Warning! SPOILERS for The Walking Dead season 11, episode 6 ahead.
A terrifying enemy is introduced in The Walking Dead season 11: feral human cannibals. Currently in its final season, The Walking Dead is juggling several storylines between Maggie and Negan’s tense truce, Daryl’s time with the Reapers, and the slow introduction of the Commonwealth. In episode 6, The Walking Dead checks in with Connie and Virgil, a pair who were last seen only just meeting.
After escaping the Whisperers’ horde by hiding within it, Connie is separated from Magna, and her whereabouts are unknown for much of season 10. In season 10’s original finale, episode 16 “A Certain Doom,” Connie reappears and is seen making her way back home, only to collapses from exhaustion on the road there. She’s luckily discovered by Virgil, who is seeking out Michonne’s people in the hope he can move on with his life after having reconciled with his grief and resulting madness. Now, Connie and Virgil are both trying to reach Alexandria, but the journey there has been anything but easy.
The Walking Dead season 11, episode 6 “On the Inside,” finds Connie and Virgil on the run and seeking shelter in a seemingly abandoned house. While at first, it appears they’ve found a refuge, it’s quickly revealed to be a trap. The house is inhabited by a group of humans who’ve turned feral and hunt other humans for food. These feral people, it’s revealed, are who were chasing them, not just walkers, and it’s a tactic likely used before to lure unsuspecting passersby to the house. Taking advantage of the house’s size and its many hallways — not to mention moving within the walls themselves — the feral people are able to overwhelm anyone who enters and kill them. They nearly manage to do just that with Connie and Virgil, but thanks to some quick-thinking from Connie to unleash walkers into the house while disguising Virgil and herself with walker guts, they both survive while the feral people are killed.
Exactly how these people turned into feral cannibals is never fully explained, and seeing how they all appear to be killed by the episode’s end, this is likely the last viewers have seen of them. Still, there’s quite a bit that can be inferred from even this short appearance, and it may explain why the show hasn’t attempted such a terrifying threat before. The Walking Dead has certainly explored cannibalism in prior seasons, be it Terminus or the children groomed by Michonne’s friend, Jocelyn — but the feral nature of this group is unique. Even the Whisperers, who abandoned nearly all the trappings of civilized society, still interacted and spoke with each other like people.
These feral people, though, are by far the most animalistic people featured on The Walking Dead, with their hunched postures and near-complete lack of language (only one ever says anything, yelling “Hungry!” while attacking Virgil). This could mean they were very young children when the outbreak began, abandoned early on and never taught normal human behavior. The house’s windows are boarded up and that suggests it was fortified against zombies by someone, meaning that perhaps these children’s guardians left them at home while leaving to search for help or supplies. If the adults never returned, the children would be left to learn how to survive on their own, and with little guidance, would likely revert to their most basic instincts. It’s been 12 years in The Walk Dead timeline since the world fell apart — plenty of time for desperate kids to turn wild.
The way the feral people use the house’s secrets (namely, the hidden servant hallways) against their victims also suggests it’s the only home they’ve ever known. The scratched-out eyes in the many portraits hanging up imply a fear of being watched, as if they’re afraid of being punished, not unlike children who lash out. Altogether, the lifestyle of the feral people indicates they’ve had very little contact with civilization and have been left with only the drive to survive by any means necessary. This clearly led them to feast on any “food” that stumbled upon their house in search of a respite. And though season 11’s feral cannibals are the most far gone humans The Walking Dead has ever featured, given how long it’s been since the outbreak began, there’s a good chance they aren’t the only feral people out there.