The following contains spoilers for Tales of the Walking Dead Season 1, Episode 3, "Dee," which aired Sunday, Aug. 28 on AMC.
Coming into the third episode of Tales of the Walking Dead, the marketed story feels entirely unnecessary. In this installment of the anthology series, an original Walking Dead character returns: Alpha is now "Dee," a woman willing to do anything to protect her child. The end of the plot makes a pretty big reveal about her origins, but it contradicts another part of her backstory.
The Walking Dead gave Alpha/Dee two backstories -- one portraying her descent into "survival over anything" mode and another where she met Beta and seemingly started the Whisperers. After these two flashbacks, Alpha and the Whisperers' story should have been done. Tales of the Walking Dead hasn't had enough though, and a shocking detail proves the franchise will wring out any character at the expense of its own canon.
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The Walking Dead Season 10, Episode 2, "We Are the End of the World," saw Alpha and her daughter Lydia meeting Beta in a rehabilitation center a few years into the outbreak. None of them had adopted the skill of wearing the dead's skin to blend in with walkers, which is the signature Whisperer trait. Alpha did suggest to Beta near the end that he wear his dead best friend's mask, which many assumed is where the Whisperers originated. But Tales of the Walking Dead reveals that wearing the skin of the dead was never Alpha's idea. In fact, she wasn't even the first Whisperer.
In the best scene of the entire series, Dee must contemplate whether to kill Lydia. The little girl isn't prepared for the apocalypse, reinforcing that adults are more fit than kids in these situations. But in Lydia's defense, she's being raised by a mother whose love language is harsh and selfish. When she swears that she's hearing fairies talking to her in the forest, Dee believes that Lydia isn't even living in the real world. Before she kills Lydia, Dee begins to hear the "fairy" voices too. Turns out, there were no fairies (though it wouldn't be shocking if Tales of the Walking Dead tried to pull off fairies existing after the previous time-melding episode). The whispers came from a group of people who wear the skin of the dead -- the leader of whom knocks Dee out.
The leader notably has blonde hair, seen when she takes off her mask. In the final scene that takes place some time later, Dee talks to a mask with blonde hair, telling it that she wouldn't have become Alpha without her. Alpha's signature mask is the skin of the former Whisperer leader, who may very well be the first Whisperer. The revelation is exciting and all, but now Alpha's backstory in Season 10 makes no sense. Season 10's flashback takes place after she meets the first Whisperers... so why wasn't she a Whisperer when she met Beta?
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One possibility is that Dee wanted to be the new Alpha, but didn't have the strength for it. It doesn't fit her character to leave the Whisperers for anything other than firepower, since she was dedicated to the Whisperer cause. When she recruited Beta, an unquestionably intimidating figure, she had someone to fight for her. This idea also lines up with her determination to talk to a reclusive Beta in the flashback. The underlying problem with this theory is that Dee is still not wearing a Whisperer mask -- a practice she surely would've adopted by then.
While contradicting the television series' canon, Dee's recruitment to the Whisperers is actually accurate to the comics. Her comic book counterpart suggests that she joined the Whisperers and had to fight for her place as their leader. Her backstory was told through word of mouth, which never complicated the details of her life.
The problem that arose when Tales of the Walking Dead chose to tell Alpha's backstory for the third time is that it added an unneeded complication. If this one small detail about the Whisperers had been left out of the script, confusion wouldn't be an issue. In fact, it would've made the episode better by letting Tales of the Walking Dead step out from The Walking Dead's overwhelming shadow -- no matter how alluring the original Whisperer reveal was.
New episodes of Tales of the Walking Dead air every Sunday at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on AMC and stream a week early on AMC+.