The Walking Dead: Who is Carving All The 'W's?

With the Season 5 finale of The Walking Dead only days away, fans of the show are on the edges of their seats. With so much chaos going on in the current state of the show, even the 90 minutes that the finale has been allotted doesn’t seem like enough time to wrap up everything that’s going on. It seems to be an episode that’s going to be explosive from start to finish, and while I don’t know what exactly is going to happen, I do have a few ideas.

First of all, we’re most likely going to find out what the deal is with the ‘W’ carvings we’ve been seeing on various walkers and corpses. Whoever is doing this is getting closer to Alexandria and they’re certainly not going to leave Deanna’s peaceful little community alone. So, who are they? The comic book series has offered us some clues as to who these people are (warning: COMIC SPOILERS below).

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Is it Negan and the Saviors? I previously theorized that Negan may be showing up by the end of the season, but at this point I now realize it’s much too early for him. As well, hacking up every survivor ruthlessly isn’t exactly Negan’s style. He much prefers to keep people alive so they can provide provisions for his Saviors, so I think it’s extremely unlikely that the culprit will turn out to be him. Without a doubt, though, we’ll be seeing Negan and Lucille in Season 6, and I’m 100% sure of that.

Could Morgan be the one killing people and carving ‘W’ into their foreheads? Maybe it’s actually not a ‘W’, but an upside-down ‘M’? Perhaps Mr. Jones is still as batshit-crazy as when we saw him in Season 3, and killing the people he comes across is part of his plan to “clear” the new world. I suppose that is certainly a theory that some fans out there have, but I’d say that it’s even less likely than if it were Negan. We’ve seen Morgan in teaser videos earlier in the season, and he seemed like he had finally found his marbles. I think there’s a good chance he’ll show up in the finale, perhaps getting himself killed in the process, but I’d be completely shocked if he had anything to do with these murders.

Is there a serial killer in our midst? The TV series skipped over the subplot of a serial killer named Thomas, who was one of the convicts the group encountered all the way back at the prison. He manages to kill two of Hershel’s daughters and slice up Andrea’s face before getting killed in an intriguing storyline, and it would have been interesting if something similar happened on the TV series. It’s not too late to incorporate a similar storyline, instead placing it in Alexandria. However, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a lone killer could be sneaking around and hacking up all these other survivors into pieces, unless it was someone like Jason Voorhees.

The most popular theory, and the one that I’m inclined to agree with, is that these are the workings of a gang that refers to themselves as the “Wolves.” The name comes from graffiti we’ve seen earlier this season hinting that wolves are “not far,” and that would also explain the ‘W’ marks we’ve been seeing. It could be a group of murderous scavengers who enjoy leaving their mark wherever they go, and they’re not going to be able to resist an attack on a peaceful, gated community like Alexandria. If this is the case, then Deanna needs to thank her lucky stars for Rick and the others showing up when they did, as the native Alexandrians don’t seem to be nearly well-enough prepared to handle an attack of this magnitude.

In any case, we’re going to find out one way or another on The Walking Dead this Sunday night on AMC, at 9/8c.

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The Walking Dead: Who is Carving All The ‘W’s?

By Jeremy Dick | Mar 26, 2015