Alpha, known then as "Dee", tries to protect her daughter Lydia on the community steamboat they live in post-apocalypse, but grows jealous of another resident, Brooke, who Lydia appears to like and trust more. Dee is alarmed by Brooke's naive view of the current world and attempt to maintain normality despite the dangers. Dee's suspicions of a resident named Billy prove to be true as Billy and his gang attempt to seize the boat for themselves; Dee and Lydia narrowly escape as the residents and the gang wipe each other out, leaving Brooke as the only other survivor. Dee scars Brooke's face for failing to protect her daughter after Lydia stops her mother from killing Brooke. At the end of their rope, Dee and Lydia are found by the Whisperers who are led at this time by a woman named Hera. Dee later kills Hera and turns Hera's face into her walker mask, becoming Alpha of the Whisperers.
The episode seemed to be the origin story not just of Alpha and Beta, but of the Whisperers as a group. While they didn't show that faction, the face-mask Beta carves certainly seemed like a hint at things to come. And, well, Alpha and Beta signify the first and second of something and we can safely presume that something to be the Whisperers. Without explicitly stating it, the episode appeared to give us a pretty clear picture of how the Whisperers began. But the Tales episode this week not only contradicts that origin story, it breaks all continuity in the process.
Alpha - known at this point as Dee (Samantha Morton) and Lydia (played here by Scarlett Blum) are living on an old steamboat on a river in the south. The steamboat community is led by a woman named Brooke (Lauren Glazier) whose leadership style is basically the bread & circuses approach. She throws fancy parties where everyone is expected to dress up nice. She seems more concerned with appearances than with common sense, and leaves the boat's outside lights on despite the unnecessary attention it might draw at night. All of this rubs Dee the wrong way. Worse, Lydia is infatuated with Brooke, who dotes on her and constantly chides Dee for her appearance or lack of motherly skills. Lydia would gladly trade her mother in for this newer, prettier, sweeter model. But things go bad, as they always do. Dee is suspicious about one of the newcomers to the boat, Billy (Nick Basta). When he serves her drinks at the bar, he's rude and dismissive, telling her that if she's not going to dress nice and make Brooke happy, she should just stay in her room. It's almost as if he doesn't want her around for some reason.
Whatever the case, her heckles are up. Billy's giving her bad vibes and she isn't shy about telling the others when they learn that an older gentleman has gone missing. She presses the point and when she confronts Billy, who she sees signaling the shore with a mirror the next day, he screams that she's trying to stab him and dives into the water, swimming away. Brooke, who is apparently an idi*t through and through, chastises Dee again, despite Billy's obvious BS (Brooke was standing right there, so she knew Dee wasn't trying to stab him). When Billy returns later with five other goons, all carrying loaded weapons, Dee is vindicated. Other passengers aren't so lucky, as Billy goes around shooting them to make room for his crew. Alpha shows up and takes action, slitting one of Billy's men's throat and grabbing his gun. She fires a few shots and then dives over the side, escaping with Lydia to the shore. Here she has to fight off some zombies and she and Lydia, covered in blood, conceal themselves under a dead walker. Stragglers from the boat are picked off by the zombies - except Brooke, who manages to survive.
When Alpha finds her, Brooke bizarrely claims that the whole thing is her fault, even though she was the one who warned them about Billy and was trying to be cautious. Alpha is about to kill Brooke when Lydia shows up and intervenes. Instead, she cuts a long gouge into Brooke's pretty face. They leave Brooke and head their own way, eventually stopping to rest. Lydia has been going on about fairies talking to her in the woods. Alpha decides that this is no place for a child, no world for Lydia to grow up in, but just as she's about to kill her own daughter she hears the voices, too. It's the Whisperers! They show up in the nick of time and welcome the pair into their fun costume club. Throughout, Alpha has been narrating all of this and in the end we learn she's been talking to the leader of the Whisperers, the blond woman who just invited her in, who she's now about to kill.
But wait a minute. Where is Beta? What happened to that entire origin story? Alpha and Beta didn't start the Whisperers, so how are they called that? And isn't it odd that they would call themselves "A" and "B" just as a coincidence? And why is Alpha's head shaved when she meets Beta (before she's a Whisperer) but not shaved when she meets the Whisperers? The timeline has been retconned or ignored or the show's writers and producers simply forgot about the first origin story episode when they put this one together. Whatever the case, it's still a pretty good episode as far as The Walking Dead goes lately, though oddly timed given how long ago the Whisperer war ended. As tedious as the Whisperers became, Samantha Morton is always terrific and menacing, and she's that here but with a touch more humanity. I might even go so far as to say I prefer this complicated Dee to the cartoon villain, Alpha. But I prefer complex characters to psychotic monsters. Maybe I'm just not thinking about the timeline right or missing something, I'm not sure, but it feels to me like the writers either forgot about the original flashback episode or just tossed the baby out with the bathwater. Or this is the start of The Walking Dead multiverse, with alternative timelines.
This installment brought back award-winning actress Samantha Morton who, rather famously, introduced 'Alpha' and 'The Whisperers' to the TV franchise back in its ninth season. Though she eventually met her maker at the hands of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), show creator and Tales Of The Walking Dead screenwriter Channing Powell resurrected the lady with a look into her earlier days as Dee, a survivor whose most definitely looked down upon by the well-to-do clan who befriend the woman and her daughter Lydia whom they welcome onto their riverboat sanctuary. What we learn - to a degree - viewers already knew: Dee definitely doesn't play well with others, especially when they might have eyes set on adopting Lydia into the elite of what remains of society while relegating the 'mother hen' to the outskirts, where she's treated just a step-up from the dearly (and hungry) departed.
Still, the episode earns high marks for its focus on Dee's ever-fragile psychology. With her time spent on The Walking Dead, Alpha-Dee was established as a master manipulator, one whose ruthlessness truly knew no bounds in achieving what she demanded of those she commanded as well as others she came into conflict with. Speaking in a Southern drawl barely above a whisper (what foreshadowing and characterization the writers employed there), she'd layer on a 'bag of sugar' before pulling off the figurative band-aid and unleashing just the right measure of pain to maintain control of those within her grasp. But the Dee we're treated to in her signature hour is only just discovering her true persona: it's a fascinating look at an individual in transition - one longtime viewers know is destined to become as treacherous and reviled as a herd of zombies by lacks the mastery we've seen before. Because she's emotionally and psychologically in transition - because we don't quite know how she's going to react to these current circumstances - this spin-off finally delivered an hour that demonstrates the potential of revisiting old haunts with a new freshness. Well, Dee finds herself in a predicament that, alas, we've kind of seen all too often in the wider Walking Dead universe. While we haven't seen one situated on a riverboat, we've have seen these circumstances, and I think that reality might continue to plague writers of this incarnation as they continue trying to find 'that new car smell' in the ever-expanding used car lot. Kudos to all involved with sticking with it; I just hope that - as this version develops - they keep striving for something audiences legitimately haven't seen before.
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