Characters / The Walking Dead Television Universe: Zombies

Zombies

Appearances: The Walking Dead | Fear the Walking Dead | The Walking Dead: World Beyond | Tales of the Walking Dead | The Walking Dead: Dead City | The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon | The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

Debut: "Days Gone Bye"

"They may not seem like much one at a time... but in a group, all riled up and hungry... man, you watch your ass."

— Morgan Jones

The walking dead. The monsters who have populated the Earth since the world went to hell and who the survivors of a global pandemic must face every day while fighting to stay alive.

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The "Walkers"

These are the most common form of the undead on the planet, separate from the variants listed below.

A-M

• Amputation Stops Spread: Quickly hacking off a bitten limb will prevent the infection from spreading further. It works for Hershel Greene and Lydia, but doesn't save Tyreese and Luke, who die from the blood loss.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Given that everyone on Earth has been infected by the virus, anyone who is killed without brain damage will inevitably come back as a walker.
  Dr. Jenner: Everything you ever were or ever will be... Gone.
• And Then What?: In Tales, Amy points out to Dr. Everett that if the walkers have their way and wipe out all of humanity there will be no one left to reanimate and create new walkers. Everett admits that if the walkers succeed in causing humanity to go extinct, they will join them in extinction as well. In The Ones Who Live, Beale also admits this, stating that within decades the walkers will eventually die out with no more living humans left to reanimate or be eaten and will all eventually become nothing but compost for plants.
• Attractive Zombie: Discussed when Psychopathic Manchild Brandon asks Negan to rate walker hotness on a scale of 1 to 10.
• Behind the Black: Time and time again survivors are caught off guard by walkers sneaking up behind them from out of frame, even though said walkers typically have no stealth whatsoever and don't appear to have the self-awareness to silence themselves while they advance on their prey. The survivors should also be able to smell a person-sized mass of rotting flesh.
• Big Bad: Of the entire television universe. Their very existence is what causes all the problems across the world and catalyzes many of the survivors into the villains that the protagonists encounter. They themselves have waned as an individual threat over time, but even a few walkers are still a threat even to the most competent survivors. Never mind the vast hordes that they can form. In the absence of conflicts between humans, the zombies are the main threat.
  • They serve this role directly in Season 1 and most of Season 2. As the show had not yet introduced Beware the Living as its central theme until the second season, the zombies were the main threat the survivors had to face.
• Body Horror: As the walkers are decaying, an encounter with one of them usually leads to a good deal of this. Even the freshest zombies can suffer from this if they met a particularly gruesome end before they turned.
• Boom, Headshot!: The clearest way to kill a walker is to shoot it in the head.
• Burn the Undead: An alternate way of killing walkers is to burn them.
• Deadly Lunge: Expect them to pounce on their victims from Behind the Black this way.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • Their strength, stealth level, aggressiveness, and even their intelligence can vary wildly (sometimes several times within the same episode) depending on what the plot calls for.
  • Also how long it takes to come back as a zombie varies, which is lampshaded by Dr. Jenner in "TS-19". Sometimes it depends on what the plot calls for; occasionally, it's due to the severity of the wound or other external circumstances. For example, Shane only takes a few minutes to turn after being stabbed in the chest by Rick. Tobin takes exactly one hour and thirteen minutes after dying from being poisoned by an infected arrow.
• Devoured by the Horde: Possibly the grisliest way to die in the apocalypse comes when enough of them are able to gather together and rip someone apart.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first few episodes of the original show, the walkers are seen running and climbing after survivors while avoiding obstacles. Later episodes show them as much less mobile and more mindless. This is especially so with the show's first scene, which depicts a little girl walker holding a teddy bear, and Morgan's undead wife, who somehow retains enough intelligence to try the doorknob and look into the peephole of his front door. On later episodes, not only are the walkers never seen holding anything, but it's heavily implied they don't retain any traces of the people they once were, and that any suggestion that they do is delusional. Notably, in Fear the Walking Dead's pilot episode, which explicitly takes place at the onset of the undead outbreak, the first zombie we see becomes a mindless, violent walker immediately after reanimating. This type of zombie makes a comeback as a variant in Season 11C of The Walking Dead (see "Climbers" below).
• Eaten Alive: The horrifying fate of most people who are Devoured by the Horde. They are even capable of this individually if they manage to sneak up on and bring down their prey with a bite to the jugular.
• Elite Zombie: On occasion. An example are the walkers in riot gear at the prison. Their armor protects them from headshots, making them harder to kill.
• Fearless Undead: These zombies have no problem walking into danger, due to being empty shells consumed by a singular desire to eat.
• Flesh-Eating Zombie: Well, duh. Worse, their hunger is almost never satisfied. The only case of a walker showing any sign of being satiated is when one fully devours Lori’s corpse and is found bloated in a corner afterwards, having become significantly lethargic in demeanour afterwards. They can also be robbed of their Horror Hunger if rendered incapable of eating, with the two walkers first accompanying Michonne eventually becoming passive after having their arms and lower jaws removed.
• Full-Frontal Assault: "The Key" features the show's first fully nude zombie in the scene where Simon and Dwight burn Negan's car. It's hardly noticeable, however, and never actually attacks anyone.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Dr. Everett in Tales believes that the walker plague is punishment for humanity's abuse of the planet.
• Gorn: Some of the messier zombie kills. And their feasts on human survivors as well.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Technically. Most human antagonists are eventually defeated, while the walkers are still a problem after ten seasons and twelve In-Universe years. During these human conflicts, walkers tend to be a background threat. The Walking Dead ends with walkers simply being accepted as a part of life.
• Hero Killer: A single zombie bite will kill anyone, even the most competent survivors. And hordes of them will overwhelm anyone. Just ask Dale, Sophia, T-Dog, Andrea, Lilly, Bob, Tyreese, Noah, Deanna, the Anderson family, Carl, Beatrice, Luke, Jules, Rosita, and Jadis.
• Hell Is That Noise: The deep growling and rasping noise the Walkers make. Even experienced survivors still flinch upon hearing that distinct noise.
• Hollywood Tactics: An In-Universe example. It takes quite some time for people to figure out the best way to kill walkers. Soldiers at the beginning of the apocalypse are seen unloading their automatic rifles on walkers in an incredibly inefficient way; Tomas' prison crew tries to kill them using prison riot fighting tactics when they first encounter them; and even well into the apocalypse, many survivors get up close to walkers and grab their heads so they can stab them with small knives, leaving them perfectly within biting range.
• I Have Many Names: See Not Using the "Z" Word. As the term "zombie" does not exist in The Walking Dead universe, the survivors refer to the undead using a variety of names, the most frequent one being "walker".
• Incongruously-Dressed Zombie: The show has a lot of these. Sometimes, it's Played for Drama, as the clothing occasionally protects zombies from attack, causes the characters to react differently to them, or raises disturbing implications about how they died.
  • The show starts out with a little girl zombie (see below) dressed in a robe, pajamas, and bunny slippers, carrying a bear.
  • One walker is dressed in a Santa Claus suit.
  • One of the walkers encountered while searching for Sophia at a rural church was an old woman in a mourning veil. It's slower to attack than the others because its vision is impaired, and gropes blindly for any source of noise until Daryl hacks it up.
  • Odd clothing on zombies actually has plot implications when the survivors take over the prison, as some of the walkers there are wearing prison riot-gear and therefore have helmets which logically serve to protect their brains. Later in that same episode, Daryl points out that one of the zombies in the prison is dressed like a civilian, thereby raising fears that the prison might not be as secure as they had hoped.
  • Lizzie becomes emotionally attached to a particular walker on the prison fence because it's wearing a name tag, which gives her something to call it.
  • When his quarantined patients start turning, Hershel warns Maggie not to shoot Henry's walker because it's still wearing the resuscitator bag Hershel needs to save Glenn.
  • Michonne, traveling with leashed walkers in the midst of a herd in "After", gets creeped out by a black female walker with the same hairstyle as hers.
  • One of the walkers in "Here's Not Here" has its hands tied behind its back, suggesting a fatal run-in with other humans. Another becomes this trope when it walks straight through Morgan's campfire, emerging as a Man on Fire.
  • One crispy-blackened walker in the burned-out forest from "Always Accountable" still has its head intact enough to moan, because it had a motorcycle helmet on when it got roasted.
• Jabba Table Manners: Especially if they've gone a while without a decent meal, zombies are horrendously messy and haphazard eaters.
• Jump Scare: They can usually be counted on to provide one of these. Behind the Black (see above) is sometimes involved.
• Made of Plasticine: From the start of the second season the survivors have little trouble driving any kind of implement right through a zombie's skull with simple muscle power alone. The third season onward has them driving knives and/or swords right into skulls. This is intentional, to signal the decay of walker bodies over time, though, oddly, freshly reanimated walkers are just as easy to put down.

N-Z

• Non-Malicious Monster: Being mindless creatures, all the zombies want to do is eat. They take no pleasure in it and aren't out to kill anyone specifically.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The characters never once refer to the undead as "zombies." This is a justified example, because, according to Robert Kirkman, the Walking Dead universe exists in a timeline where "zombies" never became a pop-cultural phenomenon due to the lack of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, so people would not generally know the term (unless they had a trivial knowledge of voodoo). Because there's no easily recognizable equivalent in their universe, each group of survivors tends to call them different things. "Walkers", first introduced by Morgan, is the most commonly used term, and the one typically adapted by the revolving band of survivors in Rick's group. We also have:
  • Geeks: used by the Atlanta Camp survivors in Season 1.
  • Lame-Brains: used by The Living.
  • Biters: used by Woodbury and Martinez's camp.
  • Rotters: used by Grady Memorial Hospital, the Wolves, the Reapers, and the Commonwealth.
  • Roamers: used by the people of the Alexandria Safe-Zone.
  • Wasted: used by Benjamin.
  • Epidermis Epicureans: used by Eugene Porter.
  • Sickos: used by Magna's group.
  • Guardians: used by the Whisperers.
  • Hissers: used by Amelia.
  • Rippers: used by Virgil.
  • Posters: used by Teddy Maddox's Doomsday Cult.
  • Has-Beens: used by Tony Delmado and Percy.
  • Homo mortuus: used by Dr. Chauncey Everett.
  • Additional terms used across the franchise include "the undead", "the dead", and "the infected".
• No Zombie Cannibals: The zombies in this universe only target humans and the occasional animal, never each other.
• Once per Episode: A walker will be killed. "Splinter" is the only episode in the entire franchise to date to feature no walker deaths.
• Our Zombies Are Different:
  • Mostly due to Early-Installment Weirdness: The zombies in the first season of the mother show can be surprisingly smart and agile, depending on their physical state when seen. They've been seen using rocks to smash through glass, the pilot episode showed one grasping at a doorknob as if attempting to open it, and a couple actually managed to climb over a short chain-link fence in pursuit of Rick and Glenn. By Seasons 2 and 3, however, their continuing decay seems to have reduced their capabilities.
  • Discussed in detail between the Governor and resident science guy Milton in "Walk with Me". Milton explains that the walkers Michonne was traveling with stopped trying to attack her because she cut off their arms and lower jaws. He later hypothesizes that the walkers retain a slight recollection of who they once were, and that they also starve (albeit slower than living humans).
  • One zombie, the Governor's daughter, Penny, is shown going after a bowl of raw meat — a rare case of a zombie not going for the living.
• Plague Zombie: Zig-zagged in that, unlike in the comic book (which follows the Romero infection rules)^note Everybody who dies comes back as a zombie unless they died of severe head trauma., "TS-19" establishes that a virus caused the Zombie Apocalypse. However, it didn't behave like most zombie viruses — it is (presumably) airborne and/or waterborne, and has infected everybody on Earth, kicking in only after they die. This allows the show to still use the Romero trope of everybody coming back when they die, not just those who are bitten, while still using a zombie virus.
• Posthumous Character: Given that walkers used to be living, breathing people.
• Pretend We're Dead: A person coating themselves in walker blood/intestines is enough to disguise their scent and allow them to blend in with a horde (once rain washes the smell off, however...)
  • The Whisperers (and later, other survivors), manage to refine the trick by wearing masks made from the skin of dead zombies to further look the part.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: The only guaranteed way of making sure they stay dead is to destroy the brain. Walkers won't die simply by having their heads cut off, even if it happens to the person while they are still alive (see poor Hershel Greene and the victims of Alpha's barn massacre).
• Room Full of Zombies: The scene from "Days Gone Bye" where Rick finds a room in the hospital barred with the words "Don't Open. Dead Inside." is the page image.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Their strength can range anywhere from being unable to pull themselves out of a hole in the ground to being able to rip open a man's stomach with their bare hands depending on what the plot requires. ^note Note that this example is the same walker, from "Judge, Jury and Executioner".
• Summon Bigger Fish: Zombies have been used more than once as a weapon to get the survivors out of a tough spot against a more dangerous, human threat. A good example occurs in "On the Inside", when Connie turns them on the animalistic Ferals who have her and Virgil cornered. The walkers tear into the malnourished group of savages, allowing the pair the time needed to escape.
• Undead Child: Obviously, though curiously not many of them are seen. Notable examples include Summer from "Days Gone Bye"; the child walker who scared Sam Anderson and caused the deaths of him and his family in "No Way Out"; and the walker at the hole in the wall in "Out of the Ashes", played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan's (Negan) real-life son Gus.
  • It's also confirmed that unborn children can turn into walkers. Maggie mentions a particularly horrific example in "Acheron, Part II" that's mercifully kept off-screen.
  Maggie: Then all of a sudden, it fell down the stairs, and it came right at my feet. It was a walker that used to be a woman. [...] And her belly was round and full. And whatever was inside of there was trying to get out.
• Villain Decay: Over time they become little more than a nuisance to the survivors (who become more skilled at handling them) as the real theme of the series starts to take effect. Although, see Zerg Rush below.
  • Averted later on when a character's Plot Armor abruptly fails. Carl Grimes, one of the show's main protagonists, is taken down by a simple zombie bite.
  • The Stinger of the Grand Finale of World Beyond warns that this is very much not the case in France, where a variant of the walker plague is revealed to have been around since at least the early days of the apocalypse. This variant causes the dead to reanimate in mere moments as fast, highly aggressive, and strong zombies.
• The Virus: What brought about the zombie apocalypse. According to Dr. Edwin Jenner every human on Earth carries it, though they have no idea what actually caused it. He breaks down for Rick's group how the infection starts and ultimately causes someone to turn into a zombie.
  Jenner: The resurrection times vary wildly. We had reports of it happening in as little as three minutes. The longest we heard of was eight hours [...]
  Lori: It restarts the brain?
  Jenner: No, just the brain stem. Basically, it gets them up and moving.
  Rick: But they're not alive?
  Jenner: You tell me. [...] The frontal lobe, the neocortex, the human part... That doesn't come back. The you part. Just a shell driven by mindless instinct.
• Who Needs Their Whole Body?: Zombies only die if you destroy their brains, meaning even if they're cut in half, entrails spilling out their sides, it won't be enough to stop them from attempting to come after you. The Bicycle Girl zombie from the pilot is a prime example.
• Would Hurt a Child: Being mindless, undead cannibals, the walkers aren't the least bit picky about who they eat. The most gruesome example has to be the death of Sam Anderson in "No Way Out", in which walkers lunge at him from all sides and tear the poor kid to pieces as he screams in terror for his mother.
• Zerg Rush: While the survivors have adapted to fighting groups of them over time, herds are still considered a very serious threat.
  • The first truly massive herd we see is the Quarry Herd from "First Time Again". Thanks to Rick's plan going awry, most of them end up at the gates of Alexandria, which culminates in the events of "Start to Finish" and "No Way Out". The survivors band together and are able to dispatch most of the herd.
  • The second big horde is the one seen at the end of "The Obliged" and in "What Comes After", numbering in the hundreds. Knowing it's only a matter of time before the herd runs right through Hilltop, Rick leads it onto the bridge the communities have been building and blows it up using a stick of dynamite, completely destroying the bridge in the process (and seemingly giving up his own life as well). The remaining walkers catch on fire and fall into the lake below.
  • The Whisperers' horde from Season 9 is easily the biggest we've seen on the show and is the primary reason the survivors can't just lay waste to the group, since Alpha has an army of thousands of walkers at her disposal. In "A Certain Doom", Carol and Lydia lead this horde over a cliff to their deaths hundreds of feet below.
• Zombie Gait: While an average zombie can only shuffle or, at most, break out at a disjointed jog, and therefore be outrun, the main problem is they do not get tired. In "Beside the Dying Fire", Andrea is overcome with exhaustion and jumped by a single walker, after being forced to fight and flee for hours on end.
• Zombie Infectee: The first episode establishes that a bite from a walker guarantees the victim is on borrowed time (unless they manage to sever the wound, as in the case of Hershel, who had part of his leg cut off after being bitten on the ankle). How long it takes for the infected person to turn depends on the severity of the wound. For example, after being bitten once on the stomach, Carl is able to last the better part of a day walking around like normal without showing any symptoms.
  • Animals cannot become zombies, though a bite from one will lead to an infection that will ultimately kill them.

Variants

Lurkers

"Lurkers"

Appearances: The Walking Dead (2010) | Fear the Walking Dead | The Walking Dead: World Beyond | Tales of the Walking Dead | The Walking Dead: Dead City | The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

The most common variant encountered across the franchise, to the point where they are barely considered separate from the rest of the walkers.

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• Boring, but Practical: It might seem foolish to assume Lurkers are more dangerous compared to something like the Virginia Climbers or the French Cohorts, but lurking walkers have claimed a lot of lives over the course of the franchise, including some very experienced survivors who otherwise survived well into the decade and beyond.
• Mythology Gag: In the comics, Rick and Dale theorized about the division between walkers and lurkers all the way back in the prison arc (2004-2005), but the comic never quite returned to the idea and neither Rick nor Dale ever mentioned it again. Regardless, they would have been right in this case.
• Playing Possum: Their main mode of 'hunting' is pretending to be a corpse until a living person approaches, before lunging or grabbing at a limb and biting. Hershel finds this out the hard way.

Burners

"Burners"

Appearances: The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

A variant present in continental Europe, particularly France. Burners seemingly possess acidic or otherwise corrosive blood, making them particularly dangerous to improperly armored survivors.

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• Acid Attack: Their blood will cause nasty boils on the skin and flesh of anything it covers.
• Heal It With Fire: The boils caused by their blood can be treated with cauterization to avoid infection.
• Hollywood Acid: Downplayed for once, since it doesn't quite burn through the skin or eat through the floor, only causing nasty boils. However, it does sizzle and steam quite heavily.
• My Blood Runs Hot: Definitely invoked with their corrosive blood.
• Wham Shot: Daryl checking on his arm after being covered with a Burner's blood.

France (SPOILERS for World Beyond)

French Zombie Variant/"Cohorts"

Something new to fear.

Appearances: The Walking Dead: World Beyond | The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

Debut: "The Last Light"

A new variant of zombie seen in The Stinger of the finale of World Beyond. Unlike the slow-moving "walkers" that have been a cornerstone of the franchise for the last ten plus years, this variant is a smarter and faster breed with a quicker reanimation time unlike anything the survivors have encountered before.

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• The Berserker: It slams itself into a steel door with an anger and ferocity like that of a wild animal. Even Daryl is terrified when he realizes how fast and strong these variants are.
• Canon Foreigner: There were never any zombie variants in the source material.
• Hell Is That Noise: Unlike the walkers, which typically let out a garbled moan, the first of this kind we see lets out a frightening, inhumanly monstrous screech while it tries like hell to break free of the lab it's trapped in.
• It Can Think: This variant is smarter and more self-aware than the walking zombies. At the very least these ones seem to retain a significant amount of memory retention, considering that the reanimated scientist immediately turns around and starts pounding on the door that her killer had exited from as if she had remembered where the way out was, all the while completely ignoring the recording of Dr. Jenner playing in front of her the moment she comes back.
• No-Sell: Daryl tries to kill the first Cohort he encounters with a fire extinguisher. Unfortunately, its skull is far more durable than the zombies he's accustomed to, and it quickly gets back up and tries to attack again, forcing Daryl to flee.
• Our Zombies Are Different: These zombies are far more dangerous than the ones roaming throughout the United States, being much faster in both movement speed and reanimation time, more ferocious and significantly more intelligent than any other zombie seen up to this point, essentially being undead rage infected compared than the slow, lethargic and stupid walkers.
• Screaming Warrior: The first of this variant we see is shown screaming and howling like a rabid animal as she tries to smash down the locked door of the lab she’s trapped in.
• Wham Shot: In a truly game-changing move for the franchise, the French doctor reanimates less than a minute after being shot in the head and immediately charges at the door where her killer just exited, banging on it with a ferocity we've never seen from any zombie in this universe before. Not only that, it's implied this variant of zombie has existed in Europe for the entire duration of the outbreak. The characters we've seen fight so hard to survive on the other shows might have gotten off easy compared to the people who have had to contend with this kind of zombie in the apocalypse, and it's far from over.

Virginia/"Climbers"

Virginia countryside variant/"Climbers"

"What the fuck?"

Appearances: The Walking Dead

Debut: "Days Gone Bye"

"I've heard stories about walkers like this that can climb walls and open doors. I was never sure if they were just stories."

— Aaron

A variant encountered by Aaron, Jerry, Elijah, and Lydia in the Virginia countryside en route to Oceanside. They soon prove to be far more spread out than they realized.

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• Back for the Finale: Played With. With the Retcon that the walkers seen exhibiting this kind of behavior in the first episodes of The Walking Dead were variants, this means they qualify for this trope, as they return for the final stretch of episodes.
• Big Bad Ensemble: With Pamela Milton in the parent show's series finale. They ultimately become the Final Boss since Pamela is arrested and detained midway through the episode.
• Book Ends: Variants were present as threats in the first two episodes of the series, climbing and breaking things with blunt weapons. They end up as major threats in the final episodes, with a direct Call-Back taking place when a variant uses a rock to smash the glass door to the building the group is taking refuge in.
• Dramatic Unmask: Played With. Aaron makes to rip off what he believes is a Whisperer’s mask once he gains the upper hand on the variant, to unmask their human assailant. When Aaron only succeeds in tearing the walker’s skin off its’ face, and watches the walker continue to snap at him despite missing a face, its true nature is revealed.
• The Dreaded: Once the survivors take stock of what they’ve encountered, Aaron’s group becomes fearful of running into more of them. The Commonwealth is in pure shock at their behavior, and dealing with the variants becomes a top priority once Mercer usurps control from Pamela.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The walker horde at the end of "Lockdown" is shown dispersing and pursuing the Commonwealth jeeps at a much faster rate than hordes usually move about, foreshadowing that the horde contained variants before their proper introduction.
• Hero Killer: Their actions cause the deaths of Jules, Luke, and Rosita in the Walking Dead series finale, with one of the variants being directly responsible for Luke's death.
• It Can Think:
  • After climbing into the perimeter, the variant manages to somehow bring down the defenses Aaron and Lydia had set up including a locked gate, meaning it’s smart enough to discover precautions taken by humans and actually takes steps to make sure it has back-up.
  • The variant also possesses more advanced motor functions that most walkers lack. It’s able to climb and scale walls and not only grabs and pulls onto Lydia’s weapon when she misses and stabs it in the torso, but picks up a rock to attack Jerry with.
  • It's smart enough to recognize the concept of weapons, given by how it pulls back on Lydia's weapon and picks up a rock to club Jerry with.
  • A variant in the same horde that Aaron’s group travels with actually is paying such close attention to its surroundings that it immediately goes down and picks up a knife that Lydia threw down.
  • It’s strongly implied that the variants at the Commonwealth gates were actively working together, as while a few of them began climbing a ladder to draw the trooper’s attention, another snuck up on his tower to get a hold of him.
• Leitmotif: Scenes with this variant are punctuated by a piercing droning. This is notably heard again in “What’s Been Lost” when Carol tangles with some walkers in a tunnel, implying that she may have also faced some variants herself.
• No-Sell: Twofold. Shutting a door can usually keep a walker out of your way even if you don’t lock it, but this variant is smart enough to actively use a doorknob and nearly lets the horde in. Then, the group flees to the roof of their building, which is usually a solid way to escape walkers, who lack the needed motor functions to follow them up a ladder. This variant, however, is capable of climbing and is able to make its way to the roof.
• Outside-Context Villain: Nobody in the Coalition or the Commonwealth has ever encountered variants of walkers. The only surviving character of the Atlanta party in “Guts” who did encounter variant behavior, Rick, is MIA. Thus, everyone is pretty shocked whenever they witness these variants in action. A Commonwealth trooper is completely shocked to see some climbing a ladder and is so stunned that he is unable to remember to check his six, getting attacked by a third variant whose struggle with him results in the gates being opened and the horde invading the Commonwealth.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The walker variant encountered by Aaron's group in "Variant" is smart enough to not simply go after the group once it breaches their defenses; it goes back to the gate, studies and undoes their defenses, and leads a horde inside so that it can have a small army as back-up, simultaneously keeping the heat off of it.
• Real After All: Played With. Season 9’s “Evolution” had the characters wondering if the walkers attacking them were in fact walkers who had somehow evolved into more intelligent threats, only for them to be revealed to be disguised humans. “Variant” reveals that there are indeed walkers who either really did evolve into more intelligent threats, or they were always this way from their reanimation.
• Red Herring: Anyone who had not watched the final SDCC 2022 trailer for the season may have been led into believing this variant was a surviving, malicious Whisperer. The characters certainly assume so, after their earlier encounter with Keith in “Out of the Ashes”, and much of the build-up is highly reminiscent of the Whisperer-controlled walkers in Season 9’s “Evolution”; but ultimately Aaron discovers that this is a variant walker and no human being.
• Retcon: Walkers with the ability to use tools and climb objects were seen all the way back in the second episode of the show, though since walkers never displayed this ability again, this was considered a case of Early-Installment Weirdness and something the writers wished to forget about. Season 11 retcons them into variants.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The walker’s nature as a variant was not hidden by either the SDCC trailer nor “Variant”‘s promotional material.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: While it can still be killed as easily as other walkers, this is the first variant the Coalition encounters following the Retcon of the franchise’s Early-Installment Weirdness. As such, Aaron’s group is deeply shaken by the encounter and are left praying that they don’t encounter any other variants.

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