‘The Walking Dead’ Season 10 Will Unmask Whisperer Secrets, Explore Alpha and Beta Relationship

The Walking Dead Season Ten will reveal more details behind Whisperer leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) and vicious lieutenant Beta (Ryan Hurst), and could shed light on the exact nature of their relationship.

"Here's this giant guy who's following this five-foot-nothing psychopath, but why is he following her?" Hurst said at Walker Stalker Con London.

"I can't give away too much, but what I love about this show is it's very slow to reveal any of its answers. Any time that you think you're gonna be onto something, they're gonna switch to another storyline and drag you into some more cliffhangers. In Season Ten, [showrunner] Angela [Kang] and I have been rapping about exploring more of their relationship and getting some answers. And also starting to see if and when there's sort of going to be a divergence between the two. That's about as much as I can tell you."

"If I told you more," Hurst added, "I'd have to peel your face off."

Hurst was similarly tight-lipped when asked if Beta will ever remove his fleshy mask, something his comic book counterpart never did in Robert Kirkman's books.

"We've been discussing that, about whether he does, if he does," Hurst said. "And also, it's just one of those questions that people ask, 'Why doesn't he take it off?' And it's something that we explore in Season Ten."

Kang added to Walking Dead lore when episode 913 revealed a twisted Whisperer ritual not found in the books, which saw Beta comfort a bitten and dying Whisperer as he transitioned into becoming a walker. Dubbed "guardians" by the Whisperers, walkers are an important part of Alpha's cult, providing protection and camouflage for their walker skin-clad counterparts.

"Now things ramp up and it's time to go to war, but, to add another twist, the Whisperers are not your normal group. They're not behind walls somewhere," Kang told Deadline of the continuing conflict with the Whisperers in Season Ten.

"You can't just go knock on their door and have guns pointed at their gates. That's not them. We're playing with the expectations of are they even where they say they are at any given time. They're migratory."

The Whisperers temporarily cleared out in the snowy Season Nine finale — allowing Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai Gurira), and others to cross into marked Whisperer territory when relocating displaced Kingdom members to the Hilltop — but the survivors haven't seen the last of their territorial new enemies.

"We picture that they move south for the winter, but then who knows what that means, and the fact is we didn't see them go," Kang said. "Our survivors don't know if they're going to see them come. We want to set up that the conflict with Whisperers is not going to be like the conflicts we've had with other groups that are safe behind walls."

The Walking Dead Season Ten is due out this fall on AMC.

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