The Walking Dead: World Beyond is teasing a cure to the zombie apocalypse in season 2, but has the solution been staring viewers in the face all along? Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2 finally reveals what the CRM's army of scientific minds have been up to behind closed doors, and though they haven't hit upon a definite solution quite yet, breakthroughs are being made. The likes of Dr. Bennett and Dr. Belshaw may not have pinpointed the cause of the outbreak or discovered why dead people reanimate (contradicting The Walking Dead season 1's CDC visit), but they do believe an end is in sight... sooner or later.
As weird as it sounds, Dr. Bennett is looking toward the wonderful world of fungi for an answer to The Walking Dead's virus. According to his research, certain fungi grows on rotting flesh and accelerates the decomposition process. If these mushrooms could be replicated and spread, the world's zombie population would effectively melt over a short period of time. Mankind then only has to dispose of its dead properly, and a zombie might never set foot upon this fair planet again.
In Walking Dead: World Beyond episode 3, Dr. Bennett's daughter, Hope, theorizes a more specific solution - yeast. She believes that yeast - a type of fungi - could be the mushroom her father has been searching for, and when she presents her theory, Dr. Bennett admits it's an idea he never considered. While the veracity of Hope's plan is yet to be determined in the Walking Dead franchise, it's a solution that was foreshadowed way back in World Beyond season 1.
When Walking Dead: World Beyond first introduced Alexa Mansour's Hope Bennett, she was the rebellious party girl of Campus Colony, home-brewing alcohol to drink secretly with her fellow teens in basements and bedrooms. A bottle even found its way into the hands of CRM Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Kublek. Hope's ability to brew booze in the zombie apocalypse was an early sign of her immense scientific intellect, and helped convince the CRM that she was worth adding to their pool of geniuses. In hindsight, however, Hope's extra-curricular activities were also hinting toward a potential zombie solution. The fermentation of yeast is a crucial part of making alcohol, so Hope getting her friends drunk was a prelude to understanding yeast enough to suggest it as a potential weapon against the undead.
And if Hope really has hit upon a zombie solution with yeast fermentation, that means the answer Walking Dead fans have been waiting for since 2010 was subtly introduced in 2020 (ironic) with World Beyond season 1. Few would've suspected when Hope was secretly distributing alcohol in the premiere episode, that she was actually laying the foundations for clearing the entire Walking Dead world of reanimated corpses. It's an excellent piece of unexpected foreshadowing - the hidden meaning behind Hope's alcohol seemed to be her secret intelligence, but the meaning behind the meaning was saving the entire world.
That's assuming, of course, Dr. Bennett's fungi plan actually works. There's no guarantee he can find a strain (yeast or otherwise) that'll do the trick, and if he does, the accelerated decomposition won't necessarily be rapid enough to make an actual difference. Then there's the issue of how to distribute this fungus among the undead hordes. Unless there's some way of mass distributing the strain, spreading it manually, column by column, will take too long to be helpful. Nevertheless, this is the closest The Walking Dead has come to finding a cure, and it's something we've known about for some time.