‘Fear The Walking Dead’ May Have Cured Zombie Bites At Last

The Walking Dead, after 11 years and now four spin-offs, appears to be finally working on that pesky zombie problem at last.

Daryl Dixon’s new show looks like he’s going to be exploring the origins of the zombie plague, while Fear the Walking Dead, the long-running, long-suffering spin-off may be proposing a cure for zombie bites in this universe.

Previously, the only way to survive a zombie bite was to cut your limb off before the infection spread. This happened to both Aaron and Lydia in the main series, and is a staple of most zombie fiction, even outside of The Walking Dead.

Now, Fear the Walking Dead has another proposed “cure,” albeit one that still needs…a few kinks worked out.

In this week’s episode, it was revealed that June has been doing research as someone known as “Blue Jay.” She has been running experiments based on the idea that radiation is a way to prevent dying from a zombie bite. This research was based on Alicia being bitten, cutting her arm off, but then struggling to battle the bite for the rest of the season, the longest we’ve seen anyone survive from a bite. Given Alicia’s exposure to radiation, the theory was born that radiation could be a potential cure.

And the main development is that it…worked? Well, kind of. The problem the experiment revealed was that even if high doses of radiation did in fact stop the virus infection, it’s…a high dose of radiation, so much so that it kills the person anyway. Just in a different fashion. Now there’s a new idea that the result of this could be some way to prevent children from becoming infected in the future. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but my theory would be that perhaps mild doses of radiation before you’re infected, when you’re young, might be able to ward off the virus. Or at least the latent version of the virus everyone has where if you die, even if not bitten, you turn anyway. That would at least allow some measure of rebuilding society in a future generation if every single corpse didn’t turn into a walker no matter what. But a lot of that is speculation right now.

I do expect that Fear the Walking Dead may end this final season with some sort of big breakthrough for the universe to change things. But even if a temporary cure is found here, it remains to be seen how it would be disseminated and implemented throughout the rest of the broken world. The end of The Walking Dead: World Beyond showed that zombies are evolving themselves in new ways. In Europe, where Daryl is, they have fast zombies now. The end of The Walking Dead itself introduced the concept of smart zombies, who know how to open doors and wield weapons like knives, at least in some rudimentary capacity.

I have no real idea where The Walking Dead is going from here. With TWD and Fear ending, it is breaking up into these spin-offs with mainline TWD characters, but it’s an odd place for the universe to end up. But the lore of the world is changing fast, and we’ll see what that means for all these new shows.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.