Is Climate Change the True Villain in THE WALKING DEAD Season 9 Finale?

After six years surviving in the apocalypse, our protagonists on The Walking Dead would be doing pretty well by now if all they had to worry about were zombies. But that’s always been a major theme in The Walking Dead: The idea that humans are always the scariest, most dangerous monsters on earth. The likes of the Governor, Negan, Jadis, and Alpha have proven that point in spades.

The Season 9 finale of The Walking Dead was a bit low-key. All of the shock and drama was used up in the penultimate episode, “The Calm Before” when Alpha marked the Whisperers’ territory with the heads of ten Kingdom/Hilltop residents. In “The Storm”, all we got was the strange ritual flagellation of Alpha by Beta and the cracking of an unknown voice on the radio. Besides that, it was a long slog through bitter snow where frozen zombies prove especially easy to dispatch (essentially shattering like glass). And the Whisperers? They’ve all gone south for the winter.

Still, that Arctic blast was enough to almost take out Judith, Negan, and Dog (not to mention an entire convey from the Kingdom headed to Hilltop). Sure, everyone survived, but things were touch-and-go for a while. Which got me thinking: Was climate change the real villain of The Walking Dead‘s Season 9 finale?

As the Kingdom convoy is headed towards their first waystation, Ezekiel notes that the winter has never arrived that early and with such ferocity. It’s a 100-years storm, the kind of climatic event that becomes more common as the effects of global warming intensify. It’s a bleak reminder that, even though mankind’s abuse of the environment may have ended when the zombie apocalypse sent everyone back into the Dark Ages, we may have passed the proverbial “Tipping Point” years ago–something many climate-change scientists have predicted.

What do you think horror fans? Was climate change the real villain of The Walking Dead Season 9 finale? Do you suspect producers were perposely including a pro-enviornmentalist message in “The Storm”? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!

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