A deep cut on The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2 introduces a character first mentioned on The Walking Dead. Spoiler warning for TWD: World Beyond Season 2 Episode 3, “Exit Wounds.” At a Civic Republic Research Facility in Ithaca, New York, divergent thinker Hope Bennett (Alexa Mansour) is among the recruited assets working with the Civic Republic to give humanity a future — and potentially end the zombie apocalypse. Hope is a student of biologist Dr. Ellis (Allan Edwards), a colleague of her biochemist and geneticist father Dr. Leo Bennett (Joe Holt), who we learned is researching fungi to accelerate the decay of the dead and reclaim the planet.
It’s a mission that Eugene Porter (Josh McDermitt) claimed to be on in Seasons 4 and 5 of The Walking Dead. When we meet the mullet-haired and big-brained survivor, his traveling companions Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz) and Rosita Espinosa (Christian Serratos) are escorting Eugene to Washington, D.C., on a classified mission to “take out every last dead one of them.”
In The Walking Dead Season 5 Episode 1, “No Sanctuary,” Eugene purports to be a scientist who was part of a “10-person team at the Human Genome Project to weaponize diseases to fight weaponized diseases.”
“Pathogenic microorganisms with pathogenic microorganisms. Fire with fire,” Eugene said, claiming to be aware of “all the details behind fail-safe delivery systems to kill every living person on this planet.” If the group gets him to D.C., he can “flip the script” and eradicate walkers from the planet.
It’s on a bus ride to D.C. in Season 5 Episode 5, “Self Help,” that Eugene mentions Dr. Ellis: “The smartest man I ever met happened to love my hair. My old boss, T. Brooks Ellis, the director of the Human Genome Project. He said my hair made me look like, and I quote, ‘a fun guy.'”
Except Eugene is a liar. An admitted good liar, Eugene claimed to be a scientist knowing the ins-and-outs of the outbreak so people would get him to D.C., believing “that locale holds the strongest possibility for survival. And I wanted to survive.”
“I also lied about T. Brooks Ellis liking my hair. I do not know T. Brooks Ellis,” Eugene confesses. “But I did read one of his books, and he seemed like the type of guy that wouldn’t blink twice at a Tennessee Top Hat.” (A.K.A. a mullet.)
New episodes of The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2 premiere Sundays on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD and stay tuned to ComicBook for coverage all season long.