#immediately rewound to listen to that sequence again

[thinkingaboutbones]

i think about the naddpod donkey kong one-shots every single day of my life, theyre literally the peak of entertainment im so obsessed with them

[twdmusicboxmystery]

10x02: We Are The End of the World - First Thoughts

Okay, how did everyone like the episode. I thought it was stellar, to be honest. I know not everyone was excited for this episode because it’s a bottle episode about Alpha and Beta, but me and my fellow theorists fully expected to get a lot of interesting symbolism and foreshadow, and we were not disappointed!

***As always, spoilers abound for episode 10x02 below. Don’t read until you’ve watched!***

Opening Sequence:

I firmly believe the opening sequence represents what happened to Beth after Coda. I kind of suspected it would anyway because sneak peek, we saw Alpha and Lydia run into a hospital. Watching the entire thing confirmed it. It starts with a woman who is passed out in her car. It appears she's gotten into an accident. When we first see her, she's laying against the steering wheel with horn blaring and the airbag deployed. But she's not dead.

She wakes up and tries to get out of the car. The sound of the crash and the blare of the horn have brought walkers down on her. She tries to get out and away before the walkers surround her. She tries to get out her door but can’t, which I thought was kind of interesting. She slides over and exits the passenger side, diving under the car, but doesn't make it. A walker grabs her leg and bites it and proceeds to eat her.

Alpha and Lydia are nearby and Lydia's earmuffs get knock off. She hears a woman screaming and start screaming herself. That brings the walkers down on them and they have to run. They end up running into the hospital.

I think this represents Beth waking up in the car, being surrounded by walkers, and getting out. She probably crawls under the car for some reason. (It actually reminded me a lot of when Aaron and Daryl did this in 5x16 to get away from the Wolf trap.) And then eventually she makes her way back into the hospital (Grady).

Other evidence of this? Alpha and Lydia pass a fire lane sign. That's a reference to the fire truck. Only firetrucks can park in fire lane. The last time we saw the fire truck was at Grady.

Just before they get inside at the admittance door, they pass a sign that says, "Second lives." Yeah, that's pretty on-the-nose. After all, Beth's "second life," would have begun the moment she woke up in that car where TF left her and made her way back into the hospital.

From there, it's hard to know how to interpret Alpha meeting Beta, or how to apply that to Beth. When Beth goes back into Grady, will she meet someone who will become a good friend and always stay with her or travel with her after that? Maybe. Maybe Edwards could fulfill that role. Or maybe it will be a new character we didn't actually meet in S5.

It's also possible there will be no such thing. Maybe the opening sequence was about Beth, but after that, this just becomes about Alpha and the parallels diverge. No way to tell yet.

Sibling parallels and anti-parallels:

After the opening sequence, we get some interesting stories going on. Alpha stays in the hospital with Lydia for one night and gets to know Beta little bit better.

She finds a picture of him and another man who's wearing the smiley face shirt in the place where he stays. A walker wearing that same shirt comes out and Alpha kills him. It's also obvious that this man, whoever he was, meant a lot to Beta. So, I figure this man must have either been his brother, his best friend, or possibly his boyfriend.

For various reasons, I don't think Beta is gay. I’ll get into why in just a second. But my guess would be that this was his brother. Why? Mostly because the parallel story in the present-day (non-flashbacks) was about two sisters. So, it makes sense for the story in the past to be about two brothers. And of course it doesn't have to be his biological brother. After all, Rick and Daryl are "brothers." But either way, it's a man he cared a great deal about. So, I’ll first talk about Beta’s story and then we'll talk about the two sisters. There was just so much in this episode. It was hard for me to decide how to break down my discussions.

Beta:

If I'm right that Beta lost his brother, then he and his brother must have stayed in the hospital but at some point, but his brother died. We don't know how. From what I could tell, he was keeping his brother locked in a room as a walker, because he couldn't bring himself to kill him. Lydia let the walker out and Alpha ended up stabbing it in the head. Then she invited Beta to come with them, into the darkness, as a Whisperer.

Now, I said earlier that there were several different interpretations of this. On the one hand, I said last season I believed Alpha and Beta represented Beth and Daryl, only were anti-parallels. In other words, these are evil versions of it of Beth and Daryl. This episode confirm it for me more than ever.

So, the first way to interpret this would be as a parallel to Daryl and Merle. Because Daryl lost his brother and saw him become a walker as well. Similarly, Daryl didn't want to leave his brother. Back in S3, he left the prison with for a time before returning, and refused to let Merle go off on his own. He campaigned to let Merle stay at the prison for that very reason. So, he did not want to leave his brother either. The big difference is that when Daryl saw that Merle had become a walker, he immediately put him down and mourned him.

Beta let his brother keep running around as a walker, did not put him down, and we didn't see any tears from him over the death. (Not crying was a big theme in this episode. I'll come back to it.)

The second way I think you could interpret this is the way I've always interpreted the Lizzie/Mika situation. Which is that it represents the stronger half and the weaker half of one person. The weaker half (Mika) dies while the stronger but often more twisted half (Lizzie) lives on. Well, that makes it sound like Beth really is dead because she was always the happy, hopeful one.

But the one who lives doesn’t always HAVE to be twisted either. If you compare this to Daryl and Merle, Daryl lived on because he genuinely was the stronger one, but he's obviously not twisted. He was the good one between the two, so the Lizzie situation doesn't always hold true. But we've seen several pairings with the good one died and the twisted one lived on. (I.e. Lizzie and Mika, Beta and this guy, and the other pair of sisters we see in this episode.)

A third way to interpret this can be as parallels to Daryl leaving Beth behind. Not all the circumstances in this situation match, but we have this person Beta cared about being struck in the head while in the hospital, have him going down right in front of Beta, and then talk of leaving him behind. So there are definitely callbacks to Grady and Coda going on here.

The two sisters:

These two sisters are never named. They even call each other sister. As I watched, I tried to figure out how we should interpret this. Perhaps the most obvious would be the sibling parallel. To Maggie and Beth. I do believe there is something to that because the sister who gave birth to a baby that Alpha made her leave behind definitely had parallels to Beth. Let me show you.

You can see that she is sweet and missing her child. She's obviously not as callous as many of the other Whisperers. But there were more specific things that reminded me of Beth.

For one thing, there's a part where she's and her sister are lying on the ground, trying to sleep. She's lying on some sort of light animal skin. I honestly can't tell what it is because it's just a pelt and we can't see we can't discern what kind of animal it came from. It occurred to me it could be a dog skin. Granted, it could also be a white wolf skin. No way to tell. But the thing that really floored me was that there's a part where, talking to her sister, she says, "I'm so sorry." I think rewound that three times to listen to it because something about bothered me.

Finally, I figured out what it was. Beth says that exact thing to Joan when she wakes up in the hospital without an arm. "I'm so sorry." But it wasn't just the words that are the same. By itself, I probably wouldn't have remembered that line from Beth in Slabtown. It's the actual sound of her voice. This woman has a small, timid, high-pitched voice that sounds exactly like Emily's. Try to listen to the two side by side if you can. They sound like the same person!

Now, with that being said, the other sister would represent Maggie. And as with Alpha and Beta paralleling Beth and Daryl, this is definitely an antiparallel. The sister says, “I should have left you behind when I had the chance.” She later sacrifices her sister in favor of Alpha. Obviously, Maggie would never have done that. So once again, we have this being an anti-parallel to TF and their values.

As with the Beta situation, this could also be construed as the weaker half dying where the stronger, more twisted half lives.

It even occurred to me that if you wanted to compare this to Lizzie and Mika (these two sisters are kind of grown-up versions of Lizzie and Mika) his shows how Alpha is also an anti-parallel to Carol. Because when Lizzie killed her sister, Carol recognized how evil it was. She even went as far as to kill Lizzie to keep her from doing that to anyone else. Here, Alpha actually praises the sister and rewards her for killing her sister. Yeah, definitely twisted.

And again, this can obviously be interpreted in terms of Beth, because we have a situation where the sisters are together and surrounded by walkers. The older sister sacrifices the younger (remember fathers Gabriel's words in 5x16, "you sacrificed one of your own,") and then leaves her behind. Again, this is not the same way it went down with TF and Beth, but this is just the evil version versus the good version.

Okay, a couple more things. I was very interested in the part where Alpha and Beta mentioned their “mission.”

One who has followed me for very long remember this, but I did a post about the Wolves’ religion back in S6. It’s obvious that the wolves were a foreshadow of the Whisperers. Not only do they call themselves a pack several times in this episode, but I'm getting the feeling that they believe much with the Wolves believed.

Back in S6, I did a post on the religion of the wolves. One of them, who talked to Morgan, said that they were freeing the people the killed. It almost felt like they saw killing human beings as freeing them so that they could enter a higher plane of existence or something. And of course, when people die, they become walkers. So it felt like they were very pro-walker and anti-human.

We also saw them gathering armies of walkers which they used in their traps, one of which Daryl and Aaron accidentally tripped in 5x16.

Again, we’re seeing the exact same thing with the Whisperers. At the beginning, Alpha and Beta talk about it together, saying, "Have you forgotten our mission?" We don't actually know what their mission statement is yet, but there are gathering walkers who they refer to as guardians. We also learn in this episode that Beta is very pro-walker. He actually likes the sound the dead make. It's the only song he doesn't want to hear end. That's very telling. No wonder he was drawn too Alpha walking among the dead. It's not just a survival thing for him. He actually enjoys it.

Meanwhile, Alpha also talked about how the dead are free because they love nothing and fear nothing. They only want to feed. That parallels what the Wolf told Morgan about being free. So I kind of feel like they want to turn the entire world into walkers. They definitely seem more pro-walker than pro-human. Just kind of interesting.

Because I said I come back to it, let's talk for a minute about the tears. Last season, we saw Alpha kill someone because he saw her crying. Because she wants to be strong for her and lead her pack, she says she doesn't cry. That, of course, parallels strongly with Beth saying she doesn't cry anymore.

We saw a lot more of that theme this episode. The two sisters talked about how Alpha didn't cry. Even when she left Lydia and thereby lost her daughter, she didn't cry. (By the way, it seems she told the Whisperers, including Beta, that she killed Lydia, which is untrue.) The two sisters talk about wanting to be strong and not cry in the same way as Alpha. And at the end, when one sister sacrifices the other, she doesn't cry at all. (Another anti-parallel between her and Maggie.)

It's more subtle, but I also noticed that when Beta lost the man with the smiley face shirt, he didn't cry either.

Obviously, seeing TF mourned for those they love, seeing Daryl cry for Merle and Beth and Rick, seeing Carol cry when she had to put down Lizzie and Mika, etc., is very important. It's the tears that make them human and make them the good guys. Only the bad guys don't cry for the ones they lose.

Also, notice how Alpha is full of crap. She says she doesn't cry, and that Lydia was dead to her a long time ago. Yet, she's keeping a shrine to Lydia and she cries and misses her. 

I also see this as yet another parallel to Beth. At the beginning of S4, she told Daryl she doesn’t cry anymore, which was kind of crap. She tried not to cry and thought that made her strong, but it was a misconception on her part. She kind of abandoned it when the prison fell (she cried in Inmates) and especially after Still when Daryl razzed her about not crying for her dead boyfriends. I think she had to learn the value of mourning. And she did.

So, in a lot of ways, Gamma is actually more psychopathic than Alpha, because she genuinely doesn't cry and has made herself hard to the point of not being human. Alpha pretends to be that way, but it's all a ruse.

Oh, I also said I’d come back to why Beta is not gay. Because he and Alpha entwined fingers at the end. I don’t know if they actually have a physical relationship. They haven’t shown us a sexual element between these two, so they truly may not. But I think they are supposed to be emotionally romantic soul mates. Hence the entwined fingers. So I don’t think the guy Beta lost was his boyfriend.

I’ll go into this more tomorrow in my Details post, but I feel like this was Alpha and Beta’s Still episode. They met, got to know one another, and forged a deep (albeit twisted) connection. More on that tomorrow.

I think I'll end there today. Those were the biggest takeaways for me. There are a lot of references in this episode that I need to touch on tomorrow. Alpha and Beta got a lot of Beth and Daryl’s dialogue here, and how the sisters parallel Beth as well. Stay tuned.

Thoughts?