Zeb Larson reviews The Walking Dead #133…
Impending Doom.
This issue drops an interesting new threat into the laps of the survivors, one that is disturbing by virtue of the fact that it appears to have been hiding in front of them the whole time. This issue of The Walking Dead certainly makes for lively reading, even though the pacing throughout the issue is a bit uneven and the disparate threads have yet to come together. I will be discussing some spoilers here, so read ahead at your own discretion.
This issue follows many of the different characters, giving them a page or two each. Carl wakes up and finally reads the letter from Anna, which turns out to be an admission that she is attracted to him. Elsewhere, Andrea and Magna’s group have a surprisingly calm conversation about the nature of the Alexandria communities, and Eugene gets some hard news from Rosita. Rick finally leaves Carl behind and Jesus leads a group of survivors out on patrol to look for a missing patrolman. These are the tangential threads of this issue, though. The real meat is the discovery of the Whisperers, who have taken Dante captive. It appears that the Whisperers wear zombie skin in order to camouflage themselves, and they are angry with Rick’s survivors for intruding on “their” territory. Jesus’s group is wandering straight into a pack of them, which sets up the finale of the issue.
There’s one problem with a story like this. As last issue ended with a cliffhanger and the information about the Whisperers comes part way through the story, it’s hard not to skip past the character building or Carl’s budding romance to figure out just who the hell these guys are. As a reader, one has to commit to re-reading this to figure out where the rest of these various plot threads are going.
It is a testament to the strength of this series that an issue which just barely features Rick Grimes’ presence still manages to be so interesting. In a way, that mirrors what has happened internally with the survivors. Rick has built a relatively stable system that doesn’t need his constant input or presence in order to function. Once you can take off the blinders that the Whisperers place on the story, there is a fairly interesting story going on here. Magna’s group defies expectations and again acts relatively calmly, though I still suspect that there’s going to be some long-term tension. It’s harder to be invested in the Carl-Anna-Sophia love triangle that’s potentially shaping up here, but it may yet have an interesting role to play in the story. And then of course, the Whisperers are no doubt going to make things very interesting for the survivors.
If there’s something Robert Kirkman is good at, it’s throwing out red herrings to distract and confuse the audience. At several points, there have been signs or indications that Magna’s group would somehow end up in conflict with Rick and the others. The way that they seized Andrea last issue certainly made it look like something bad might go down. Yet each time the problems have been resolved peacefully. Could it be that the real conflict between them and Rick’s people is going to come when the Whisperers get closer to the Hilltop Colony? They may be working with them, or they may know something about them, or they might be totally unrelated, but the proximity of the two events might be enough to make people in the Hilltop paranoid. And as all we know, paranoia is the greatest danger when zombies are out and about.
Zeb Larson
Originally published October 26, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
