The Season 10 premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead saw the main groups and their reactions to the satellite dropping out of the sky. With Episode 2, we get to see Alpha (Samantha Morton) and Beta’s (Ryan Hurst) reaction to the same incident. But, that’s not the important bit, as viewers got to see just how Alpha and Beta managed to find each other.
Previously, on The Walking Dead, we have seen Alpha’s story from her time immediately after the outbreak. In Episode 2 of Season 10, we finally get to see how she went from being a terrible mother to a terrible mother who runs a cult.
The episode opens seven years prior to the events that unfolded on the Season 10 premiere of The Walking Dead. Alpha already has a hankering to walk with the dead and is covering herself and her daughter, Lydia (Havana Blum), with walker guts to disguise themselves. While Alpha is totally on board for this new way of living, Lydia is not. She has a pair of headphones to help distract her from the noise of it all, but when a walker knocks the headphones off, the pair have to hide inside a medical facility.
And, it is here that fate intervenes.
It has been confirmed by The Walking Dead’s showrunner, Angela Kang, via Entertainment Weekly, that Beta had previously been treated at this facility which they describe as a rehab — or similar — facility. And so, when the world gets flushed down the crapper, he heads straight back to the only place that has helped him in the past.
Initially, Beta went there with someone else that Ryan Hurst described as a “one of his best friends,” thanks to a picture seen toward the end of the episode featuring both of them. However, considering this picture also has their faces scratched out, I am guessing there is more to the story than what was shown in this episode of The Walking Dead.
Oh, and if you thought this episode would reveal what Beta looks like without his mask, guess again. Even before the Whisperers were a group, Beta was hiding his face. For those that read the comics, there is a reason for that. For those that rely only on the TV series, I’ll refrain from mentioning anything for now.
Beta allows Alpha and Lydia to stay for one night only and Alpha sets about finding out more about him. By the end of the night, after humming some tunes and killing some walkers, she starts calling him “B” and referring to herself as “A” rather than doing the normal thing and sharing names. But, we all knew that there was nothing normal about this pair.
All is going well until Lydia decides she needs to try harder to be as horrible as her mother and goes off to play with walkers while dressed in their guts. While Alpha is searching for her, she inadvertently kills Beta’s friend, the one who came to rehab with him and who is now a walker.
Beta totally flips out and loses his cool. However, Alpha manages to talk him down. She also is totally okay with Beta taking his best friend’s face and shirt before leaving because Beta likes mementos.
And, that’s the story of how the Whisperers started.
While all of these flashbacks are going on, there is plenty of present-day stuff involving the Whisperers in Episode 2 of The Walking Dead Season 10. Gamma (Thora Birch) is introduced and viewers discover that it was her sister, Frances (Juliet Brett), who was the woman instructed by Alpha to leave her crying baby out for the walkers to eat in Season 9 of The Walking Dead.
That baby was rescued and adopted and is now living a happy life with the communities, but poor Frances is left having to think about the consequences of her actions. As a result of this, she is harboring a pretty wicked grudge against Alpha and her sister keeps telling her to move on.
This didn’t happen, though, and when she loses her cool among a group of walkers, she is sent to Alpha for punishment. Alpha actually empathizes with the woman since Lydia is also now no longer with the group and decides to let the woman live. This was probably the only nice thing Alpha has done recently and it was also the wrong thing to do regarding her own safety.
In the end, Frances can’t cope with the fact that she chose Alpha over her own child and attacks the leader of the Whisperers. In a snap decision, Gamma steps in and grabs her sister off Alpha before pushing her into the walkers. As I expected, Frances becomes walker chow and I officially hate Gamma more than Alpha now.
Alpha responds by giving Gamma the name she is now known by and everyone cheers. While Gamma may be entirely into Alpha and her beliefs now, as Thora Birch pointed out in a recent interview, the consequences of her actions will come back to haunt her at some point in Season 10 of The Walking Dead. And I’m really looking forward to watching her suffer as a result of this.
The Walking Dead Season 10 returns with Episode 3 on Sunday, October 20 at 9/8c on AMC.