“WE ARE THE WALKING DEAD.”

If a Walking Dead fan was tasked with choosing only one issue to give to an outsider in order to give them a thorough understanding of what the series was all about, this issue (and possibly the first issue) would be an excellent candidate. Whether you support all of Rick’s decisions or think he’s lost his marbles, the undeniable truth is that Rick’s half-issue long monologue very poignantly sums up the tone of the series. Whenever someone I know asks me why I like “The Walking Dead,” they always assume that I am a zombie genre connoisseur. They think I bow at the alter of George Romero (Kirkman is better) and assume my favorite movie must be Night of the Living Dead (it’s actually Star Wars). I tell them that I really have never been a zombie fan, and it has never been the zombies that have kept me captivated by The Walking Dead. I tell them with absolute honesty that The Walking Dead is all about the people. It’s about human beings (many of them decent, but all of them flawed) who must constantly struggle to hold on to some semblance of humanity while still making hard choices that are necessary to survive.

Rick’s declaration that all of the survivors are the “walking dead” rightfully may send a shiver up one’s spine. However, that shiver likely results from the stark realization that those chilling words ring so true. From Rick’s perspective, the human beings they once were—the ones that a fully functioning society made it possible for them to be—are in almost every way that matters deceased. What is left is a moral husk of what they used to be, and they must come to accept this bitter pill to swallow or join the ranks of the flesh-eating corpses gathering outside the walls of their sanctuary prison. Either option results in them ending up as “the walking dead” in one form or another. Maybe the far-off hope might begin to kindle that perhaps society can be rebuilt and these battered survivors can one day wake up from their nightmare and come alive again to a better sense of renewed morality. But they are not there yet. In fact, they are very far from it. Rick’s recognition of this fact is rather depressing, but it also is bizarrely liberating in a way because it frees him up to do what he must to protect those he loves. But that freedom—as we have repeatedly seen—is not without a sense of heaviness.

The committee idea sounds good on paper, but in practice it may not work so neatly. A committee is an old world idea. A committee is meant to exist in a world where society is still intact. But in the zombie apocalypse, it is an anachronism that could be dangerous. Committees are often mired in indecisiveness, and a moment of indecision is all it can take in the zombie apocalypse to get one killed. The difference between Rick and everyone else in his group is not that Rick is crazy and everyone else is sane. The difference is that Rick has accepted the new normal of the zombie apocalypse while everyone else is fixated on a past that can very likely never be again. Rick’s acceptance has often allowed everyone else to bury their heads in the sand and keep believing the illusory notion that the old way of doing things is still feasible. But a rude awakening could be looming ominously on the horizon. more