take him on.’ Instead, she does this whole manipulation. She knows the two of them are in it together. She knows it’s more dramatic if she goes after the instigator, and then makes the dude cry so that he seems so weak. She emasculates him before she kills him.”

Alpha also put on a show for frightened prisoner Henry (Matt Lintz), held hostage by the Whisperer camp after Beta (Ryan Hurst) caught him trailing the pack in an attempt to rescue Lydia (Cassady McClincy).

“It’s such a crazy thing she does, and I think Samantha does an amazing job playing those beats,” Kang said.

“They’re called the Whisperers because they whisper, and so this was really the first episode where we had all these people doing these performances in whispers. And she’s doing this incredibly theatrical thing with her voice so low, and it makes it really eerie in a strange way. And just the way that she gets real close to him before she stabs him and all that. But yeah, it’s definitely like, ‘Behold all my people. I am the Alpha and here is the reminder,’ like, ‘Hey, boy, don’t mess with me.’ So it was really fun to see that all play out.”

Henry was later rescued by Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Connie (Lauren Ridloff), who unleashed walkers on the unsuspecting Whisperers before fleeing in the chaos with Lydia in tow. Beta and a pack of Whisperers will next hunt Daryl and the group while Henry’s parents, Carol (Melissa McBride) and Ezekiel (Khary Payton), face a newly emerging enemy threatening their involvement with the approaching fair.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.

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