I’ve been thinking about cannibalism. Which, tbh, is a rather odd thing for a reformed vegetarian to do. But I actually started on this thought process some years ago when I actually was still a veggie. This was originally published in two parts on Sci-Fi Fantasy Network in 2017 (back in the days it existed and I had a regular column). But the whole deranged thought train  popped into my head again recently as I was on a bit of a re-watch binge of Z Nation. And now here we sit, once again dissecting cannibalism. More specifically, the use of cannibalism in zombie narratives, and the potential this particular brand of beasty has to provide greater meaning and purpose to a story beyond being simple horror.

Zombies are viscerally terrifying to humans for two reasons: they’re the walking proof of our own mortality packaged in a rotting corpse; and they consume us. Not by feeding on your body, but by literally consuming it. And, if anything of you remains, dooming it to wander the earth long after we’ve (hopefully) consciously vacated them. 

Vampires have been romanticised to the point that becoming one is often the happy ending. Nobody generally wants to become a zombie, and when somebody does, the story treats it as a bizarre aberration. A vampire bite can be done beautifully, romantically, erotically. 

It’s considerably harder to do that with a rotting corpse eating another person.

To my recollection the only time a zombie has been romanticised is Warm Bodies, and even there the zombie in question remains more pretty boy, less rotting corpse. 

And yet, in both The Walking Dead and Z Nation, the truly disturbing portrayals of eating human flesh don’t come from the zombies. It’s the people who are still alive, perfectly conscious of what they’re doing, and have somehow decided that eating other people is a reasonable way to carry on living.

Why We Should All Spend More Time Considering Cannibalism

In typical me fashion, I may have dramatically overthought The Walking Dead cannibals, and then compared them to Z Nation’s cannibals, and then spent far more time than is reasonably healthy pondering cannibalism.

Naturally, I now present all these thoughts to you.

You’re welcome.

Because the interesting question of cannibalism isn’t how horrific it is. I know, you’d think it would be. But the questions of what drives people to cannibalism, how they manage to justify it to themselves, and how stories use that to examine humanity, morality, survival beyond the immediate horror of one body eating another…that’s fascinating.

Or, potentially, I’m rather odd.

But zombie narratives are particularly well positioned to exploit cannibalism, and both The Walking Dead and Z Nation do, though The Walking Dead does considerably more with their cannibals than Z Nation ever managed.

Before you venture further, spoiler warnings for The Walking Dead, particularly seasons 4–6, and Z Nation, particularly seasons 1–2.

A Warm Welcome, And Something On The Barbecue

The Walking Dead’s cannibal plot kicks in towards the end of season four with episodes 15–16 introducing Terminus, and season five, episodes 1–3 completing the arc. After the debacle at the prison, the gang is split up and trying to find their way back to each other. Separately, they discover signs for a place called Terminus, which promises safety, sanctuary, and food. They all conclude heading there is the best plan; the signs are everywhere, they’re all likely to head there, hoping the others are also headed there. 

And when Rick, Daryl, Michonne and Carl arrive, they meet Gareth, who seems genial enough. Though, almost too nice and reasonable in the face of four filthy, heavily armed strangers sneaking up on them unawares. The whole place is a wrongness of cheerful optimism full of bright sunflowers and the seriously creepy Mary (spectacularly played by Star Trek’s Denise Crosby). 

Mary is constantly tending a barbecue. A rather peculiar sight in a world where food is so scarce, and there’s no sign of livestock.

Rick soon sees familiar things: Glenn’s bright orange rucksack, Maggie’s poncho, and Hershel’s watch. Naturally, Rick instigates a confrontation and they run. So beginning a chase demonstrating the denizens of Terminus are either worse marksmen than Stormtroopers, or purposefully herding them.

As the four run through Terminus they pass a disturbing pile of offal, before they’re driven into a cargo container and reunited with the rest of the group (plus some newcomers they met along the way), a cliffhanger. So ends season four.

Season five kicks off with No Sanctuary, and the payoff is immediate. Rick, Daryl, Glenn and Bob are lined up like cattle for the slaughter along with several other unfortunate souls who are dispatched with chilling efficiency. The men doing the killing appear utterly detached from the horrors of what they’re doing. 

In that scene, they don’t seem to kill out of malice or a desire to inflict pain but simple practicality.

Which is somehow worse.

A Warm Welcome Of Another Kind

Z Nation uses a very different promise of warmth. 

Cassandra is introduced in the season-one premiere, Puppies and Kittens, as a scantily clad woman inexplicably locked in a cage. When the group later encounters two ominous blokes on motorcycles, she clearly recognises them. The show’s cannibal plot comes in episode three, Philly Feast, as we discover Cassandra was part of Tobias Campbell’s rather freaky ‘family’. 

Here the lure is sex rather than food, shelter and safety. Women of the compound are used as a promise of sex to lure men into trailers, where Tobias’s people capture them for the group’s food supply.

This, to me, still seems like an extraordinarily precarious way to find fresh meat. In a world where everyone is hanging on by a thread, the promise of food and safety seems a far more reliable lure than the promise of nookie.

Never underestimate the stupidity of men in the face of the promise of sex, I guess 🤷‍♀️ (I’d love to say this without gender bias, but alas the show won’t let me; as far as we’re aware it’s just men that are this dumb.)

And this is the first story problem I have with Z Nation. At least with The Walking Dead’s cannibals, Terminus is somewhere all manner of people would naturally gravitate towards. It’s easily found, signposted along railway lines, even advertised on the radio. 

It’s visually a bright, hopeful place filled with food and resources. 

Tobias’s operation relies on strangers bimbling by and dropping their guard long enough to be tasered. How are they finding enough unsuspecting dopes to sustain an entire community? 

The logistics seem rather optimistic for the apocalypse.

There’s also another side to the way Z Nation presents Cassandra that’s far more interesting than whether she’s effective bait, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Butcher Or The Cattle: How Terminus Became Cannibals

The people of Terminus weren’t always cannibals. Once upon a time they were genuinely trying to help others, offering food and safety at the expense of their own resources. They took in other survivors who took advantage of that generosity, imprisoning the residents of Terminus, repeatedly beating and raping them, killing their friends and family.

The flashbacks are brief, but brutal. And we do actually see something of what happened to these people. We see the suffering and the desperation that drove them to take Terminus back, and we hear the conclusion they reached: 

You’re the butcher, or you’re the cattle.

When you’ve survived such extreme brutality it’s almost understandable to conclude the answer is to become so brutal yourself that nobody can brutalise you again. 

There’s a weird bit of folklore that actually applies here (if you’ll forgive the tangent). The rules of hospitality may have been lingering in the collective unconscious of Terminus. In older traditions, hospitality isn’t just offering somebody food and somewhere to sleep. If somebody comes into your home and breaks bread at your table, you’re supposed to protect them and prevent others from doing them harm. In exchange, your guest is honour bound to behave themselves while under your roof. Greek xenia takes those responsibilities of host and guest seriously, while in other traditions sharing bread and salt creates an obligation. 

Everything’s tied to food.

Which is rather horribly ironic given what Terminus becomes.

The hospitality Terminus offered was broken and perverted by what happened to them, so they created a new version. They still invite people in and offer sanctuary, but now they’re the ones breaking the rules, in the opposite direction. Instead of protecting the people who come to them for food and shelter, they kill them and eat them. 

There’s an older folklore pattern there; the host who turns out to be the danger.

Except that with Terminus, that welcome was once real. 

It doesn’t excuse anything they subsequently do. They might have been able to justify what they did to the people who broke their hospitality in the first place, that was self-defence. Though eating them arguably goes slightly beyond what’s required for survival. But if they were literally bereft of any other food source at the time, perhaps it wasn’t. 

But the strangers who arrived at Terminus later hadn’t broken anything. They’d done nothing but show up hoping for shelter. Gareth can’t justify breaking the rules of hospitality with everyone just because someone once did it to him. 

That’s a warped view of it. 

But there is at least some logic to how Terminus became cannibals. Warped though it is, it makes a degree of sense. We’re actually shown what happened to them, and that gives us a way to understand how they became what they are by the time Rick and co. meet them.

And the cattle reference is also rather literal. The way Terminus operates is almost industrial. People are lined up and killed like cattle at a slaughterhouse. Human carcasses hang like sides of beef. Personal possessions are sorted and stored in an eerie echo of the possessions of Holocaust victims. And this, too, is understandable: to dehumanise victims and equate the act with butchering cows or pigs makes the whole thing slightly easier for the human brain to comprehend.

Like conveniently forgetting pigs have the equivalent intelligence of a human toddler whenever you fancy a bacon sandwich.

It doesn’t make it humane. But it makes it believable that these people have managed to rationalise their actions.

The Irrational Rationality Of Z Nation’s Cannibals

Z Nation goes considerably further with the horror of cannibalism than The Walking Dead. Tobias’s victims are kept alive while pieces of flesh are sliced off and consumed over time. They’re left injured and alone, presumably knowing people are eating parts of them and will eventually come back for more. 

Addy’s discovery of those half-eaten, still-living people is genuinely the stuff of nightmares.

And Z Nation does not do enough to support that level of horror. 

The Walking Dead’s cannibal arc got multiple episodes and deep exploration. On Z Nation, we’re given Cassandra’s long verbal explanation of what happened during Black Summer, and how Tobias was trying to protect his family, and how the whole thing supposedly drove them to lose their souls. 

We don’t see them suffering through it. We don’t feel the desperation that drove them to it.

Tobias is clearly unhinged. Pushed to the brink by leadership, loss, and the condition of his wife, who’s gone but not dead. She’s an eerie living echo of the zombies surrounding them, doing little but eating. 

People.

That explains something about Tobias. It doesn’t explain everybody else.

How did one batshit mental guy convince everybody following him that it was perfectly reasonable to eat people? The show never really shows us.

The key to any good plot involving extreme and unbelievable elements is to ground the shit out of the fantastic and insane by being as realistic as possible everywhere else. 

That trick lets readers or watchers devote their suspension of disbelief to the inherently unrealistic elements of the plot, because the rest of the world is effortless to believe. 

Z Nation can send the Liberty Bell rolling down the street flattening zombies, or unleash a giant cheese wheel, and I’ll happily go along with it. 

Those scenes are purposefully ridiculous.

That doesn’t mean the show is incapable of being serious. 

It has some incredibly deep emotional moments, some very well-developed characters, and some genuinely phenomenal arcs. Addy’s arc throughout the show is spectacular, and Murphy is a gross, delicious, weirdly compelling and morally complex (not to mention questionable) character. 

Z Nation makes black comedy, slapstick lunacy, and genuinely serious stuff work together most of the time. And, if anything, that’s the sign of great writing.

The fact it works.

The issue isn’t that I’m expecting Z Nation to be as serious as The Walking Dead. They’re very different shows. But Z Nation demonstrated it could deliver complicated people, repeatedly. And there is just no complexity to the cannibals, which makes them incredibly difficult to believe.

It compounds that issue by making what the cannibals do so much more horrific. 

So there are two problems (lack of logical explanation for character actions, and extreme horror), and together they’re tough to get past.

If the people of Terminus had been cutting pieces off living victims we would at least have their history and empathy for what they’d been through to help us understand how they’d come to justify it. If Tobias’s people had been dispatching victims with mercy (a central concept of the whole show), the missing psychology might not have been quite so glaring. 

As presented, the horror is extreme and the people committing it are barely explained.

The combination gave me indigestion.

When Survival Becomes Appetite

Historically, people have eaten the bodies of those who were already dead to avoid starvation. Survivors of the Andes plane crash. Members of the Donner Party. The latter also gives us a particularly disturbing twist. William Foster shot and killed two Indigenous guides, Luis and Salvador, so the remaining survivors of the Forlorn Hope could eat their remains.

There’s a world of difference between eating somebody who was already dead, and deliberately killing somebody so you can consume them. 

Z Nation doesn’t even have the option of the relatively less disturbing version, because the science of the show makes it impossible. Eating someone who’s already died risks the zombie infection. That’s why Tobias’ group takes flesh from living people. And by the time we meet them, it’s well past Black Summer. Yet we aren’t given enough information to know if they have another food source. Everyone else is managing. Yet we’re expected to accept that this is simply how Tobias’ family have chosen to survive.

We’re never shown precisely who the people at Terminus ate first. If it was the people who brutalised them, and those people had been consuming their friends and family, well…

Fair.

I can see how they might rationalise that as survival. But the second they start luring innocents?

Nope.

Gareth later claims new arrivals were supposed to have a choice: join the cannibals, or feed them. We certainly don’t see that offer being made to Rick’s group, and it’s a pretty grotesque definition of choice anyway.

The problem for Gareth is that The Walking Dead’s cannibal arc continues after Terminus falls. Bob is abducted. He wakes to find his leg has been amputated and the survivors of Terminus are eating him.

Right in front of his face.

Gareth then discovers Bob has been bitten by a walker, leading to one of the most iconic lines in any TV show ever…

Tainted meat!!!!

And then there’s the question Bob leaves hanging: did the cannibals actually eat ‘tainted meat’? Everyone in The Walking Dead already carries whatever makes them reanimate after death, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to walkers bites. If it did, getting bitten wouldn’t do anything. So if getting bitten by a walker kills you and you come back as a walker, can eating flesh of someone that’s been bitten by a walker do the same?

The episodes never actually answer the question. Gareth’s people eat Bob at the end of Strangers. Bob’s bite is revealed at the beginning of Four Walls and a Roof, and Rick kills them later that same episode. We don’t see them live long enough to know whether eating Bob did anything. 

But Robert Kirkman answered the question elsewhere. In the Letter Hacks section of The Walking Dead comic, issue #134, he said eating flesh from a living person who’d been bitten would have no effect on the person eating it. So Bob’s revelation may have been hilarious and (presumably) a deeply satisfying blow for him to land, but it wouldn’t have doomed them. It did, however, give Bob the power to terrify them.

And entertain us for all eternity with that clip.

But before all of that, the two get to chatting, and Gareth claims he hates all the ugly business of hunting people. Yet now that they’ve lost their slaughterhouse, he seems to relish it. 

Gareth also doesn’t appear particularly concerned with mourning his many losses. None of them do.

Human meat has become an obsession.

In both stories, somewhere along the way, what started as a justification of survival became a way of life they enjoyed. 

Are the Real Monsters the Dead, or the Living?

The opening of Four Walls and a Roof cuts between humans eating human flesh and zombies. The noises each makes are similar, their mannerisms are similar, and the line between the living and the dead is well and truly blurred.

So what is the difference?

Zombies act on base instincts with no conscious thought.

Humans consciously choose cannibalism. 

The Walking Dead establishes early on that the reanimated don’t retain the consciousness we associate with being human. They’re not choosing to be monstrous, there’s no malice, no thought, no morality. They simply do what instinct forces them to do. And it never stops. We’ve seen zombies decomposed to the point of immobility, legless, absorbed by hedgerows, and still driven to try and reach a source of food. 

That’s just what they are.

The people of Terminus still have the capacity for choice. They’re doing consciously what the monsters do instinctively. First, for survival. Later, because they like it.

And our heroes also do some fairly questionable things in the name of survival.

Just how far is too far? 

What’s an acceptable level of violence when defending yourself and the people you love? That’s a major theme of The Walking Dead, and Terminus makes it blatant.

The Questionable Morality Of Carol Peletier

I’ve always found Carol fascinating. Okay, maybe not always. In season one she was utterly insufferable. But as she developed she gained a very strict moral compass. 

One that’s so skewed compared to that of the average person she’s fully capable of justifying some fairly bizarre things without much guilt.

In her view she’s still acting morally.

At the prison, Carol takes it upon herself to kill Karen and David because they’re both very sick and could potentially spread the illness to everyone else. She chooses to take two lives in an attempt to prevent more death. In her mind, they’re almost certainly going to die anyway, and anyone else contracting the illness would suffer the same fate.

The math just maths.

She doesn’t ask for other opinions. She makes the decision, acts, and tells nobody. 

The only thing she appears to regret (at least initially) is that it didn’t work. Everyone gets sick anyway.  

She was right about how dangerous the illness was. 

Whether that justified what she did to try and prevent it is a different question.

Then there’s loony Lizzie, who thinks zombies are friends and kills her sister so she can become one. Carol’s already had to watch her own daughter, Sophia, come shambling out of a barn as a walker. Now she’s responsible for two more girls, and one killed the other. Carol’s faced with a child she can’t safely leave with anybody else. They don’t have a psychiatrist, drugs, or any means of treating her. And how would even a professional begin to do so? 

There’s no precedent for treating zombie psychosis.

To Carol’s mind Lizzie is suffering in a state of untreatable psychosis. And there’s no hope she’ll ever recover.

So she shoots her.

It’s hideous. And entirely consistent with Carol’s moral compass. 

So she’s already making extraordinarily complicated decisions about what constitutes protecting her people, long before she ever reaches Terminus. And she’s fresh off the back of that tragedy when she discovers Rick and the others are being held at Terminus.

Naturally, she packs up her rocket launcher and bods off to get them.

Because…what else was she going to do?

Somebody took her people. 

What she does to get them back is just what it takes to get them out. If I were in that position, physically capable, and had the means, I can see myself doing exactly what Carol does to rescue my family. 

Take the zombies out of the equation and you’ve just got a group of people who have captured your friends and intend to murder them. Why wouldn’t you rescue them?

The army does it, special forces do it, regular people do it in hostage situations and similar. The zombies raise the stakes and give Carol a resource she wouldn’t otherwise have, but they’re really just one of the weapons she happens to have at her disposal.

When she confronts Mary, it’s a bit of a gut punch. Because Mary tells Carol she could have been one of them, and Carol actually appears to consider the possibility.

She’s not untouched by the things she’s done. There’s a glimpse of how close Carol’s own moral calculations can come to Mary’s, even while the reasons for their actions remain different.

Then Carol leaves Mary to be eaten alive by the walkers. 

Which, fair.

If zombies didn’t exist, how would she have dealt with Mary? 

Would shooting her in cold blood have been more merciful? The walkers make it more gruesome, but Carol isn’t literally ending Mary’s life. Does that make it more or less moral? 

Would we really expect her to save the woman who lured her friends in to be eaten?

I wouldn’t.

Would killing Mary herself have made her a better person, or more of a murderer? 

Questions like this keep me up at night, and it’s why I love Carol so much.

The complexity.

Rick is similarly complicated. After the escape from Terminus he wants to go back and kill everyone. The others talk him down. He walks away. He makes a choice not to pursue people who are no longer immediately threatening him. When he finds they’ve pursued them anyway, taken Bob, eaten his leg, and apparently don’t intend to stop, all bets are off.

Rick finally kills Gareth with the red-handled machete he promised to use. 

At the end of season three Carl killed a boy who was surrendering. He made a cold calculation that the boy might still pose a threat, and concluded it was better to end him. Rick and Hershel were horrified.

Post-Terminus?

He and the others execute men who are on their knees and begging for their lives.

The group’s edged closer to the brink. They’re making decisions earlier versions of themselves would have found horrifying.

There’s still a meaningful difference between what Rick and Carol do, and what the people at Terminus do. They hurt people actively trying to hurt them, people threatening their lives. You can argue self-defence, defence of others, or at the very least pre-emptive action against people you know intend serious harm.

The Terminus cannibals have no such justification. Not anymore. 

But that line blurs considerably later when Rick agrees to attack a Saviors’ outpost in exchange for supplies from Hilltop. They know how the Saviors have been exploiting Hilltop. Daryl, Abraham and Sasha already had a violent encounter with Saviors. So Rick isn’t sending his people in to kill complete innocents. 

But they’re still sneaking in and murdering people in their sleep in exchange for food.

There is one line they never cross though.

And it’s exactly the one the whole cannibal arc exists to examine.

They don’t eat people. 

They kill to protect themselves, then kill pre-emptively, and eventually kill people to secure food and supplies. 

But they never consume people, no matter how hungry they get. 

Dogs, that’s another matter. And trust me I’m still mad about that. But people?

Always off the menu.

In a world where the defining act of the monsters is eating human flesh? Where the central theme is who is more monstrous: the walkers or the extremes that normal people go to in the face of the undead?

Cannibalism is the only absolute litmus test of morality left.

A Life Worth Living, And The Cassandra Question

I promised we’d get back to Cassandra, and here we are. Because over on Z Nation, Addy and Cassandra are asking a related question: what makes life worth living in a world where survival is no longer much of a victory?

Addy records everything on a GoPro because she believes they’re living the final days of humanity and somebody ought to keep a record. Despite the horrors around her, she cares about something bigger than simple survival. She’s asking what it all means. And wondering how it will work out in the end. 

It causes a rift between her and Mack because she believes that if there’s even a chance Murphy is the key to a cure, they should take it. Mack, meanwhile, thinks the world’s gone to shit, there’s no getting it back, and the only thing that matters is staying alive together. 

Addy would rather die believing in a lie than live believing in nothing.

Cassandra, meanwhile, refuses to go back to Tobias’ compound no matter what his men threaten her with. Like Addy, life for life’s sake isn’t enough anymore. Cassandra won’t go back to how she was living, she’d rather die.

Both women are trying to decide what survival is worth, and what they’re prepared to sacrifice to save themselves.

When Addy’s taken to Tobias’ compound, she finds herself facing the life Cassandra already lived. And Cassandra, who refused to go back to that life to save herself, returns to save Addy.

Cassandra had so much potential to be such a complicated and wonderfully contradictory character. Instead, the show expects us to accept Cassandra’s history without showing enough of her choices to ever understand it. 

We know Tobias was abusive and dangerous. We see intimidation and confinement. By the time the ‘family’ exists as an enforcement group an individual woman may have little choice but comply.

That doesn’t explain how the group came to exist. Or what Cassandra’s part in the first decision actually was.

Cassandra lured men with sex so they could be eaten alive.

Was she coerced into it? Did she agree while starving and later regretted it? Did they threaten to eat her alive if she didn’t comply? 

We don’t know. That’s the point.

It could have been her fucking idea, for all we know. The writers never give us enough to know, one way or another, and that’s tragic. Because she could have been so fucking good. 

Like, Carol-level good.

Carol makes choices. Acknowledges she chose them. And is allowed to sit in the fucking discomfort of how questionable they were. The people around her react to what she did. They’re forced to decide if they can live with her choices, forgive her choices. She eventually has to reconcile all those choices with her own conscience and it’s brutal for her.

Cassandra being a trick-turning cannibal?

Never really mentioned again.

‘It’s A Chick Thing’ Isn’t Character Development

The worst part about Z Nation’s cannibal storyline is the exchange in which the men are told they don’t understand what Cassandra has been through. Someone asks if this is a ‘chick thing’, and the show seems to be saying that women can understand Cassandra, but men couldn’t possibly empathise, so don’t bother trying.

Honey, I’m a woman. I don’t get it.

Like, at all.

So if this is a chick thing, this chick ain’t here for it

Sorry, sister.

But what exactly are they getting at here? That women have no choice because they’re women? Of course sexually exploited women should be protected and rescued. Nobody’s questioning that. But there are other women at the compound forced to do exactly what Cassandra did, and they leave them there without thought. 

Nobody extends the same reasoning to the other women. So is it a chick thing or a ‘We happen to know this specific chick!’ thing?

Why is Cassandra worth saving when they apparently aren’t?

The Tragic Underuse Of Cassandra No Last Name

Cassandra is actually different. 

She escaped. Refused to return. Then gave herself up to save Addy. 

That’s not a ‘chick thing’. That’s a ‘hero thing’.

And I think Cassandra’s whole character might have been intended to say something considerably more poignant than what actually ended up on the screen. 

Something about the way women are portrayed in zombie fiction.

Cassandra is introduced as a scantily clad, slightly exotic-looking woman who’s inexplicably running around the apocalypse barely wearing any clothes. 

My immediate thought on sight of her? 

Rosita.

When we first meet Rosita in The Walking Dead she’s in tiny shorts, a little tank top, and her initial characterisation is literally being Abraham’s piece of ass. He says so. In words. And Eugene is then permitted to watch him bang her.

Rosita’s introduced as a sexual object, and the show plays it completely seriously. She eventually gets proper characterisation and her own arc, but for a while?

She’s just a piece of ass. 

Cassandra’s introduction seemed like Z Nation poking fun at that exact thing. Especially when you contrast her with 10K, who turns up wearing armour made from shoe soles to protect himself from zombie bites. 

He looks ridiculous. But at least he’s dressed for the occasion.

And he’s a sniper. He doesn’t even have to get close to the damn zombies, but somehow still has more sense than the girl showing most of her skin.

And this pair eventually develops such a complicated relationship the missed opportunity for commentary on the way women are dressed and used in these shows actually makes me weep.

Z Nation is well aware of The Walking Dead and thoroughly enjoys taking the piss out of it. Sometimes it’s overt (episode one is literally called Puppies and Kittens), other times it’s a bit subtler. But you can’t help but wonder if a show airing less than a year after Rosita’s ridiculous ass sauntered onto The Walking Dead wasn’t trying to make a point.

Bodies are always commodities in zombie narratives. Using women as sexual bait to obtain men’s bodies for consumption as meat? 

The parallel between sexual exploitation and the consumption of flesh writes itself.

It’s right there. 

I’ve no idea if the writers were trying to say something more profound here. Maybe I’m wrong. But Cassandra could have been exceptional. A little more thought to her choices and motivations, a little more insight into how she feels about what she did (or was forced to do), some kind of logic, ongoing consequences. It wouldn’t have taken much. 

But we got nothing.

And the ultimate irony is that, whatever the writers intended, Cassandra ends up little more than a sexualised body serving the narrative. 

What The Story Leaves Behind

One of the driving forces throughout season six of The Walking Dead is Carol’s internal struggle to reconcile the things she’s done with her conscience. She is repeatedly forced into violence to defend herself and others. She doesn’t question it for a long time, until suddenly she does, and it plunges her into a crisis. Terminus, Mary, and what she did there linger.

Rick also descends towards darker and more pragmatic decisions. Even Glenn, sweet beautiful Glenn, winds up killing people in their sleep. 

And we all know how that ended.

Their questionable morality and descent towards darker choices don’t vanish when the plot arc ends. They’re changed, they evolve, relationships suffer, there are consequences, they have internal struggles and crises.

You know, character growth.

Z Nation has never struggled to make its characters suffer and deal with the fallout. Which is why it’s so strange Cassandra’s history is just…dropped.

Mack and Addy carry something of the experience at Tobias’s compound forward. Their relationship is already built on different ideas of what it means to survive. What happened to Addy brings that into focus. It changes their whole relationship. It ultimately leads to tragedy. And Addy’s arc as a whole over the series is one of the strongest.

Cassandra gets short shrift.

She does get a bigger arc later. 

Sort of. 

When she’s dying from an infected leg wound at the end of season one, Murphy bites her, turning her into a human-zombie hybrid he can increasingly control. She has a complicated relationship with 10K, who tries to reach her even as her humanity is disappearing. But there’s no depth to any of it. Though there is evidence Cassandra’s creators and the actress who portrayed her saw more potential in her than we ever got on screen. Pisay Pao has said she wanted flashbacks exploring Cassandra’s life to add depth to her story. She later described a scene with Murphy that was edited in a way that removed some of Cassandra’s decision-making, taking away some of the agency she expected to see on screen.

So maybe there was material planned that never made it into the scripts, or did and was left on the cutting room floor. I guess we’ll never know. But the difference between the depth given to the characters surrounding the cannibalism narratives in both these shows really shows us the potential in this particular monster motif.

And the difference in how effective they are isn’t that Z Nation is too silly to take cannibalism seriously. 

It isn’t. 

They’ve given us a character whose body is being exploited for sex, whose past involves the literal consumption of other people, and whose later story involves losing control of her own body. 

That could have been one coherent, deeply uncomfortable character arc. 

For one reason or another, it never quite managed it.

The Walking Dead gives its cannibals a past we see on screen that helps us understand how they became this more monstrous version of the show’s real monsters. We don’t have to agree with their reasoning, we can follow it, empathise with their situation even while condemning their choices. 

And the choices Rick and Carol make in the cannibal episodes feed into their relationships, their guilt, and the huge, powerful, insanely compelling arcs both characters have for years later.

Z Nation managed to make Tobias’ group more horrific, but less effective because they’re impossible to understand. Cassandra should have been the exception, the one who gave us a nuanced look at these people. 

She was never given space to do it.

But stick the two shows and the two arcs and the two women at the heart of each next to each other? You can see why cannibalism works as more than just a gruesome addition to a horror show, particularly when the horror in the show is zombies. 

Cannibalism makes the true horror of a zombie apocalypse literal. Because in the face of so much monstrosity, humans have an alarming capacity to become more monstrous than the monsters. And, unlike the monsters, they do it while having conscious choice, agency, and an understanding of morality.