The Walking Dead: World Beyond showrunner explains that stunning season 1 premiere episode cliffhanger. The latest expansion of the ever-widening Walking Dead universe, World Beyond premiered last weekend with an episode that set up the season’s central quest storyline while raising new and interesting questions about the purpose of the mysterious CRM group first introduced on the flagship show.
Fans of course got their first hint of the existence of some mysterious group operating in the outside world from the helicopter that would show up occasionally on The Walking Dead. The so-called “helicopter group” was then teased further on Fear the Walking Dead, and later took on even greater significance when a near-death Rick Grimes was snatched up by one of the choppers with help from Jadis. Since World Beyond arrived, fans have learned that CRM stands for Civic Republic Military, and that the group serves some kind of policing function for various communities that have come together in the years since the zombie apocalypse ruined civilization.
The first episode of World Beyond further elaborated on the CRM as expected, introducing one of its senior officials in Elizabeth (Julia Ormond), and showing the communities’ ambivalent attitude toward their heavily-armed apparent protectors (Hope outright stages a one person protest at their appearance, much to Iris’ chagrin). The episode then ended with a major development as the Campus Colony, a community located at a former university, was shown to be the site of a massacre with CRM as the apparent perpetrators. However, World Beyond showrunner Matt Negrete suggested in the show’s New York Comic Con 2020 panel that fans shouldn’t rush to judgment about CRM’s real nature. He said:
“It looks like some pretty effed up stuff has gone down there. We see some, like, piles of bodies, it looks like there’s just piles of empties lying around as well, and we just really don’t know. Y’know, it could be that they [CRM] just swooped in to try and save the day and they were too late? Maybe there was something else going on? It’s a little piece of the puzzle and we’ll be kind of filling in those pieces as the season and the series goes on. But we will get answers to that, for sure. It’s gonna play a big part in us figuring out who this organization is and what they want and what their goals are.”
Adding to the confusion about CRM’s role in the massacre is the fact that Elizabeth was previously seen giving information to Hope and Iris about the location of their father, encouraging the two young women to leave on their mission to New York. It certainly seems that Elizabeth deliberately wanted to get the two girls out of the way, perhaps to protect them from something bad she knew was coming. At the very least, Elizabeth going out of her way to help the sisters seems shady and weird (she was in fact drunk on Hope’s home made champagne during her last meeting with them).
If CRM were in fact responsible for killing a bunch of people at one of the colonies, that would certainly suggest they are anything but protectors. But the presence of empties at the same massacre suggests, as Negrete puts forth, that zombies were already over-running the community when CRM arrived and they were simply too late to prevent a lot of death. For now, The Walking Dead: World Beyond is keeping CRM and their motives mysterious, which presumably makes them more compelling (as long as the ambiguity doesn’t become simply frustrating). Fan curiosity about the group is of course fueled by the presumption that they will figure heavily in the whole future of the TWD universe, especially the Rick Grimes movie that is still coming (some day).
