Tales of the Walking Dead's "Blair/Gina" episode showed Walking Dead fans what goes on inside of a walker's mind, and it was surprisingly sad.
Even though The Walking Dead has ended, the franchise is continuing to expand its mythology. The original series dramatically upped its walker game and tried to fill in a plot hole from Season 1 by resurrecting the intelligent variant of walkers: zombies that can run, climb and open doors. But there are still details about the undead left to be explored, and one was revealed in Tales of the Walking Dead by an unexpected source.
The TWD spinoff was a mixed bag of new stories in the Walking Dead universe, fairly disconnected from the flagship series' batch of characters. The first episode was so bad that some fans thought that AMC was trying to take advantage of the fandom. However, the second episode, "Blair/Gina," took a step in the right direction. It also continued the world-building by giving fans a look inside of walkers' minds.
In "Blair/Gina," Blair was an overbearing, narcissistic boss and Gina was her disgruntled receptionist at the Circle of Trust insurance company in Atlanta. The setting was significant because the episode happened at the very beginning of the apocalypse, and Atlanta was one of the epicenters of disaster. Blair left the office early, trying to get out of town with her fiancé. While they were waiting in line at a gas station, Gina showed up to get a snack -- and when she saw Blair, she decided that she needed to get away. She pulled a shotgun out of her car and tried to commandeer a gas tanker. A Department of Homeland Security agent tried to talk her down before in front of them. In the ensuing struggle for the shotgun, it went off, igniting the gas tanker and killing everyone.
But suddenly Blair and Gina were back in the office . Every time that they relived the scene, it was a little different and they were a little more self-aware -- like they were playing out their options and trying to find a way to survive. The whole concept was trippy, but partially explained at the beginning of the episode when Gina was researching possible personality disorders. One of them was , which is when two people share delusional beliefs or hallucinations after a traumatic event. Because of that shared psychosis, there are two ways for viewers to interpret the episode.
The first idea is that Blair and Gina were afraid of the zombie rumors spreading through the city, and they played out all the worst-case scenarios before they left the office. That means what showed last -- their survival -- was what actually happened. However, there are a few clues that point to a different ending.
But the second idea is that the initial scenario is the truth and everyone died, then the rest of the scenes were Blair and living out their psychosis as walkers. While it sounds ridiculous, it's actually not. During the first scenario, Blair was looking an Internet page titled "The Dying Brain" and read "At the edge of life and death, a dark wave spreads across the brain." That dark wave perfectly encapsulates what existence would be like as a walker -- stuck between life and death and forced to relive death repeatedly.
Additionally, a few impossible things happened in subsequent scenarios, which suggests that none of those took place in reality. Multiple cop cars responded to a single 911 call when the city was overrun with walkers, and later there were no cars on what should have been a crowded overpass. Those details can be taken as clues that the first scenario was reality. Everything else was Blair and Gina living out purgatory as walkers and "thinking" about what they should have done differently to survive. If that's truly what walkers are forced to do, it would be a miserable existence... just like Blair and Gina felt miserable about their lives.
