Walking Dead World Beyonds Biggest Reveal Shows The Spinoffs Limitations

The Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2 makes a big revelation about the CRM's secret project, and it's indicative of the spinoff's limitations.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond’s biggest reveal about the CRM is indicative of the spinoff’s limitations. All season, Hope (Alexa Mansour) and her allies have uncovered all sorts of new details about the mysterious organization that abducted Rick Grimes. The main story of season 2 being set at the Civic Republic Research Facility has yielded quite a few important discoveries about the CRM and their goals in The Walking Dead universe.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2, episode 7, titled “Blood and Lies”, dropped its biggest reveal yet when Dr. Lyla Belshaw (Natalie Gold) was forced to spill everything about her work for the CRM to Hope and Iris (Aliyah Royale) in an effort to save Leo (Joe Holt). Through Dr. Belshaw, Hope and Iris found out the truth about Project Votus, which involved experimenting on live humans to see how it long it takes for them to reanimate. Dr. Belshaw attempted to justify their actions by saying that “most” had already been bitten, but Iris was quick to note that this meant that at least some must have been murdered by the CRM for the sake of science.

Considering that it was already known that the CRM killed thousands of people when they wiped out the Campus Colony and the Omaha settlements, the villains working on something like Project Votus isn’t all that surprising. Project Votus perfect fits with the CRM’s nefarious activities and scientific ambitions, which is partially why the episode’s big reveal doesn’t carry a lot of weight and felt a bit anticlimactic. This being treated as one of the CRM’s biggest secrets speaks to the idea that there’s only so much The Walking Dead: World Beyond can do when it comes to The Walking Dead universe’s mythology.

Through the main show, The Walking Dead established most of the rules that the shows adhere to in regards to walkers, spreading of the virus, and how zombie infection works. It hasn’t really left much room for World Beyond to expand on them in any meaningful way. Fear the Walking Dead created its own rules in season 7 with its nuclear apocalypse, but in the case of World Beyond, on the other hand, there’s a limit on what it can offer. The spinoff previously raised the possibility of a zombie cure, but given that’s it’s a long-term and arguably unrealistic goal, it’s not something that any of the characters are likely to ever take seriously.

Plus, it was proven that despite Dr. Belshaw’s claims, her work on the CRM's Project Votus wasn’t even as groundbreaking as she made it seem. Her test subject didn’t make it a full eight hours, and as Jadis (Pollyanne McIntosh) pointed out, it would have been an interesting discovery but not necessarily a gamechanger, given that reanimation does sometimes take a few hours. So while the CRM may continue working on such things, a plan with truly shocking ramifications or any actual changes to The Walking Dead mythos is unlikely to happen in The Walking Dead: World Beyond.