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Welcome to the Watching Dead, the officially unofficial podcast for the Walking Dead on AMC. I'm Jim. I may run and today we're talking about season 10 episode 2 titled We Are the End of the World.

This is the Whisperer Hour. This is a backstory for the Whisperers, backstory for Alpha, backstory for Beta primarily. What do you think of this episode?

We talked about this a little bit in the pre-podcast. I think I liked it more than you because this is a wild wacky episode. I think you can interpret this as asking for empathy for these characters, but I think it's actually just a fleshing out of the antithesis of I feel almost stupid thinking the Walking Dead is capable of pulling some of this stuff off.

I like what they're doing. They're building Alpha into the big antagonist and Carol is in the hero and they're squaring off and it looks like they're going to be squaring off in large part over their surrogate daughters, Lydia and Gamma.

That stuff is really interesting and archetypal. I also think it's really interesting to look into cult mentality and what a cult would look like without laws to restrain them. If there was no one to be like, hey, you can't murder and rape people in a society.

If you just grew up in some kind of lawless state, I think of the Jim Jones cult. It's somewhat millennial of Christian cult. They go to South America and then people start dying, multiple wives are happening, Kool-Aid gets dispensed.

I think that's super interesting. We've only seen a nakedly ridiculous form of it in the garbage people, but we never got like, why did the Jadia or whatever name is? Why did she end up like the Jadus?

Samantha Morton, who is way better than she needs to be in this role. Answering this question is, it's broken people. You get broken people that have given up because of their life circumstances. That's when you're right for a cult to come in. When nothing makes sense and everything, nothing matters, if someone can accept Ford and saying, no, this one thing, this one thing matters. Look at me, I don't suffer from your problems because of this one thing.

You latch on it like a drowning person. I think that's interesting.

It is. I don't know if there are a couple of things that this is doing that they have to do. One of them is setting up the idea that Lydia is not the furthest thing from Alfa's mind. In fact, it's very much on her mind.

And she's driven to go back probably to try and either try and deal with that problem one way or another, whether it's killing Lydia, probably not. It's probably bringing her back into the fold because she cares about her, which she's not supposed to.

It's sort of like saying, well, all of this bullshit that she tells everybody else doesn't apply to herself, which I think is also a trick called a bunch of layers.

High control groups, rules for them and not for me.

For sure. I don't know. I respect what this episode is doing because it needs to be done. And because it does make a certain amount of sense, given the wacky scenario of the dead are coming back to life.

All bets are off at that point. But in as far as it was trying to make me sympathize with Alfa or Beta or any of these people, that's the parts where I'm like, you're not really going to get me on that.

I've seen enough to know that you don't have to be a psychotic who goes around killing people and leaving babies for dead in order to survive in this world.

I've seen too much of the better part of this world to really sympathize too much, even though I get the idea that like, well, these are very, very broken people.

It's just, you know, if they're turning to methods that are, yeah, maybe not the ones I would turn to. Sure. I get that.

Well, that's another that's trademark of like a high control extremist group. They say that this is the only way to live. And if they ever see evidence that like another way is successful, tear it down because that's a threat to the existence of the other group.

Right? Like because, you know, we can't have here. We're too extreme to acknowledge that there's a lot of different roads that people can walk.

Like I said, and there's a lot of like really interesting casting. For example, we talked about this before.

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