Spoilers for the Season 11 premiere of The Walking Dead.
If you were in a zombie apocalypse, a dark, scary Metro tunnel might not seem like the most logical place to go.
But that's where the motley crew of survivors in The Walking Dead found themselves in the final season's premiere last night.
First, some background. The Walking Dead premiered more than 10 years ago and focused on a group of people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse in Atlanta. The show had critical and rating success for years — peaking at around 14 million viewers per episode in Season 5 — before the quality and ratings took a nosedive. Season 10's finale, for example, saw 2.73 million viewers.
Article continues belowAnyway, in later seasons they make their way up north to a series of safe zones near what is supposed to be near Alexandria, Va.
Fast forward to Sunday's episode, "Acheron: Part I." The group finds themselves leaving Alexandria in a driving storm on a supply run to an outpost called "Meridian" near Bethesda, which is described as a six-hour walk.
They take shelter in a made-up Yellow Line station called "Pyron" with a terminus station of Shady Grove (which is actually on the Red Line, but whatever). The show's prop department did, however, nail the look of the station signage.
They decide that going through the tunnels is better a choice than stopping and waiting out the storm. Negan, the onetime villain who is trying to earn the group's trust after a few seasons in their jail, says they need to take "Yellow Line north. Switch to Blue at Reagan National and we hop the Red to Bethesda."
He used to live in Virginia and is acting as a guide for D.C., but are those directions right?
TV shows and movies have done a pretty good job making the city completely unrecognizable in recent years. Last year, Wonder Woman 1984 gave the District a 1980s makeover; and before that, The Handmaid's Tale imagined a post-apocalyptic National Mall back in 2019. And remember when Amazon Prime's Jack Ryan got his morning commute so drastically wrong?
But back to Negan's directions. Let's map it for ourselves:
While there is no Pyron station, I'm assuming in our fictional world there's a new stop south of Huntington or it's replacing a current Yellow Line station in Alexandria. And Negan should know that you don't really "transfer" from the Yellow Line to Blue Line at Reagan. You'd do that at Pentagon where the tunnels split.
At one point we see them exit at an "East Market" station, which if it's supposed to be Eastern Market would be VERY FAR from Bethesda.
Anyway, it's a zombie show, so of course, the dead come after them in the tunnel, forcing our heroes to board a Metro train (a fill-in replacement for a real WMATA train) filled with zombies. As you might expect, one of the group gets stuck in a train car, where he's devoured by the walkers.
Then there's some exploring of tunnels where people tried to live during the apocalypse. (There are some nods to dystopian class struggle here, too: a body of a man with a suitcase filled with wads of cash handcuffed to his arm, and then another shot of a $100 bill being used as a piece of paper to write a note showing that money became worthless.) We also see what's supposed to be a Metro poster saying "America doesn't tolerate racism."
Negan also talks about what appears to be a high water line along the tunnel walls, showing that they flooded in the past. Indeed, water has been known to get into tunnels during heavy storms and in recent years, Metro has worked on making the system more rainproof and fixing pumps to make sure that water doesn't stay in the tunnels, which can cause fires.
These aren't Metro stations or tunnels onscreen — The Walking Dead is largely filmed in Georgia. Metro says they didn't have any contact with the show, and that none of what appeared in last night's episode runs against their guidelines about what logos, images, and whatnot can be used in film and TV.
"In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I don't think anyone would bother to consult the protocols of our Use Regulations," Metro spokesperson Ian Jannetta tells DCist/WAMU in an email.
D.C.'s Metro has seen some prominence in film and TV before last night — though the results usually aren't much more realistic than these trains full of zombies. There's a fictional Georgetown stop in the action thriller No Way Out and a gruesome murder scene in House of Cards (at the similarly fictional "Cathedral Heights" station).
The Walking Dead previously ventured into D.C. in Season 9 to raid a composite version of a Smithsonian museum for a wagon and other old farming tools. That, too, wasn't filmed in the District.
This story is from DCist.com, the local news website of WAMU.
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