The Walking Dead May Have Just Revealed The Zombie Virus Origin

What Are the Variant Cohorts?

The answer lies in both the first part and the final part of the post-credit scene. Remember that video that the unnamed French doctor was watching? Well, it was a transmission from none other than…CDC virologist Dr. Edwin Jenner (Noah Emmerich)! Longtime Walking Dead fans will remember Dr. Jenner from his appearance all the way back in The Walking Dead season 1 finale. Back then he mentioned that the French were making some compelling headway in finding a cure for the virus.

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“It was the French. […] They were the last ones to hold out as far as I know. While our people were bolting out the doors and committing suicide in the hallways, they stayed in the labs till the end,” Jenner told Rick Grimes and friends.

Now, in this transmission from Jenner, we see why he was so excited about the French’s progress. Jenner says he’s viewed the French scientists’ data and that he “likes their approach.” What follows is a lot of heavy jargon that includes concepts like: “activating systems to work against reanimation,” “jumpstarting circulatory systems,” and “short-circuiting the brain” to deal with “variant cohorts.”

To the layperson, it seems what Jenner is describing are the French scientists’ attempts to introduce a shock to infected individual’s systems to halt the zombification process. This seems like a good idea in theory but as any Dr. Frankenstein could tell you, introducing energy to reanimate a corpse might make it a touchhhh stronger than you anticipated. Perhaps that’s what Jenner is referring to when he discusses “variant cohorts.”

As we’re all now very tragically familiar with in the real world, any virus worth its salt will learn to mutate into new variants to outpace living creatures’ immune systems. Corpses reanimated with the “zombie virus” on The Walking Dead almost always behave in the same way, but we’ve seen a small handful of deviations throughout the franchise’s lengthy run. Recall that way back in season 1, some zombies (like Morgan Jones’s wife) exhibited a sort of primitive memory of their time pre-zombification. Now, on Fear the Walking Dead, lead character Alicia appears to be infected with a zombie bug that is progressing at an unusually slow place. 

Then, at the end of this post-credit scene, we see yet one more example of the zombie virus operating unusually. The gunman shoots the doctor in the back and within seconds of her dying, her zombified corpse springs into action, runs to the door, and vigorously claws at it as if it is trying to immediately avenge its death. Quite simply, we have never seen a zombie operate with this level of speed and savagery.