Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Season 11 of The Walking Dead and Tales of the Walking Dead.
After more than a decade of television, the long-running AMC series The Walking Dead is now coming to a close. It has been quite a journey that hasn’t always been the most consistent, but these final episodes have started to introduce something new to this growing universe. While the human characters and their various conflicts have always been central, the swarms of undead zombies we have become familiar with have now begun to change. After roaming the apocalyptic landscape for years, it seems as though they may be evolving.
When Did the Evolution Start?
As some key background, this new element actually didn’t begin in the main series. Rather, the ideas this final season is playing with were first introduced in the surprisingly fun recent spinoff series Tales of the Walking Dead. While not always directly related to the main storyline, it told a collection of anthology stories, of which one provided a crucial component to understanding the context of what is going on with the zombies. In the fourth episode entitled “Amy/Dr. Everett,” we followed this titular duo as they began to observe the shambling beings they refer to as walkers. We started to learn how the lonely Dr. Charles Everett (Anthony Edwards) had been observing the undead beings in an attempt to see if there was some sort of way to understand what drove them and whether they were actually part of a natural evolutionary process. He is then joined by Amy Zhang (Poppy Liu) who is skeptical of his theory. This skepticism is supported by the fact that Dr. Everett was actually primarily focusing on a subject that he called “Specimen 21,” who was actually one of his deceased colleagues. The personal connection is one that seems to cloud his judgment and call into question whether he was actually just trying to justify his inability to let go of someone he had lost.
While Specimen 21 ends up being eaten by an alligator and Dr. Everett was not always the most reliable of sources, it also seems like he might have been more right than even he realized about the zombies evolving. Jumping back to the main series again, in the episode fittingly titled “Variant,” the characters do battle with a horde of zombies unlike any they’ve ever experienced. When Aaron (Ross Marquand) and his group first encounter them, they wrongly believe that they may be the last remaining Whisperers who disguise themselves as walkers. While not the most terrible of hunches, it couldn’t be more wrong. We see these walkers can open doors and climb. At one point, one even grabs a rock that it attempts to use as a weapon. When Aaron intervenes before it can do so, he tries to rip off what he believes to be a mask and reveals a bloodied skull that is clearly not a Whisperer. He dispatches with what he now knows is a walker, but the moment has clearly rattled him. In a later discussion the next morning, Aaron mentions that he had heard stories of this happening though was never sure if they were anything more than rumors. Having now seen one himself, he wonders if there are other kinds out there before quickly turning his attention elsewhere.
The Characters Are Ill-Prepared To Defend Themselves Against These New Walkers
Jumping ahead to the most recent episode “Family,” all of our various characters are launching an attack on the Commonwealth in the hopes of taking down Pamela (Laila Robins) once and for all. To do so, they use a horde of walkers as a distraction. Aaron even takes a small group into the middle of the horde. However, what begins as a distraction soon takes a darker turn as the walkers begin to climb over the walls and directly into the Commonwealth. The overwhelmed guards are no match for this onslaught. One lone guard desperately continues to try to stop them from on top of the wall, but he just doesn’t have enough bullets to take them all out. He shouts into his radio that he needs backup and that “the rotters are climbing the wall” before he is eaten by one that snuck up behind him when he wasn’t paying attention. As he falls, he hits the lever that opens the gates. The remaining guards then flee and a stunned Pamela is told that the perimeter has been breached. She insists this isn’t possible only to be informed that, due to the whole climbing thing, their defenses proved to be basically worthless. Essentially, the safe world that she has created behind these walls is vulnerable in a way that it hasn’t been before. There isn’t time to understand more of the details of this as Pamela instead decides to save herself and doom many others to death by redirecting the walkers towards them. This is where the episode then ends, but the ramifications of these discoveries could have massive ripple effects on the entire world.
Of course, this isn’t the first time we have seen walkers maintain some functionality beyond just eating human flesh. Way back in the very first episode of the stellar first season, entitled “Days Gone Bye,” there was the unsettling sequence where the reanimated wife of Morgan (Lennie James) attempted to open a door while Rick (Andrew Lincoln) looked on with horror through the peephole from inside. It created the iconic image of the door knob gently turning, and the scene was much more emotionally impactful as Morgan then discussed how she died, which gave the sense that there is still some part of who she was in there. The reintroduction of this element in this final season is, like many of these last episodes, more about the spectacle than it is the emotional engagement. It also has been rather underdeveloped and feels like it is mainly a way to set up the many other upcoming spinoff series that are coming down the pipe. One almost wishes it had been introduced sooner in this series and explored in more depth beyond these brief scenes. Whether it will have any payoff in the finale remains to be seen as it is currently merely a hint of what the future of this world may look like.