Why The Walking Dead: World Beyond's Survival Training Makes No Sense To Fans

With AMC's original The Walking Dead series coming to a close, its handful of offshoot shows are beginning to take the spotlight. Fear the Walking Dead is still going strong, recently kicking off its sixth season, and is no longer the only game in town when it comes to TWD spinoffs. The Walking Dead: World Beyond is fresh on the TV scene and is already making waves as one of the most important additions to the canon in quite some time. It's very early into the show's tenure, but early reactions to it are giving off mixed signals at best, and, per usual, fans aren't afraid to voice their opinions (and theories).

While many viewers welcome World Beyond to the Walking Dead chronology, others are a little more hesitant to accept it. Discussions on Reddit about the show are especially enlightening on viewer attitudes, with many airing their skepticism over the inconsistent acting and the clunky dialogue and making it clear how they feel about what they've watched so far. At the same time, others are beginning to raise questions and make interesting points about things in this new corner of the Walking Dead universe that aren't quite adding up. One such query applies to World Beyond's main group of kids and their apparent lack of survival training in the ongoing zombie apocalypse.

One would imagine that, growing up in a time in which the undead masses roam free, you'd pick up some survival skills along the way. This isn't necessarily the case for the likes of Iris (Alexa Mansour), Elton (Nicolas Cantu), and the rest of the young World Beyond crew, who have proven less than capable at handling a few Walkers after leaving the comforts of their fortified home. A Redditor by the name of NomNomVerse made sure to bring up this confusing detail during a live discussion about the latest episode — "The Blaze of Glory."

"I can't believe the society they were raised in didn't even train them to kill zombies," they exclaimed, prompting many other members of Reddit's World Beyond community to pile on. User Theonemum questioned, "Why didn't the more experienced walker killers just capture some, chop their jaws out michonne style, and let the kids actually kill them without the risk of a bite?" This is actually a smart plan, all things considered, since, as Theonemum put it, such experience would desensitize the characters to the zombie threat in the odd event they ventured into the outside world.

The World Beyond cast's head-scratching inability to handle Walkers properly only compounds when comparing them to the younger members of the main Walking Dead series. As crimsonsheriff reminded their fellow Reddit users, "Not even year into the apocalypse and Shane (Jon Bernthal) taught Carl (Chandler Riggs) how to use a gun, in the prison, Carol (Melissa McBride) taught kids how to use a knife in self-defense, Judith (Cailey Fleming) had some training with Michonne (Danai Gurira) and other during the time jump." 

It's baffling that the Civil Republic Military didn't take action in showing the youth of their society how to defeat Walkers. In the same thread, however, NomNomVerse presented a rationale for this apparent oversight in their upbringing: "This campus colony must not have experienced threats and takeovers like we've seen with the main gang," they said, thus emphasizing why the kids receiving some much-needed experience in Walker-killing 101 wasn't a huge concern. 

Hopefully, for the sake of their survival, the group will catch on very quickly when it comes to self-defense, or the World Beyond cast is going to get much smaller very quickly.