I have some thoughts on The Walking Dead and the season finale, if you aren’t caught up, turn back, because I am about to combine what we saw on TV with some comic book stuff.
It’s important to remember that while the big arcs are similar between comic and show, individual beats are not, the most obvious of these is that Daryl isn’t even in the comics, and Sophia is still alive 120 issues on. This is all just speculation, I have no idea how right or wrong I am.
Spoilers, do not pass.
These are my thoughts on the season 4 finale of The Walking Dead.
I watched the “Second Screen Experience tonight, and they made a couple of references to specific issues (#56 and #64), so I went back and read through, and I think I know the secret of Terminus.
Issue #56 is about a group that happens on Rick, Carl, and Abraham. The beats are very similar and Rick ends up ripping the bad dude’s throat out.
A few issues later Dale (who gets his leg chopped off due to a bite from a walker, and who is coupled with the still alive Andrea…and yes it’s icky), wanders off from the group after they get in a big walker battle, where they learn about “Herds”. Dale comes to, and finds his OTHER leg has been chopped off and a group of seemingly organized individuals is cooking up his lower limb. He goes into hysterics, and it turns out he had been bitten in the earlier battle, so they are eating “spoiled meat”.
Dale is tossed on the lawn of Rick’s gang, and the bad guys fire some suppressing fire at them before leaving. Rick says “They have no idea who they are fucking with.” The same thing they left this episode with.
My theory is that Terminus is this group of cannibals.
We first see Denise Crosby at a grill. There is a brief flash of a scene of a bunch of spines, skulls, and rib cages, and the whole episode was about Hershel turning the prison into a farm. Rick even describes how to snare a rabbit, and how you need to corral your prey.
Robert Kirkman, the Walking Dead comics writer says that they are doing about 16 issues per season, which puts them about in the right place, and the big set pieces (Abraham’s introduction, the near rape of Carl, the death of the Governor) all line up quite nicely.