Earlier this month, I wrote an article titled We Need to Talk About the Pathology of the Zombie Virus on “The Walking Dead,” spurred on by the recent storyline of the Saviors dipping their weapons in infected zombie blood as a way to intentionally pass the virus to their enemies. Mind you, it makes total sense that infected blood would infect a healthy human, but isn’t everyone alive in the show’s world… already infected? And why did nobody ever get infected from playing around with zombie blood and guts before?
The overall “rules” of the AMC series’ zombie virus aren’t all that clear, but we gather that the gist is the following. Yes, every living human in the show’s world is already infected with a dormant form of the virus that triggers when they die, turning them into a zombie no matter how they actually meet their demise. When infected blood is introduced into their bloodstream while they’re alive, however, that infection is activated/exasperated, turning them into a zombie within hours. Therefore, being stabbed with a zombie blood-coated weapon has essentially the same effect as being directly bitten by an actual zombie. Still though, I again ask… why did nobody ever get infected from playing around with zombie blood and guts in the past?
The perfect man to ask these questions is “The Walking Dead” actor Jason Douglas, whose Tobin just became a zombie after being stabbed with a bloody weapon. And Huffington Post just got some answers from Douglas, asking those very questions.
“I think what we have to accept about the convention of this show … we’re all infected anyway, but that infection can accelerate if we are really bitten or whatever in a way that really gets that into our system, and so a deep cut versus a scratch is gonna make a difference about how infected we get,” Douglas explained to the site.
He continued, “I’m sort of with you, if you’re going to be completely covered in blood, is there a chance that that infection gets into your system? What about if you already have a cut and then you cover yourself in the blood? … I think there’s so much we don’t know. I mean, we’ve already accepted the convention that the dead can come back to life and eat people, so I think we have to remember that that’s where we are, and I don’t think we can expect everything to be just so.”
“I think we have to accept that this is where we are and, frankly, just the aggressive way that the Saviors are using the walkers’ blood to really get in and infect people.”
Indeed, we’ll just have to accept the evolving rules as they’re presented.
