I began watching The Walking Dead (TWD) towards the end of the first season or the dawn of the second, if I remember correctly. Though I may have known about the show beforehand, it didn’t spark my interest, and it wasn’t until a friend strongly recommended that I take a looksie that I paid it any mind at all. I don’t recall who that person was, but I do know why it took such a strong recommendation: I’ve always found the mere thought of zombies as highly improbable and incredibly lame. In fact, I still do.

They aren’t the lamest monsters in the cultural mythos — vampires and mummies push them, at the very least, to second place (and really, aside from their characteristic apparel, how distinct are mummies from zombies, anyway?) — but they are pretty damned lame nonetheless. Granted, my judgement stems from the kind of zombies one finds, for instance, in TWD and Night of the Living Dead, mostly because I don’t have a hard-on for the genre and these are the zombie sources I’m most familiar with. These types of zombies, at the very least, travel in herds, which can be a threat, but they’re generally slow-moving and operate not on intelligence, but base instincts, and so are more easily thwarted than an intelligent creature, even if one gets into a sticky situation.

As I’ve said before, just think of this type of zombie trying to ride a bicycle. If you have vivid enough of an imagination, you’ll soon be giggling like an idiot and see my point. By and large, they aren’t that frightening.

There are, I have since learned, other types of zombies — ones that can run, for instance, or can infect animals other than human beings, some of whom are potentially frightening even if devoid of a zombie virus — so perhaps my judgement of their lameness was premature and based on my lack of a broader, more thorough understanding of just what a zombie constitutes.

In any case, zombies were not what got me interested in TWD and has kept me a steady, unwavering fan all throughout the years, even as twists and turns in the series have apparently alienated others along the way. I like the show because, in my humble opinion, it basically follows a logical process with respect to how shit would go down if such a doomsday scenario — or any number of doomsday scenarios, actually — befell us as a species and civilization.

Initially, after civilization fell or even as the collapse was taking place, there would be isolated individuals and small groups such as families who would be left to fend for themselves in locations such as their homes or, if they were so lucky (as Sasha and Tyreese) in bomb shelters. After they exhausted the resources available at their locations, they might keep their home base while making supply runs to neighboring areas and then moving increasingly further out as food becomes more scarce. Conversely, they may immediately — and in either case, ultimately — become a sort of nomadic tribe moving from area to area, hunting and gathering food and supplies, much like our nomadic, hunting, gathering, and fishing ancestors. Along the way they would likely lose members of their tribe and potentially gain members — lone individuals or small groups of people. In fact, the turnover rate might be mind-blowing.

To pause for a moment, this is another thing I kind of respect about TWD, even if it is a central reason why so many ultimately came to abandon the show, most notably with the introduction of the ever-narcissistic and potentially-psychopathic Negan and his merry band of sycophant Saviors: characters will die, even if you like them. Cases in point: Glenn and Abraham. Other characters survive, even if you initially hate them. Case in point: Gabriel, who failed to close the gate to Alexandria, letting Walkers in, and much later failed to lock the prison door, letting Negan out. The character has come a long way, and I no longer wish to baptize him in a deep fryer, but he seriously has a fucking issue with locking doors that must be addressed.

Characters will also change: there is character growth and decline, and often enough it’s pretty damned difficult to ascertain which it is — whether they are ascending or descending, given their ever-changing circumstances. As Rick (who stands as a prime example himself) said right before they entered Alexandria for the first time, if I remember correctly: “the rules keep changing.” On a level, they most certainly do. With respect to life’s constant flux, at the very least in the post-apocalypse, however, the overarching rule is clear: adapt or perish.

To continue: these tribes will also undoubtedly encounter other such tribes, some of whom are held together by vastly different value systems (Woodbury, Terminus, The Saviors, The Whisperers), in some cases leading to small-scale wars between them. Eventually various groups with resonant ideals and value systems will come together in the attempt to establish stable settlements and communities, much as in the case of the Alexandria Safe Zone, Hilltop, and Oceanside in TWD. Those communities will later come together in order to establish alliances, probably for the purpose of trade and to build up a collective force against the contrary forces represented by other communities and alliances, much as was the case when Alexandria, Hilltop, The Kingdom, and Oceanside ultimately worked together in order to defeat first The Saviors and then The Whisperers.

Simultaneously, there may have been groups that were prepared for such an event, notably those of high status in the former society — the rich, for instance, and those in government — who may have managed to sustain a smaller representation of that former society in isolated locations or underground installations. They may try to guide the re-emergence of human civilization from the ashes, much as The Commonwealth appears to be trying to do in the show so far, providing information on agriculture, building houses, generating electricity, and so on. The Commonwealth, so far as I am familiar with it through the show, seems to resonate quite strongly with how Graham Hancock believes civilization was gifted upon surviving groups of people by some surviving faction of a former civilization after a cataclysm, possibly caused by fragments of a comet, that wiped them out some 12,000 years ago.

And this is kind of where I think TWD television show and its offshoots are aiming to journey and explore, particularly in the interactions between such stable, surviving factions and those who have endured yet managed to survive through the collapse to the point where they can begin to rebuild civilization. As with the Saviors and Whisperers, there will be a clash of value systems and ideals.

Or at least I hope this is where it’s going, as this has been one of my main complaints regarding such stories, too, I might add: there always seems to be an effort on the part of survivors to get things back to the way they used to be, clearly ignoring all the issues inherent in the way things used to be — which is to say, of course, all the issues inherent in the way things currently are. They never seem to consider or deliberately organize a better version of society. They never stop and think, “Our old society led to its inevitable downfall. Now here we are, about to rise from it’s ashes: shouldn’t we be more fixated on not repeating the same mistakes, on trying to make a better world rather than just rehash the inevitably catastrophic pathway provided by the past?”

Yet if we can take a minute to rewind and hone in on TWD solely and specifically, the aching, underlying question has always been: what started the zombie virus? Some naively thought that Fear of the Walking Dead might answer this question or, at the very least, provide some hints, but no: answers were not forthcoming. All this despite Robert Kirkman’s voiced disinterest from the motherfucking get-go in providing data on the origins of the virus. Still, I thought, even if it was not a consideration of his own at the dawn of the comic — and I find it hard to believe that it wasn’t — he certainly must have considered it since.

Kirkman, who wrote the comic and then guided the series, confessed early on (once the comic and the show had gained widespread appeal) that he sold the idea in the form of a comic by telling a lie. The lie was that aliens had released the zombie virus so that it would be easier for them to invade afterward. Finally, after the comic ended, he gave the alleged source of the virus: it was from outer space, but not seeded here by an alien intelligence. Rather, it was a “space spore.”

This might seem anticlimactic, but consider what potential relevance this might have for the Fermi Paradox. There are many hypotheses regarding the origin of life, but one involves what is known as Panspermia. It can be directed or undirected, and what Kirkman suggests is that, at least in the case of the zombie virus, it was undirected. This means that a comet hit a planet harboring life — specifically, the zombie virus — and as a consequence flug material from that planet into space. This material housed life: specifically, the zombie virus. And this material ultimately served as comets that crashed onto other planets, impregnating the native life with the zombie virus.

A dire kind of cosmic spitting and swallowing where one planet’s ejection becomes another’s infection. This could be one of the leading reasons why we haven’t (officially) detected advanced, technologically-quipped, extraterrestrial intelligence.

While Kirkman’s ultimate answer with respect to the source of the Zombie virus captured my interest and spawned considerations, the comic’s inseminating lie has proven to be far more impactful in my case. The bigger question in my mind here, as a consequence, is this: realistically-speaking, would aliens intending to invade earth for the purposes of colonization do something like spread a zombie virus?

Other sources, which I tend to read and watch during my more paranoid moments, when I feel sure the end is nearing, have already largely answered this question. One doomsday video, if I remember correctly, said that if aliens wanted to colonize and rid the earth of humanity or at least reduce our population, releasing a virus first might make the most sense, and I can see the logic. One might wonder why, if they were more intelligent than us and possessed superior technology, they would even be worried about such a resistance, but the answer it quite simple: if their objective is to colonize the planet, they certainly wouldn’t want us trying to defeat them with nuclear weapons, for instance, which would have dire consequences for the cosmic real estate they wished to plant their flag in and designate their own. On the other hand, a lethal virus would be a nice, clean way to eliminate us without such a potentially devastating response.

They could engineer a virus to only infect human beings. If this virus was engineered to kill humans, the vast majority of human beings may die out, leaving behind only a small human population that would have a difficult time putting up a resistance to the colonization of high-tech extraterrestrial intelligence. There’d perhaps be viruses with other consequences that might work just as well and perhaps better, but the zombie scenario doesn’t really seem so out of the question. It may, in fact, be optimal. There may be survivors of any such virus, but there’s an added benefit when it comes to a zombie virus: whereas the zombie virus may have not gotten you, the zombies themselves might, so as a consequence it increases the rate of infection.

That alone would provide a legitimate reason to engineer such a zombie virus. And if it was like the virus in TWD, where everyone is infected but remains asymptomatic unless you’re bitten or die, even better. Over the course of the seasons, we have seen how the Walkers in TWD have decayed. How long could a Walker live, though? They only reproduce by biting, and the human population is both limited and increasingly better at fighting off the zombies. Since all humans are infected, however, once any human dies — through disease, old age, heart attack, whatever — they’ll become a zombie. If nothing else, such a zombie virus would both immediately lesson the human population and leave the remainder a threat to themselves.

Kirkman’s lie could make a good deal of sense.