The Walking Dead season 8 debate: Why no more talk of a cure?

We’re getting close to The Walking Dead season 8 finale, and in turn it feels as though we’re getting somewhat close to the end of the road for the series on AMC as a whole (at least we feel that it’s getting around time to wrap it up). With that of course comes questions, and one of the biggest ones that we’ve got at the moment is simply this: Why isn’t there more talk of a cure for the zombie virus? Why aren’t there more people searching for it?

We aren’t saying that there needs to be a cure, but with the world being as big as it is, or even just North America being so huge we would’ve thought that there would have been more mention of this than just season 1 and Eugene’s lies. Any time that there is a health crisis humans instinctively want to find a way to stop it or cure it in some way, but in the world of the Walking Dead it seems that if the CDC can’t fix it then there’s no one else on earth that can do anything so oh well guess we’re all just going to die. While the CDC obviously had the brilliant minds and the resources to work on this, they are not the only brilliant minds in North America. Things may not be the same now that this walker plague has pretty much wiped out most of the population, but there are still brilliant minds out there because if Eugene is the last brilliant scientific mind on the planet then they really are up the creek.

While we know that this show isn’t about finding a cure (and Robert Kirkman has said he doesn’t want it to be about that), we are just starting to have a hard time buying into the fact that besides the lie Eugene was peddling, that no one they’ve come across in their journey has even brought up that they are hopeful that someone might be able to fix this or that there are no groups of people that have decided to start to just wipe out the walkers and eradicate the problem all together. They don’t need to find a cure, but wouldn’t people be hopeful for one?

We know that anytime such a question is raised there are a few objections that come up, so let’s go ahead and touch on those.

1. Yes, the CDC was around looking into it in the first season – While they don’t seem to be a factor anymore, it really feels naive to assume that there is nobody else out there in this world at all who is looking for a way to make this problem go away. Even if they don’t have the sort of tools or research materials to put a big dent in it, doesn’t it make sense that there would be some out there trying or at least looking for those that are trying?

2. Yes, Eugene did reference having a cure – We feel like this character’s existence, at least in the early stage of the show, was meant to represent that there are some people out there still thinking about the cure. Yet, the problem with Eugene was that he never seriously thinking about the cure at all. He was just using that as a crutch in order to ensure his own survival. Good on him for working what he had at the time, but he seems to have tainted perceptions around a cure as a result, at least when it comes to Rick’s group.

3. Yes, the group is now preoccupied with Negan – Yet, wouldn’t it make sense for someone in the Saviors to be working on an idea? Think about it this way: Negan loves power. With that, if he could find a way to cure the zombie virus he, in turn, would be more powerful than anyone else out there. He would have leverage. It feels like he should’ve had some grunt somewhere working on something since he did have a few medical minded people in the group.

Related – Be sure to see a preview for the next The Walking Dead

If The Walking Dead wants to better establish different perspectives on its unique world entering the upcoming ninth season, it feels like this is something that it really should consider. Even if the zombies are not cured, at least introducing the idea of it offers hope which is something that is a strong part of the human spirit. While humans have not faced a zombie apocalypses in real life we have faced plagues, cancer, HIV, measles, small pox and all kinds of other horrific problems. Heck the influenza pandemic in 1918 was said to have kill  20 -40 million people. Part of the problem with this series right now is, quite simply, that there is no one resolution to look forward to.

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