Wearing the skinned faces of the undead is the Whisperers’ creepy trademark and The Walking Dead season 10 episode 2 revealed exactly how the first mask was created. Using rotting walker remains as camouflage isn't a novel concept on The Walking Dead. Back in a season 1 episode befittingly titled “Guts,” Rick and Glenn covered themselves in walker guts so they could saunter through a zombie horde in Atlanta undetected. More recently, in season 8, Father Gabriel and Negan daubed themselves with undead innards to safely walk through the zombie-swarmed grounds of the Sanctuary.
Covering oneself in walker entrails to get out of a sticky situation is one thing, but the Whisperers took things to a whole other horrifying level by skinning and scalping walkers and wearing their faces as masks. Disgusting as that is, it’s also a genius tactic that allows them to walk undetected among the undead and disguises them from fellow human survivors. It’s effective too and certainly had Eugene and Rosita convinced when they first encountered the Whisperers in The Walking Dead season 9 and assumed they were walkers who had evolved into more intelligent beings with the ability to speak.
Even after the Alexandria-Hilltop-Kingdom alliance discovered that the Whisperers were just regular (albeit pretty freaky) people, wearing the faces of the dead still made them an intimidating force to be reckoned with – but where did Alpha, Beta and the others get the idea in the first place? The Walking Dead season 10 episode 2 had the answers, and needless to say, the reveal was fittingly disturbing.
Titled “We Are The End Of The World”, The Walking Dead season 10 episode 2 offered a backstory for Alpha and Beta and explained how the pair met. Flashbacks set seven years before the episode’s present-day events revealed Alpha and Lydia were already using the guts-as-camouflage technique when they took shelter in an abandoned hospital and encountered a ski-masked Beta for the very first time. Both Alpha and Beta were messed up people even at that point and found a kindred, ghoulish spirit in each other but their budding friendship very nearly came to an end when Alpha killed a walker that Beta had obviously been close to when he was still alive.
Though Beta was furious and distraught at the loss of his zombified friend, Alpha placated him and prompted Beta to skin his pal’s face and wear it as a gruesome keepsake – and so the first Whisperer mask was created. However, as later episodes of The Walking Dead season 10 would prove, Beta’s mask served a bigger purpose than just allowing him to walk among the undead – it also helped keep his famous identity a secret.