SPOILERS: A World Beyond and the Walking Dead Franchise
In its second spinoff, the show tells its typical story in a more condensed manner, with a younger cast, and in a new context. It's the perfect stand-alone.
What have I been watching lately? Literally the entire The Walking Dead franchise. And if you, too, are waiting for the second half of the final season of AMC’s original zombie show, you should add The Walking Dead: World Beyond to your watch list. But you should also add World Beyond even if you haven’t seen any of the original show and don’t plan on seeing any of it, because the two-season spinoff can stand on its own.
World Beyond, the second spinoff of the original TWD program, is just 20 episodes long. But in that time the show’s writers give us a bunch of new characters, new backstories, and even a new setting—10 years after the onset of the zombie apocalypse that started it all. The main characters—sisters Iris and Hope, and their friends Elton and Silas—are all kids, living in a colony at a repurposed university campus outside of Omaha. All of them are old enough to remember the time before they had to worry about zombies, and before the military bombed cities across the country to try to contain the already fully spread virus causing people to reanimate. But they also live at the so-called Campus Colony, where they’ve been going to school, living with families and other kids, and not having to interact with the dead on a day-to-day basis like in the other shows.
But the thing about World Beyond, as with both TWD and its first spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, is that the zombies only ever serve as a sort of backdrop for the drama of human behavior and interaction that plays out in this new world. From the start that was one of the most promising indicators about the show—the zombies are always the same. They don’t level up, there’s no super-zombie or boss level zombie or anything. They don’t have any sort of agenda or willpower, unfortunately the only thing they do is seek out stuff to eat. Not great for the humans, but it turns out the zombies are almost always the least of their worries.
What World Beyond and the rest of the franchise share is that the greatest conflicts facing its protagonists are not the walking dead themselves, but the beliefs of the other people in their world about what must be done to survive. It’s also usually a question of what the characters believe about human nature, or their own nature, and how that justifies the things they might do to or for the other people who are also fighting to survive. In some cases (okay, several cases) that means some sort of totalitarian dictator villain, but in others its the protagonists struggling with how to deal with the fact that some people lose track of their humanity in the fight to survive. And really that’s just as true for them as it is for everyone else—the belief that to some extent, any extent at all really, there isn’t enough to go around and we have to pick and choose who to support and who has to fend for themselves.
In TWD, there are countless villains. No one will ever forget Negan, the ruthless man who builds an empire through violently enforced feudalism from other colonies. You don’t watch that show without remembering him and Lucille, his bloody baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Or the man called Pope, who led a team of mercenaries that robbed and killed anyone they needed to, and then some more just because. What they both had in common wasn’t just their proclivity for violence, it was a mindset that said when the world went to hell there were no longer any protections for anybody, and whoever could survive were the ones who deserved to do so.
But the protagonists of the TWD universe have never been too far off either as far as that mindset goes. At least not too many of them—shoutout to Dale and Carl and Rick and the rest of the homies in TWD who learn (and then Nick and Alicia and Morgan and Kim in FtWD). But even the most sympathetic characters always struggle with this problem, which is the point! It turns out that it’s hard to figure out what the right thing to do is! Really, you’d be disappointed with a show that just let everyone work things out smoothly, right?
That’s why World Beyond is a faithful addition to the series canon, not just in its setting and its plot but in the spirit of its stories. It’s about people who all want to think that they’re doing the right thing, and who have to figure out how to work things out with another group of people who feel the same way. In the TWD universe, it turns out that means a lot of people end up dying in the process, but it’s not like that’s so far off from reality anyways.
Oh, also, Hal Cumpston.
Hal is an absolute weapon, and we were teased with a few scenes of him as the hallucinated ghost of Zach Marconi in Nine Perfect Strangers (also definitely worth watching), but this is so much more room for him to do his thing. To date, World Beyond is his most extensive work as an actor, although he also co-wrote, co-produced, and starred in Bilched with two high school friends in 2018. He’s also set to appear alongside Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, and Bill Murray in the upcoming Apple TV+ war drama The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which is based a memoir about a veteran in 1967 who created a group to sneak into Vietnam to deliver messages of support, and beer, to their friends in combat. I have no idea who Hal is playing, but I don’t even care.
World Beyond was Hal’s first US audition, which he got after his film, Bilched, won multiple awards at the 2019 Chelsea Film Festival for independent filmmakers. His role as Silas is wonderful—a young man “without a malicious bone in his body,” according to Hal. His character is soft spoken and kind, but doesn’t have the trust of everyone despite his best intentions. As Hal said in an interview with a TWD fan site, “It is a fantastic resource as an actor that within every scene, he doesn’t feel comfortable and is constantly in a state of tension.” And he’s right. Silas is almost always on edge, and worried about whether people are scared of him despite his big heart.
Anyways, Hal is awesome, and so is this show. It’s self-contained but can also be enjoyed by a fan of the original series interested in learning more about the mysterious Civil Republic and their military, known as the CRM. There is but one crossover, the inimitable Pollyanna McIntosh as Jadis Stokes, but you don’t need to know anything about her old character in order to follow along when she shows up. Alexa Mansour and Aliyah Royale are excellent as Hope and Iris, a pair of equally bright but very different siblings whose father has gone off to assist in scientific research being done at the Civil Republic. Hal, I’ve already said more than enough about. And Nicolas Cantu rounds out the squad as Elton, an adorable and sincere boy who just wants to learn more about the world and look out for his friends when they need his help. What more could you ask for.
We also get legend Julia Ormond as the lead antagonist, a high-ranking official in the CRM who always seems to have one more layer of deception that hasn’t been discovered yet. There’s also Natalie Gold—who some will recognize from her role as Succession’s Rava—as Dr. Lyla Bellshaw, one of the researchers working with the girls’ father at the Civil Republic facility. Honorable mention goes to Nico Tortorella and Annet Mahendru, who play the two adults most directly looking out for the welfare of the children, but the stars of the show are the kids.
The idea that children are always bound to see things slightly differently those who are older and more experienced, who may have been worn down by the world or just have different priorities because of their age is something that has always been true of TWD stories. It’s been present in TWD with Carl, Judith, Henry, Lydia and others, and again in FtWD with Nick and Alicia and plenty more. But in the more limited time frame and overall length than its peers, World Beyond does an excellent job of staying true to that sensibility while still managing to tell a new, compelling story.
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