‘The Walking Dead’ Is Getting Smart Zombies In Its Final Season

The Walking Dead appears to be setting up its spin-offs in more ways than one. It’s not just getting characters to certain locations. Daryl needs to get to France somehow for his show, Negan and Maggie are going to Manhattan. But after this week’s episode, we are working on something…else. Something new. Specifically, a new type of walker.

Jerry and Aaron find themselves facing down a horde, and when they think they’re safe hiding inside a building, they’re horrified when suddenly a zombie…opens a door. Naturally, logically, their first thought is that a Whisperer straggler has invaded the group and is steering it, as they used to pull that kind of thing all the time.

That seems to be confirmed when a zombie climbs the roof where they’re hiding and is about to grab a rock to smash Jerry with. Aaron tackles him, punches him and rips his face off to find that…he has just ripped a zombie’s face off. This is not a Whisperer, it’s an actual zombie.

After killing it, they have a conversation about how they’re heard urban legends about different kinds of walkers, including ones like this, and shudder to think that there could be more “smart zombies” out there like this one. The entire episode is called “The Variant,” based around this type of zombie, and the implication to me is that this is setting up something important for one of the spin-offs.

But which one? That’s where things get complicated. See, we’ve already had this conversation before, because at the end of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, there’s a brief scene that seems to show the creation of a “fast zombie” over in France. The zombie runs and begins slamming itself on a door, and the implication there is that in Europe, we have 28 Days Later style fast zombies that do not exist in the US. Since we know Daryl is literally going to France for his show, the idea is that he’ll be taking on this new variant.

But fast zombies are not smart zombies. Fast zombies cannot open doors or use tools, smart zombies cannot sprint. I think these are supposed to be two different types of zombies, where fast ones exist in the EU and maybe smart ones are starting to pop up in places in the US. So that says to me we might see them in Rick and Michonne’s show, or it Maggie and Negan’s show. I’m thinking Maggie and Negan’s “Dead City” considering it would be useful for smart zombie to be able to navigate masses of skyscrapers and infrastructure in a dense city like that, but who knows. Naturally, none of this ever happened in Robert Kirkman’s original comics, which were content to use slow, dumb zombies start to finish. But AMC seems to realize that after more than a decade, that’s starting to get a bit old.

Sure, we may see smart zombies appear in some capacity in the last few episodes of The Walking Dead itself here before the spin-offs start, but this very much feels like set-up for something larger to me, and there isn’t time to make much of it within the main show itself.

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