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| “ | We whisper, and the dead don't mind... | „ |
| ~ Whisperer |
| “ | You came into our land. Killed our kind. Now we explore your land, learn about your people. You will see many of us. You will know us. You will fear us. | „ |
| ~ Alpha |
The Whisperers are a gang of survivors of the zombie outbreak, serving as the main antagonists of The Walking Dead comics from Volume 22: A New Beginning to Volume 27: The Whisperer War.
In the TV show of the same name, the Whisperers serve as the main antagonists in the second half of Season 9 and the majority of Season 10. They are also the overarching antagonists of the first half of Season 11.
The Whisperers are a ruthless group of survivors, led by Alpha and her second-in-command Beta. They show absolute loyalty to their leadership and Alpha encourages violence and even rape within the group in order to strengthen the members. The most remarkable feature of the Whisperers is that they wear the skins of dead roamers as clothing, which allows them to pass through roamer herds unnoticed. It also allows them to blend into herds.
Comic Series[]
First encounters with the Militia[]
The Whisperers are first encountered years after the capture of Negan and the end of the war between the Militia and the Saviors. They follow two Hilltop colonists, Marco and Ken, and mock them by whispering to them. Marco hears the whispers and believes the undead are talking to him, but of course his companions do not believe them. When later, a search party led by Dante is sent to find Ken, they are attacked by what they believe to be roamers. However, once most roamers are eliminating two more turn up, equipped with knives and able to talk. They kill a crewman, Doug, but are then killed by Doug. Investigating the corpses, Doug realizes that he was not fighting roamers but normal men, who were wearing the roamer skins as masks. Suddenly, Doug is attacked by another masked Whisperer - their leader, Alpha. Alpha holds him at gunpoint and while Dante tries to explain that he acted in self-defense, Alpha reveals to Dante that because his people attacked her group, the Whisperers will be observing their communities and that they should be afraid.
Likewise, the Whisperers attack the search party Paul "Jesus" Monroe leads in search for Nathaniel. Jesus can fend off his attackers and kills all but one, whom he takes captive. The captured Whisperer is brought to the Hilltop and is interrogated. When the mask is removed, the Whisperer is revealed to be a girl called Lydia. While being questioned by Jesus and Maggie, Lydia reveals that the dead protect her people and in return the Whisperers protect them. They do not harm the roamers but instead live among them. During her captivity, Lydia befriends Carl Grimes. While Lydia is held at Hilltop, two Whisperers scout the surrounding area, keeping a close watch on Hilltop. They know that Alpha is coming and that Lydia will take care of herself.
TV Series[]
Background[]
The Whisperers first begin at some point in the early years of the apocalypse and are led by a woman named Hera. Following the fall of the steamboat led by Brooke, the Whisperers find Dee and her daughter Lydia and accept them into the community.
Later, after having either left the group or gone on a supply run, Dee meets a former country musician living in an abandoned hospital. This encounter inspires Dee to take on the name of Alpha while the man becomes Beta. After returning to the Whisperers, Alpha kills Hera and takes over the Whisperers for herself with Beta as her second-in-command. Alpha also turns Hera's face into her walker mask.
Meeting the Coalition[]
Six years after the apparent death of Rick Grimes, the Whisperers have settled into the area near Alexandria, the Hilltop, Oceanside and the Kingdom. The residents are initially unaware of their presence until Eugene and Rosita encounter a herd with several Whisperers in it. Hearing their whispers, Eugene theorizes that the walkers have begun to evolve. However, the truth is revealed when a herd led by a few Whisperers corners a group of survivors in a cemetery. During the fight, one of the Whisperers kills Paul Rovia before the survivors kill him and several others and see that they are actually people in walker masks.
Fleeing back to the Hilltop, the group has another encounter with a small group of Whisperers amongst a herd on a bridge. Most of the Whisperers are killed while one, Lydia, surrenders. Lydia, the daughter of Alpha, is imprisoned at the Hilltop where she is befriended by Henry and interrogated by Daryl. Lydia, remembering her mother's murder of her father, eventually switches sides, but Alpha arrives at the Hilltop, demanding the trade of her daughter for the captured Alden and Luke. Lydia ultimately willingly turns herself over, but she is followed by Henry who gets captured before he is rescued by Daryl and Connie. During this time, a young Whisperer, Francis, is forced to abandon her infant son, but he is rescued by people from the Hilltop and taken in by Earl and Tammy Rose Sutton who name him Adam.
Escalating Tensions[]
Following the raid on the Whisperers' camp, Beta leads a group of Whisperers and a herd after Daryl, Connie, Lydia and Henry. The group lures the Whisperers into an abandoned office building and separate them from the herd, killing all but Beta who survives everything that Daryl throws at him. Finally, Daryl knocks Beta down an elevator shaft, temporarily incapacitating him.
The Whisperers subsequently keep an eye on the communities from a distance, watching them gather for the Kingdom's trade fair.
The Barn Massacre[]
After murdering a couple, Alpha infiltrates the Kingdom's trade fair where she gets a good look at the communities and their way of life. Encountering her mother, Lydia rejects her offer to rejoin the Whisperers.
Alpha manages to kidnap several of the people gathered at the Kingdom, including Henry, and takes them to a barn for execution as a warning to the Coalition. They are found by Alex and DJ, giving the captives the chance to break free and fight back in a heroic last stand, killing several Whisperers before they are all taken down. Alpha then personally executes each person, decapitating them and forcing Siddiq to watch.
Capturing Daryl, Alpha shows him a massive horde of tens of thousands of walkers that she has gathered in a ravine and which is controlled by her people. Alpha establishes borders around the Whisperers' territory that the Coalition must never cross or she will unleash her horde upon them, an ultimate weapon that the communities have no way of countering. At the pike border, Daryl, Carol, Michonne and Yumiko find a traumatized Siddiq and the reanimated decapitated heads of their murdered friends.
Cold War[]
Subsequently, the Whisperers and the Coalition enter into a state of cold war. The Whisperers move south for the winter, somehow getting their herd out of the ravine without being noticed. With the Kingdom falling to old age, the Coalition is forced to cross the Whisperer border in the midst of a blizzard, something that is later reported to Alpha.
Over the following months, the Coalition builds weapons and trains to fight the Whisperers when they inevitably return, although they are unable to find a solution for their horde. They also avoid crossing the border again until a satellite crash forces them to cross in order to put out a forest fire. Shortly after the fire, Alpha and the Whisperers return with Alpha observing Daryl and Carol checking out the empty ravine where she had stashed her herd. During their return journey, Francis, enraged over being forced to abandon her son, attacks Alpha. Alpha is saved by Francis' own sister Mary, resulting in Francis' death. As a reward, Alpha makes Francis her third-in-command, Gamma.
Unbeknownst to the communities, Alexandria's new doctor, Dante, is actually a Whisperer spy. Having joined the group after Lydia's departure, she is unable to recognize him, and Dante is able to pass Alpha secret messages. Alpha sends waves of walkers against Alexandria, causes a tree to fall at the Hilltop, damaging their defensive wall, and has Gamma poison the river that is used as a water supply while Dante sabotages Alexandria's water filters, resulting in a cholera outbreak. After the repeated border crossings, Alpha moves the borders closer to the communities as a punishment while Carol, Henry's adoptive mother, seeks revenge upon her son's killer. After Siddiq realizes that Dante is a spy, Dante murders him, but he is caught by Rosita and is later killed by Gabriel for his crimes.
After escaping from prison in Alexandria, Negan joins the Whisperers and becomes Alpha's lover. At the same time, Aaron befriends Gamma, eventually revealing Alpha's lies when she learns that Lydia, whom Alpha had claimed was dead, is still alive. Gamma, reclaiming her real name of Mary, directs the communities to the cave where Alpha is hiding her horde. Alpha lures the team inside and traps them with the horde. However, they manage to make their way out, killing several Whisperers in the process. Carol bombs the horde with dynamite, destroying roughly half of the horde, but collapsing part of the cave and trapping Magna and Connie inside.
With Mary having betrayed the Whisperers, Beta sneaks into Alexandria using a hidden tunnel dug by Dante in order to get her back. Beta kills several residents, including former Savior Laura, before finally capturing Mary when she willingly surrenders herself in exchange for Beta leaving. However, Beta is ambushed by returning Coalition forces and he is forced to flee empty-handed.
Trying to find his missing friends, Daryl engages Alpha in a brutal fight, ending with both of them seriously injured. Lydia saves Daryl, but she refuses to rejoin or kill her mother. Now completely rejected by her daughter, Alpha declares all-out war against the Coalition.
The Whisperer War[]
No longer held back, Alpha begins preparing to destroy the Coalition once and for all. Under the advice of Negan, she blocks all means of easy escape from the Hilltop, using a tactic that he had once used with the Saviors. Armed with sap-coated arrows, the Whisperers set fire to the Hilltop and its defensive wall before making a full-frontal assault with their horde. With their community on fire, the Coalition is left heavily outnumbered and outmatched. Nevertheless, they manage to destroy a great deal of Alpha's horde and several Whisperers before the Hilltop finally falls and the survivors retreat. By the next morning, the Whisperers are executing survivors to join the ranks of their horde while others, such as Earl Sutton, succumb to their wounds elsewhere. Hunting a group of survivors, Beta finds and kills Mary as well as another Whisperer that sees his face after Mary rips his walker mask as she dies. However, Alden puts Mary down when she reanimates and forces Beta to retreat.
However, even with the destruction of the Hilltop, Alpha is not satisfied as she still wants Lydia back at her side, even if only as a member of her horde. Negan is able to capture Lydia in the forest nearby and leads Alpha alone to where he is supposedly being held. After Negan fails to change Alpha's mind, she discovers that he has tricked her and led her to an empty shed. Negan slits Alpha's throat, killing her, and delivers Alpha's reanimated severed head to Carol, having been working with Carol the entire time to infiltrate the Whisperers and kill Alpha. Carol then places Alpha's head upon the pike border as Alpha had done with the victims of the barn massacre.
Following the death of Alpha and the destruction of much of their horde, the Whisperers briefly cease to be a major threat. Due to Negan killing Alpha, a small group of Whisperers embrace him as their new leader, only to have Negan kill them in order to save Daryl. Beta recovers Alpha's severed head, but rejects being called the new Alpha. Retreating to his former home, Beta uses his old music to draw in a massive new horde and finally puts Alpha's head down, using a piece of her face to fix his ripped walker mask. However, the loss of Alpha drives Beta into complete insanity and he begins experiencing hallucinations.
With his renewed horde, Beta leads the Whisperers to Alexandria, only to find the community completely abandoned. By this point, the Coalition has finally come up with a plan to destroy the Whisperers' seemingly-unstoppable horde and have retreated to an abandoned hospital that they dub the Tower. However, instead of leading the horde to Oceanside as planned, Beta realizes where the Coalition has actually gone and diverts to the Tower, laying siege to it.
Surrounded by the horde, Daryl leads a team using the old walker guts trick through the horde while Coalition archers provide covering fire with the help of Lydia picking out their targets. However, Beatrice is killed in the process and Beta turns the horde so that the archers can't pick out friend from foe anymore. Donning her mother's old walker mask, Lydia joins the others who rig up a makeshift sound system built by Luke to a horse-drawn wagon. Blaring loud music, the Coalition leads the Whisperer horde away from the Tower, giving those left behind time to escape. A small number of Whisperers invade the Tower, but as Gabriel struggles to hold them off so that the others can escape, he is saved by Maggie Rhee and her friend Elijah who kill the Whisperers.
At night, the Whisperers emerge from the trees and ambush the wagon. Despite suffering losses, they succeed in destroying the wagon and the sound system. With the Whisperers turning the horde back towards the Tower, Daryl's team infiltrates the horde and begins killing the Whisperers one by one while Lydia uses her Whisperer training to turn the herd once more. Spotting Lydia, Beta is distracted by the appearance of Negan, focusing his whole attention on getting revenge upon the man who had killed his beloved leader. Taking advantage of this, Daryl stabs Beta through the eyes and leaves him to be devoured by his own horde, a fate that Beta willingly accepts.
With Beta and the Whisperers dead, Lydia is able to lead the horde to a massive cliff, joined by Carol. Together, the two women lure the horde over the cliff's edge, destroying it for good with Lydia tossing off her mother's walker mask as well. With their horde eliminated and all of the deaths that they suffered, including Alpha and Beta, the Whisperers are finally destroyed.
Shortly thereafter, while patrolling in the woods on the way back to the communities, Maggie puts down a reanimated Whisperer that she comes across.
Survivors[]
After the war, Aaron leads a team back to the ruins of the Hilltop to scavenge for blacksmithing supplies in hopes of being able to repair Alexandria's damaged wall. In the ruins, Aaron's team encounters and sadly puts down a number of their friends who had died in the destruction of the Hilltop and reanimated.
Much to their surprise and rage, they find a small group of surviving Whisperers squatting in the ruins as well. Their leader, Keith, reveals that following the fall of the Whisperers as a whole, the few survivors scattered or joined his group. Keith insists that these remaining Whisperers only wish to survive and intend no more harm. Lydia recognizes Keith as someone who wasn't in her mother's inner circle, lending credence to his story. Keith also claims that he would slip Lydia food behind her mother's back, although she can't be sure if that's true or not. The vengeful Aaron tortures Keith, even having a walker bite him in the hand, before Carol finally puts a stop to it and allows Keith to amputate his hand. Keith expresses understanding of their rage towards him and, as a gesture of good faith, reveals that his group had seen the still-missing Connie recently. With the information that Keith gives them, Connie is finally found and reunited with her friends and family for the first time since she got trapped in Alpha's cave.
The ultimate fate of Keith's group of Whisperers is unknown. Maggie Rhee later returns to the Hilltop to try to rebuild it and there is no sign of the surviving Whisperers.
Legacy[]
During their time as a threat, the Whisperers killed a number of good people, left immense devastation in their wake and destroyed the Hilltop.
Upon returning to Alexandria, the residents find out that the Whisperers didn't leave the town untouched, destroying its crops and badly damaging the wall and community. This final act of destruction, combined with the Whisperer horde scaring away all of the animals in the area, puts the community in dire straits, in danger of starvation. In addition, the damaged defensive wall leaves the community open to walker attacks, forcing the residents to consider abandoning Alexandria for good. This is only rectified after Maggie leads a team to Meridian and recovers its food supply and Eugene returns with forces from the Commonwealth who help to rebuild the town.
During Maggie's mission to Meridian, she adopts Whisperer tactics in order to defeat the Reapers. At Maggie's request, Negan creates walker masks for Maggie, Gabriel and Elijah, having held onto his own after the war. Negan then puts the other three through Whisperer training, teaching them how to move with and control herds. Using this, Maggie, Negan, Gabriel and Elijah lead a herd to Meridian, laying siege to it and the Reapers. However, while this tactic gets them inside of the walls, the Reapers are able to destroy the herd itself using a hwacha.
Following the defeat of the Reapers, Maggie attempts to rebuild the Hilltop which suffered far more damage than Alexandria did. However, she rejects the help of the Commonwealth unlike Alexandria, causing the residents to struggle.
While hiding from Lance Hornsby following the destruction of Riverbend, Negan, his new wife Annie and their people hide out in what Negan describes as "some Whisperer worm hole."
During the fight against Lance's forces, Negan dons his old Whisperer mask in order to infiltrate a herd and attack two Commonwealth soldiers, killing one while the other one is ripped apart by walkers. After giving Daryl the dead soldier's radio and gun, Negan removes his mask and steals their vehicle.
Members[]
External Link[]
- The Whisperers (Comic Series) - The Walking Dead Wiki
- The Whisperers (TV Show) - The Walking Dead Wiki
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 Villains
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