Tag Archives: The Walking Dead S06E11

In the ancient past that is the year 2008, an ambitious (and ultimately disappointing) game, entitled Spore, was released. Nicknamed “SimEverything,” the game was meant to depict the progress of life and civilization across millennia, beginning with single-celled organisms and ending with spacefaring intergalactic communities. Part of Spore’s premise involved splitting the game up into stages based on that progression, starting with ones that let your characters evolve individually and then eventually advancing to others where they would form collectives that traded and went to war with neighboring tribes.

As The Walking Dead moves toward a new stage of world building in “Knots Untie”, I like the idea of the series taking a similar path. For several seasons, we’ve seen the core group of survivors grow and change with their needs changing accordingly. In the beginning, TWD was about Rick surviving on his own and finding his family. Eventually, with the number of survivors swelling after the events of Herschel’s farm and beyond, it became about that group and finding safety and security for more people. This idea was reinforced at the prison, a setting that continued the theme of trying to find a place that offered at least temporary safety, and then struggling to protect it from both the dead and the living.

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