Why Alexandria Makes No Sense On The Walking Dead According To Fans

"The Walking Dead" has been thrilling viewers for over a decade with its untold legions of shambling undead, folks swaddled in corpse flesh, and zombie taxidermists. But then, out of nowhere, eleven seasons and over 150 episodes in, something comes along that makes fans go "wait, that seems like a heck of a stretch."

The offending party: Alexandria, the safe zone that first appeared in the season five episode "The Distance." Lately, the Washington, D.C.-adjacent haven for the uninfected has had viewers scratching their heads and wondering what the show's writers are thinking in the eleventh hour of "The Walking Dead."

At least that's what's going on over on the /r/thewalkingdead corner of Reddit, where discussions regarding season 11 episode "Promises Broken" quickly turned to sass and lip. The sass was directed at the people of Alexandria, and the lip at the writers room that keeps them there. Basically, it nothing about the place adds up when looked at with any level of scrutiny, according to the show's more vocal devotees.

It's a well established fact that post-apocalyptic municipalities are only as dramatic as their constant risk of being overwhelmed by the undead/robots/undead robots. That said, viewers have noted that Alexandria doesn't boast much consistency when it comes to presenting its struggles.

One user described the plight of Alexandria — "starving to death as we speak," as they put it — before pointing out that the response to a lack of resources was for "The one group they sent to find food" winding up "70% dead and busy spending their day digging a hole in the woods and plotting to kill an entire community." Or, to put it another way, "you guys had one job."

Meanwhile, the very fact that anyone would stay in the safe zone perplexed others. One user rhetorically spoke on behalf of the people of the settlement, saying "I think we should stay in Alexandria, with its 1/2 burned buildings, walls that seemingly leak in walkers at an amazing rate, where our land is destroyed and there are NO new resources to be found." If nothing else, it goes to show you that the real estate market is cutthroat even after the fall of civilization.

Frustrations with the situation surrounding Alexandria are nothing new, with many fans pointing to the Whisperer War as the start of the problem. Around the conclusion of the story, viewers were clued in on the idea that Alexandria was running low on supplies. By the start of the next season, and seemingly out of nowhere, the safe zone was in an even worse predicament than before, with around a month's worth of food left and no option but to send an astonishingly murderable away team to try and take back a Reaper settlement.

The whole kerfuffle raises a glut of questions. Why was retaking the Reaper settlement the best use of markedly mortal resources? Was there nowhere else worth checking? How did the community let things get this bad without putting any thought into finding more food, or at least more thought than it takes to get to the conclusion "eh, we'll send some of our guys to get takeout from the restaurant where the drive-thru guys kill everybody?"

And more than anything, why would the survivors stay in Alexandria if they wanted to remain survivors? While the area might have been the best game in town for a while, boasting solar panels and sustainable plumbing and a very scenic windmill, times have changed.

Folks have been pointing out issues with Alexandria for as long as the safe zone has been on the show. Entire swaths of Reddit are dedicated to pointing out gaps in in-universe logic when it comes to the region, with users claiming to be engineers arguing with other users who claim to be engineers over whether or not the supports on the outside of the wall would be better served on the side where nobody could knock them down. It's a tension versus compression issue, apparently. We don't actually know. We're not engineers, no matter what we tell people on message boards.

Despite an overwhelming enthusiasm for souring "The Walking Dead's" sweet, plenty of fans seem willing to extend their disbelief far enough that they see Alexandria as a perfectly acceptable hypothetical spot to settle down and teach their kids to aim for the head. In another corner of Reddit, enthusiasts hypothesized that much of what makes the place enticing is either long-lasting enough that the survivors wouldn't have to worry about it, as with the PVC used in the plumbing, or easily replaced or reconfigured, like the solar panels and batteries. Now if we could just convince the "Quiet Place" family to listen to that sort of logic and move closer to a waterfall, everybody could be happy.