The Walking Dead
AMC
Last night brought a lot of surprises to The Walking Dead universe. Fans were happy to see that Kim Dickens is returning to Fear the Walking Dead after allegedly being dead for years, but past that, on The Walking Dead: World Beyond, which wrapped up its entire 20 episodes series last night, it fundamentally changed the rules of The Walking Dead as a whole.
World Beyond never really landed with me in terms of its cast of characters, but it moved The Walking Dead forward in very significant ways with its exploration of the CRM, the most powerful force in the US, which is murdering a lot of people, but also doing things like working on a cure.
The post-credits scene of World Beyond is fundamentally altering everything. It appears to take place in some sort of abandoned lab in France. First, there are heavy implications that this lab, or labs like it, were the place where the virus was born in the first place, implying it was man-made and spread from there, even as the same scientists work to fix it.
But for the immediate relevancy, we saw the return of Noah Emmerich’s CDC character who comments on a “variant” that they haven’t seen in the US. We learn what that is when the woman watching the video is shot and killed, and resurrects not just as a zombie, but a zombie that runs and slams itself against a locked door with a whole lot of force.
In short, The Walking Dead has now opened the door for 28 Days Later style “fast zombies.”
For all these years, The Walking Dead has followed the original source material, and “classic” zombie fiction where the zombies are shambling and cannot really go faster than a power walk, at best. But as popularized in 28 Days Later, and used in a lot of other zombie fiction since from World War Z to Train to Busan to Black Summer, the idea is that “fast zombies” are much, much more dangerous. Normal zombies are slow and really only super dangerous if they surprise you or they arrive in huge numbers. But a single fast zombie is terrifying all on its own.
The implication from this scene is that these fast zombies have existed in Europe at least from almost the start. We know that Emmerich’s character died about a decade ago in the timeline, and as such, it stands to reason that variant has existed in Europe ever since, and has likely been spreading.
World Beyond
AMC
That leaves two main options:
- Either a future Walking Dead spin-off that hasn’t been announced will be set in Europe with these fast zombies.
- Or the fast zombies will find their way across the ocean and start spreading that mutation in the US, and therefore could show up in Fear the Walking Dead, the Daryl and Carol spin-off, Tales of the Walking Dead or whatever other shows AMC has planned. I doubt they’d appear in time for the Walking Dead season 11 series finale.
I am personally very excited by this, because I don’t think zombies have been a forceful enough threat in the series for ages. The show keeps having to invent “super clusters” of slow zombies because the individual ones are just not that effective, but a fast zombie plague? That is going to transform the universe from top to bottom. Cannot wait to see how that unfolds.
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