WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 11, Episode 4, “Rendition,” which aired Sunday on AMC.
If nothing else, the first few episodes of The Walking Dead Season 11 have shown that the Reapers mean business. They clearly have it out for Maggie and her friends, and their level of skill and training has the group positioned as a legitimate threat to everyone’s survival. Now, as Daryl is captured in “Rendition,” fans finally get to see what the Reapers are really all about.
Following the Reapers' attack, everyone fled into the darkness. The next morning, Daryl found Dog with one of the Reapers. However, it’s not just any Reaper. It turns out, the Reaper is Leah Shaw, his former love interest. Although he plays off the fact that he actually knows any of the people he was with, a group still comes to take him back to their base for questioning.
There, Daryl continues to play dumb, so the Reapers decide to make him talk by waterboarding him. After that, Daryl starts to give up little pieces of information but nothing important. Eventually, Leah convinces Pope -- the Reaper’s leader -- that Daryl could be of value to their group. He had given them what information he knew and was a hard-nosed fighter, just like them. So, Pope decides to put Daryl to the test with a trial by fire. After passing the test, Pope gives Daryl the low down on the group.
Fan speculation was correct. The Reapers are a small group of former soldiers who met each other in Afghanistan. As would be expected, the war was terrible but not worse than what came after. They had psychological damage and couldn’t find jobs, so they decided to work together as a mercenary army -- doing the dirty work that no one else wanted to. That only accentuated after the world fell, and Pope described what they experienced as worse than what they saw in Afghanistan.
The key part about the Reapers, though, is their religious fanaticism. Pope exemplifies this repeatedly throughout the episode. In Afghanistan, they had held onto the idea of God because there was nothing else to grasp in a world of death and destruction, but after the fall, they shied away from any kind of belief. However, a religious experience brought them back.
As they were doing their dirty work one day, bombs started to fall around them. Pope was convinced that politicians wanted them dead, but they were probably targeting the walkers. Either way, Pope and his group holed up in a little church at the edge of town, expecting to die as the fires raged around them. However, the next morning, they were all unscathed. Pope interpreted the event as an act of God, declaring them as the Chosen Ones. Now, everything he does, he does as if he has God’s personal backing. In his mind, it’s almost like he’s waging a holy war against anyone that does not align with his demands.
During The Walking Dead's post-episode interview, showrunner Angela Kang explains the Reaper’s religious experience as a not all that uncommon phenomenon. Apparently, a raging fire can simply jump buildings and leave them totally unscathed. Pope probably didn’t know that, so he had taken the event and construed the event as a divine mandate.
To learn more about the Reapers and their holy war against everyone and everything, tune into Season 11 of The Walking Dead. The series airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC and is available to stream early on AMC+.