Alpha’s New Origin Story Contradicts Everything We Know

Tales Of The Walking Dead gave us yet another Alpha origin story this week. It was a pretty good episode, too, except for one thing: It completely contradicts the first Alpha origin story we got back when the Whisperers came to The Walking Dead.

Way back in Season 10, Episode 2 (which aired in October of 2019, in the Before Times, before the pandemic and ensuing madness) the episode “WE ARE THE END OF THE WORLD” told the story of Alpha and Beta’s first meeting.

Alpha was not yet a Whisperer. Neither was Beta. Their first encounter was fraught but ultimately they ended up connecting. At the end of the sequence, Beta carves the face off of a zombie that had some special significance to him—the same face he uses for his Whisperer mask. This is also when she names them Mrs. A and Mr. B.

The episode seemed to be the origin story not just of Alpha and Beta, but of the Whisperers as a group. While they didn’t show that faction, the face-mask Beta carves certainly seemed like a hint at things to come. And, well, Alpha and Beta signify the first and second of something and we can safely presume that something to be the Whisperers.

Without explicitly stating it, the episode appeared to give us a pretty clear picture of how the Whisperers began.

But the Tales episode this week not only contradicts that origin story, it breaks all continuity in the process.

Alpha—known at this point as Dee (Samantha Morton) and Lydia (played here by Scarlett Blum) are living on an old steamboat on a river in the south. The steamboat community is led by a woman named Brooke (Lauren Glazier) whose leadership style is basically the bread & circuses approach. She throws fancy parties where everyone is expected to dress up nice. She seems more concerned with appearances than with common sense, and leaves the boat’s outside lights on despite the unnecessary attention it might draw at night.

All of this rubs Dee the wrong way. Worse, Lydia is infatuated with Brooke, who dotes on her and constantly chides Dee for her appearance or lack of motherly skills. Lydia would gladly trade her mother in for this newer, prettier, sweeter model. But things go bad, as they always do.

Dee is suspicious about one of the newcomers to the boat, Billy (Nick Basta). When he serves her drinks at the bar, he’s rude and dismissive, telling her that if she’s not going to dress nice and make Brooke happy, she should just stay in her room. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want her around for some reason.

Whatever the case, her heckles are up. Billy’s giving her bad vibes and she isn’t shy about telling the others when they learn that an older gentleman has gone missing. She presses the point and when she confronts Billy, who she sees signaling the shore with a mirror the next day, he screams that she’s trying to stab him and dives into the water, swimming away.

Brooke, who is apparently an idiot through and through, chastises Dee again, despite Billy’s obvious BS (Brooke was standing right there, so she knew Dee wasn’t trying to stab him). When Billy returns later with five other goons, all carrying loaded weapons, Dee is vindicated. Other passengers aren’t so lucky, as Billy goes around shooting them to make room for his crew.

Alpha shows up and takes action, slitting one of Billy’s men’s throat and grabbing his gun. She fires a few shots and then dives over the side, escaping with Lydia to the shore. Here she has to fight off some zombies and she and Lydia, covered in blood, conceal themselves under a dead walker. Stragglers from the boat are picked off by the zombies—except Brooke, who manages to survive.

When Alpha finds her, Brooke bizarrely claims that the whole thing is her fault, even though she was the one who warned them about Billy and was trying to be cautious. Alpha is about to kill Brooke when Lydia shows up and intervenes. Instead, she cuts a long gouge into Brooke’s pretty face.

They leave Brooke and head their own way, eventually stopping to rest. Lydia has been going on about fairies talking to her in the woods. Alpha decides that this is no place for a child, no world for Lydia to grow up in, but just as she’s about to kill her own daughter she hears the voices, too. It’s the Whisperers! They show up in the nick of time and welcome the pair into their fun costume club.

Throughout, Alpha has been narrating all of this and in the end we learn she’s been talking to the leader of the Whisperers, the blond woman who just invited her in, who she’s now about to kill.

But wait a minute! Where is beta? What happened to that entire origin story? Alpha and Beta didn’t start the Whisperers, so how are they called that? And isn’t it odd that they would call themselves ‘A’ and ‘B’ just as a coincidence? And why is Alpha’s head shaved when she meets Beta (before she’s a Whisperer) but not shaved when she meets the Whisperers?

I don’t get it. The timeline has been retconned or ignored or the show’s writers and producers simply forgot about the first origin story episode when they put this one together.

Whatever the case, it’s still a pretty good episode as far as The Walking Dead goes lately, though oddly timed given how long ago the Whisperer war ended.

As tedious as the Whisperers became, Samantha Morton is always terrific and menacing, and she’s that here but with a touch more humanity. I might even go so far as to say I prefer this complicated Dee to the cartoon villain, Alpha. But I prefer complex characters to psychotic monsters.

Maybe I’m just not thinking about the timeline right or missing something, I’m not sure, but it feels to me like the writers either forgot about the original flashback episode or just tossed the baby out with the bathwater. Or this is the start of The Walking Dead multiverse, with alternative timelines.

Hey, does that mean we can get a new story with Rick? Maybe in this version, the Andrea he meets is the one from the comics instead of the one we got stuck with in the show.

What did you think of Episode 3? Tales Of The Walking Dead has been less bad overall (so far) than I anticipated, so that’s good. My least favorite at this point is the first, which is a shame because I like Terry Crews. I need to watch Episode 4 now that it’s out on AMC+ and get a review out sooner than later.

Oh, and I should note that I really did like the idea of an old steamboat as a post-apocalyptic safe-haven. There just wasn’t nearly enough time to explore that idea in one single episode.

Here’s my video review:

My previous Tales reviews below:

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