Some thoughts about Maggie and Georgie and The Reapers

Spoilers through first three episodes of 10C and last season of Fear.

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There are really only two reasons for The Reapers to be following groups like Maggie's around and destroying their communities. The first reason is the less likely one: that they have a belief system that's something of a variant of The Whisperers. They don't believe that society should be rebuilt, even in primitive ways. Unlike The Whisperers, who more or less were trying to live like animals or at least said that was their whole thing, The Reapers do easily use pretty high-end gear and weaponry. They also don't seem to want to tell anyone what it is they are doing. People with philosophies like those of Alpha couldn't find enough people to monologue to about how the dead were the future, etc, etc.. So, it's more likely the second reason.

The second reason for The Reapers to be following around Maggie's group is for the strategic benefit of a larger group. This fits more in line with what we've seen of them. They react to being captured by killing themselves, which implies that Reaper soldiers feel a greater purpose-- a connection to a larger group. They are armed to the teeth and have no shortage of ammo. They also work, as far as we've seen, alone, which is fairly astounding when you consider that even though these people (the one we officially met and, if you want to count them in, Leah and Mays) are very capable people, it also is just kind of stupid to do anything alone in the zombie world. But if you were a larger group who basically didn't care that much about these people other than to use them for protection, you would be okay with losing a couple here and there in the name of keeping your home base free of pesky new people who might cause trouble. (This also is a factor of the idea that this group must be very large and therefore can view people as capable at survival and warfare as The Reapers are as expendable.)

It's also worth mentioning that if The Reapers are at all connected to the group trying to destroy the communities over on Fear-- and when Virginia caught one of them, it was exactly like the scene with Maggie on TWD-- then we are looking at a group of people that are spread out across the country and have been doing this for years. It's likely that this is connected to CRM more than it is to The Commonwealth but, at this point, it probably could be either, especially if the group on Fear is a parallel to The Reapers and not The Reapers themselves.

What strikes me as odd is how The Reapers kept finding Maggie. Obviously, if you were wanting to destroy groups that had built anything significant, Georgie and her people would be a primary target for you. They know what they are doing and if they become successful, they could easily create communities to overtake the ones The Reapers are protecting. But Maggie's story of what happened to her people implies to me that there's a far bigger danger around her than she realizes. Maggie tells of how the group would run with whatever survivors there were, if any, from place to place but The Reapers kept finding them. They even found Maggie when she took Hershel to her family's old beach house. There's only two possible explanations for this:

1. Maggie, being a high-profile member of Georgie's group, is known to The Reapers and the community they protect enough that if any Reaper sees her, they know to immediately go after her because of what she's capable of building. This would imply massive infrastructure and advanced technology on the part of the community that's being protected because it involves dissemination of Maggie's picture on a large scale but we've seen that CRM could do this. Or...
2. There's a mole in Maggie's group. One of the only ways that The Reapers could keep finding Maggie is if someone from her team is actually a plant for The Reapers.

Either way, these people are now seeing Maggie about to rebuild Alexandria and that puts the whole home base of the show in peril. The fact that Alexandria was already trashed by The Whisperers is probably the only thing keeping The Reapers from attacking right away, buying the main characters time to get on their feet and assess the threat.

As for why the groups are allowed to build something before it's destroyed by The Reapers.. the people behind The Reapers believe that it's better to let people feel like they have hope and are making progress and see if they develop anything of value before deciding whether or not to annex or destroy (and it's almost always destroy). The point is that it's easier to control large groups of people if you aren't just killing everyone in sight because, one day, you'll miss someone who will find another group and tell them about you and those groups could get larger and pose an actual threat. Best to be more stealth about it, is the philosophy of The Reapers and their people. Also, that all sounds more CRM to me and I think that's the point. The main group is going to get involved with The Commonwealth more in S11, for better or worse. The alliance is going to be tricky but maybe necessary when they realize that the threat they're up against with The Reapers is a community much more advanced and larger than even The Commonwealth. Without The Commonwealth, they won't have a prayer (which is likely how our main characters are going to end up running The Commonwealth by the end of the season.) All of this then leads into the whole unified TWD universe plot of CRM-- connecting together Fear and World Beyond and Rick's story to the main plot.

Submitted March 31, 2021 at 06:24PM by maryssmith https://ift.tt/3ueXEj9