The Walking Dead’s Accidental Season 3 Whisperer Tease Explained

The Walking Dead teased the arrival of the Whisperers as early as season 3, but not necessarily on purpose. Currently at the end of its tenth run, The Walking Dead’s main antagonists right now are the deceptively pleasant-sounding Whisperers. These foes clad themselves in the skins of defeated zombies and sneak among the undead, living primitively in the wild. Highly territorial, The Whisperers take exception to residents of Alexandria and Hilltop encroaching upon their land and became increasingly aggressive until the good guys can take no more. Carol assigns Negan to kill the Whisperers’ leader Alpha, and this provokes bloody retribution. Hilltop is destroyed and Alexandria comes under attack shortly after.

Of course, The Whisperers are just the latest in a long lineage of Walking Dead villains that includes Woodbury, The Saviors and some short-lived cannibals, but it’s fair to say that readers of Robert Kirkman’s original Walking Dead comic books were especially looking forward to seeing the horror-influenced Whisperers in live-action. This excitement resulted in a few false alarms ahead of the Whisperers’ actual TV debut in season 9. For years, any zombie that showed even a little too much humanity was falsely accused of being a potential Whisperer in disguise. One alleged Whisperer tease, however, caught fans’ imaginations in a big way.

In The Walking Dead season 3’s “Clear,” Rick meets Morgan for the first time since season 1. Tragically, Morgan has lost his son Duane during this time, and the death has sent Morgan into an unstable, paranoid breakdown; scribbling on walls, shouting nonsense, etc. Viewers largely dismissed Morgan’s ramblings as the delusions of deeply damaged individual, but when revisiting the episode sometime later, one line sticks out. Morgan claims to see “people wearing dead people’s faces” and Rick has to convince Morgan he isn’t wearing a face of the dead.

Some theorize that a grief-stricken Morgan actually encountered The Whisperers around this time but due to his paranoid, depressed state of mind, no one took the sightings seriously, even Morgan himself. Coincidentally or otherwise, Morgan leaves Alexandria before The Whisperers arrive, so never has the opportunity to see that his hallucinations might’ve been real after all. Purely in narrative terms, this Morgan line does work as foreshadowing for the arrival of The Whisperers. Although there’s no iron-clad confirmation, the allusion to bad people wearing the faces of the dead might now be seen as The Walking Dead‘s first mention of The Whisperers.

However, this almost certainly wasn’t what the series intended. “Clear” aired in March 2013, but The Whisperers didn’t make their comic debut until August 2014, over a year later. While it’s possible Robert Kirkman tipped-off Scott M. Gimple (“Clear” writer and Walking Dead producer) that he was planning to introduce skin-wearing villains to the comics, Gimple himself has confirmed the connection is just a happy accident, albeit one that could retroactively take on a new meaning if fans viewed it as such. After Duane’s demise, Morgan begins seeing everyone as dead men walking – everyone just waiting to die. This is what the “wearing dead people’s faces” line refers to, rather than hinting towards the existence of the Whisperers.

There’s also a possible timeline discrepancy between Duane’s death, which occurs less than a year after the start of the outbreak, and the formation of The Whisperers, who are born when Alpha and Lydia meet Beta. Lydia is 16 in The Walking Dead season 9, and appears to be around 9 when first meeting Beta, putting the flashback approximately 7 years prior. Although The Walking Dead is never precise in its chronology, the time skip after Rick’s death eats up 6 years by itself, so it’s highly debatable as to whether the Whisperers would’ve been around during the events of The Walking Dead season 3.

The Walking Dead season 10 is currently on hiatus.

About The Author

Craig Elvy
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Craig first began contributing to Screen Rant in 2016, several years after graduating college, and has been ranting ever since, mostly to himself in a darkened room. Having previously written for various sports and music outlets, Craig’s interest soon turned to TV and film, where a steady upbringing of science fiction and comic books finally came into its own.
Craig has previously been published on sites such as Den of Geek, and after many coffee-drenched hours hunched over a laptop, part-time evening work eventually turned into a full-time career covering everything from the zombie apocalypse to the Starship Enterprise via the TARDIS.

Since joining the Screen Rant fold, Craig has been involved in breaking news stories and mildly controversial ranking lists, but now works predominantly as a features writer.
Jim Carrey is Craig’s top acting pick and favorite topics include superheroes, anime and the unrecognized genius of the High School Musical trilogy.

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