The Walking Dead Gives the Alexandrians Jobs at the Commonwealth

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday’s “New Haunts” episode of The Walking Dead. The Commonwealth is putting Alexandria to work. 30 days earlier, Eugene (Josh McDermitt) returned home with Deputy Governor Lance Hornsby (Josh Hamilton) to invite the Alexandrians to join the Commonwealth: the rebuilt civilization governed by president’s daughter Pamela Milton (Laila Robins). Aaron (Ross Marquand ) and others chose to stay behind at the Alexandria Safe-Zone, and others still went with Maggie (Lauren Cohan) to rebuild the Hilltop. For those assimilating into life at the Commonwealth, they’re assigned jobs based on what they did before the apocalypse. 

Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Rosita (Christian Serratos) are white-armored trooper recruits in the Commonwealth Army and at the command of General Mercer (Michael James Shaw). Elsewhere, former housewife Carol (Melissa McBride) has slipped into a role as cookie-maker at Elodie’s Treats, while pre-apocalypse zookeeper King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) handles animals at a Halloween carnival petting zoo. 

Journalist Connie (Lauren Ridloff) is back on the beat as a reporter for The Commonwealth Tribune, working side-by-side with sister Kelly (Angel Theory) as her ASL interpreter. Princess (Paola Lazaro) and ex-con Magna (Nadia Hilker) are back working their jobs from before the fall: Princess sells music at a record store, and truck stop waitress Magna waits tables at the Governor’s extravagant Halloween masquerade ball. 

Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), who arrived at the Commonwealth with Eugene’s group earlier in Season 11, is working as a lawyer in Governor Milton’s cabinet. Her long-lost brother, Tomi (Ian Anthony Dale), was a baker at Elodie’s Treats before he was forced to resume his high-pressure career as a thoracic surgeon.

“For us, it’s really fun to think about what people did. A lot of it was already either set up in the show or we were drawing on inspiration from the comics. But whenever we kind of had a question, we just think about, ‘Well, what do we think is the backstory of this character?’” showrunner Angela Kang told Entertainment Weekly about placing the assimilating Alexandrians into new jobs. “The thing that we do know about our characters is most of them did not come from the upper classes. Yumiko is the rare example of somebody who was from a white-shoe law firm, so she kind of like landed in this other strata.” 

Kang continued, “Whereas most of our other characters, they just had normal jobs, and a lot of them struggled quite a lot before the apocalypse. And it was kind of like, well, we should see Ezekiel in the closest thing they have to zookeeping. And so that was really cool to kind of put him back into tending to animals. You see he is great at it. And he is so gentle with the children and with the animals. And you kind of understand, well, this is the guy who then became a king in the apocalypse.”

“So for us, it was really fun to see our characters in very different circumstances than we have seen them,” Kang said. “But also it makes us think, wow, the world really, really changed when it fell, and it seems so arbitrary when you see them go back to these things.” 

New episodes of The Walking Dead: The Final Season air Sundays on AMC and AMC+. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter and @NewsOfTheDead for TWD Universe coverage all season long.