The Walking Dead Revealed The Cause Of The Outbreak

Whether talking about The Walking Dead comics or The Walking Dead television show and its many spinoffs, one of the closest guarded secret of the entire franchise is how the zombie outbreak first started. That wasn’t because the man who started The Walking Dead was holding out for the right time to reveal it. In fact, for many, many years, Robert Kirkman made it clear that he didn’t want people to know how it started.

That’s why both the comic and the television show start the zombie apocalypse “off-screen” while Rick Grimes is convalescing in a coma. When he awakens, everything has already fallen apart and the world is ruled by flesh eating undead. The cause of the outbreak was never revealed in the comics. Despite a years-long run that began well before the show ever aired on AMC. It was also never revealed during the original program’s 10-year run. But finally, in The Walking Dead: World Beyond, how the world fell apart and who caused it was indeed revealed, though even that was hidden away from all but the most devoted viewers.

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The Walking Dead World Beyond: Is This Really The Origin?

After Kirkman went out of his way to avoid ever shedding light on how everyone started turning into zombies when they died, the Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2 finale post-credits sequence gave the TWD zombies an origin story.

According to that post-credits scene, The Walking Dead zombie virus started in Europe. The scene which confirms the origins in World Beyond takes place at a biomedical facility in France. The scene shows one of the now long-abandoned researchers returning to the facility hoping to restart her work of examining the virus and eventually discovering a cure. However, this unnamed researcher is confronted by another survivor who has seemingly been spending enough time at the lab that the survivor knows the facility’s secret. When the scientist declares she wants to end the zombie apocalypse and believes she can come up with a way to fix everything, the other survivor replies, “End this? You started this.”

On the wall of the same facility, there’s also the rather ominous message, “Les Morts Sont Nés Ici.” It appears that someone, either another researcher or lab worker, or perhaps even the person that accosts the would-be savior has scrawled “the dead are born here.”

The very obvious implication here is that this lab is somehow where the virus that ended the world originated. And it’s clear in further dialogue that the research team never meant for it to get out of the lab. It was something that was being worked on, and presumably was being studied in order to find a cure before it somehow jumped outside those walls and infected the entire world in rather impressive fashion. Now it’s been shown that every single person in the world somehow has the virus and that when someone dies they will always come back, as long as their brain hasn’t been destroyed.

While Kirkman had never let anyone know the origin of the TWD zombie virus, the show did hint early on that this was not some mystical situation where a supernatural force was reinvigorating the undead. In the first season, Rick and his people travel to the CDC and find a researcher who has given up on life. But before he allows the facility to be destroyed, and his own death to arrive along with it, he shows them that people were working on the cause and the cure. However, neither was ever found (at least by the CDC and those labs it was working with) before everything shut down.

A TWD Mystery That Should Have Been Left Untouched

Now that The Walking Dead officially shared what certainly seems to be how the end of the world started, the question is, was it necessary to do it? And the answer certainly seems to be “no.” And what’s more, the creators and showrunners in the franchise know it. That’s why it was tucked away in a post-credits scene for a spinoff that didn’t do particularly well. It was essentially hidden away as a reward for the most dedicated fans. But it offers up more questions than answers.

The problem with any answer to the biggest question in The Walking Dead is that it doesn’t really answer anything. How did a virus like this get from France to the US and the rest of the world so quickly that the lab that created it couldn’t send a warning or all of its research to all the other labs in the world? While it’s certainly possible that carriers could travel not knowing they’d been infected, until they died, that still doesn’t explain the speed at which the world fell apart. Of course it’s possible this was a red herring and not really how things broke out. That’s the beauty of the show and this answer being tucked away in the way it was. It’s still possible this was only part of the start of the end of the world.

The Walking Dead

Release Date

2010 – 2022

Network

AMC

Showrunner

Frank Darabont, Angela Kang, Scott M. Gimple, Glen Mazzara

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