It’s always an exciting time when we encounter a brand new faction of survivors in The Walking Dead. The series invariably becomes consumed by questions like, “Can these new faces be trusted?” and “How high will the body count grow by the time this story is finished?”. That same appeal is currently driving “New World Order.” After making baby steps towards restoring human civilization, our heroes are learning just how much further other intrepid survivors have traveled.
There’s a welcome sense of ambiguity to this conflict. More to the point, it’s hard to gauge just how much of a conflict there actually is at the moment. Perhaps the Commonwealth is another Woodbury in the making, or perhaps this massive pocket of normalcy in a sea of the undead really is the utopia it’s made out to be. Thus, the narrative is driven by equal parts unease and an optimistic hope that life may finally start to improve again.