The Walking Dead has been on the air for over 11 years.
In that time, we haven’t been given a definite answer about how the zombie apocalypse started.
All of that changed Sunday with the series finale of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, which took viewers to Europe for the first time.
The post-credit scene for the latest spinoff took viewers to a research lab in France.
We meet a woman using old electronic equipment.
She finds a video of Dr. Edwin Jenner, who died at the close of The Walking Dead Season 1.
If you watch The Walking Dead online, you know Edwin blew himself and everyone else in the CDC building to bits after declaring that the virus was already inside everyone.
This little nugget revealed that anyone who dies would become a walker, throwing the attempts to survive into disarray.
Jenner previously mentioned France on the show.
“While our people were bolting out the doors and committing suicide in the hallways, they stayed in the labs till the end.”
Did this mean the French scientists were close to finding a cure?
We have no idea, but there’s even more.
A man arrived in the facility in France with a gun.
“Are you a member of the Primrose team?” he wonders, but the woman is a part of the Violet team.
“They weren’t here when it happened. When you all did what you did. They were at the conference. In Toledo.”
The color-coded teams certainly suggests there were different teams in the research lab.
“If they were to return here… to their work… They might end all this. Even after all this time.”
The man with the gun is not interested and believes everyone else to be dead.
“We won’t jail them like the others,” he says. “We’ll kill them. End this.”
“You started this,” he claims. “All the teams. Then you made it worse.”
That scene alone confirms that the virus was man-made and that the French scientists made it worse.
The man kills the woman, but in one of the most shocking scenes of the series, she reanimates without any delay we’ve seen in the past.
Her first order of business is to chase the man who shot her, but she seemingly also has superhuman strength.
She bangs on the steel door, making huge dents in the process.
The walkers have typically been very slow in the franchise, so this different strain leads to a different kind of walker.
Also of note:
The rule in the franchise has been to aim for the head when killing someone.
The lady came back from the dead after being shot in the head, and she seemed to have a certain level of consciousness, unheard of on the other shows.
It was a huge scene, and one that could tie in to the long-gestating Rick Grimes movies, or at the very least, an episode of Tales of the Walking Dead.
What are your thoughts on it, TV Fanatics?
Hit the comments below.
Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.
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