Over the years, our group of survivors on The Walking Dead have come across several communities they’ve considered safe havens. Whether it was Hershel’s farm back in season 2, or Terminus, Alexandria, the Hilltop, the Kingdom…the list goes on.
However, the Commonwealth — a new civilization introduced in season 11 — is far more sophisticated than anywhere they’ve been before. But is it all sunshine and rainbows? It may not be long before the cracks begin to show.
The Commonwealth isn’t merely a group of survivors trying to make it work in a world ruled by the dead. It feels more like a slice of the real world, as if humanity is finally getting back on track to how things used to be. The community — or more accurately, a group of several towns — holds a collective population surpassing 50,000. It has all the luxuries of pre-apocalypse life, including shops, concerts, and even sporting events. Governor Pamela Milton (Laila Robins) appears to be ruling her community very well. From the trailer, we see that our survivors disagree about how to approach it.
Integration into the Commonwealth will be “very bumpy”
The teasers for the next eight episodes point towards most of our group from Alexandria joining the Commonwealth. While some of them get instantly sucked in, many suspect they’re being lulled into a false sense of security. And why wouldn’t they be? Every community that’s looked too good to be true has ended up falling apart in some sort of unmitigated disaster.
“I think as with any time our people link up with the new community, there is going to be people who are true believers and go like ‘this is great,'” showrunner Angela Kang recently told Entertainment Weekly. “And then there are always our skeptical ones who are looking for what is going to go wrong here, and I think that that holds true. I think that the integration is very smooth for some and very bumpy for others.”
Carol (Melissa McBride), in particular, looks more at home than anyone; she’s baking cookies again with a wide grin on her face. Although with Carol, you never know if it’s a smokescreen or not, as Kang points out:
"Carol definitely has a very particular and specific role to play at the Commonwealth. And anytime Carol is with her cookies, it is a little bit like hiding her true skills, because they all had to do a job that was like something that they did before. And to everybody else, she was just a homemaker and nobody that did any particular job that seemed of any special interest, but we know a lot more about Carol now, obviously."
Of course, there have been numerous villains throughout the series, ranging from cannibals to weird feral creatures to folks wearing zombie skins. But the difference with the Commonwealth is that it’s trying to bring back a sense of the world before the apocalypse, but their ideologies are warped in a way that damages our group. Look no further than the comic book to see just how unfair the social hierarchy of the Commonwealth is.
“Kind of like in the comic book story, as our people get into more of an organized civilization that is large and has taken a lot of the structures from the old world but adapted it somewhat and amplified certain things somewhat, they are frustrated,” Kang said. “The society itself can be a pressure point for them at various times as they are dealing with being stuck in a very stratified, class-driven place.”
And let’s not forget that the Commonwealth isn’t the only threat out there. Believe it or not, The Walking Dead has zombies, too. And there’s also the Civic Republic, which makes the Commonwealth look tiny. “hey are grappling with a lot,” Kang said.
The Walking Dead returns for season 11B on February 20. Or you can get it one week early if you’re an AMC+ subscriber.
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