The Walking Dead: World Beyond season 1 featured zombies covered in natural overgrowth, but only in season 2 does the spinoff actually do something worthwhile with that idea. Walking Dead: World Beyond follows a group of teenage survivors from the 10,000-strong population of Campus Colony. Naturally, they're fairly useless out in the wild where undead roam, and World Beyond season 1 shows Iris, Hope, Silas and Elton gradually learning what the apocalypse truly looks like. In World Beyond's premiere, the young quartet stroll past the ruins of a plane crash, and spot the rotting passengers now covered in green moss. The following episode includes a similarly grassy zombie that Elton stops to document with a photograph.
The flora-covered zombies in Walking Dead: World Beyond season 1 were intended to demonstrate the passage of time, with the story set around a decade after the outbreak began. They also served as a visual metaphor for life blooming amidst death. Walkers (or Empties, as World Beyond calls them) represent the end of human civilization - stagnating, rotting corpses consuming everything around them. The greenery upon them, however, proved that (to quote a totally different franchise) life finds a way, and from the epitome of death, creation sprouts forth. The foliage was an allegory for World Beyond's young survivors themselves.
World Beyond's moss-covered zombies had little further use in season 1, but season 2 dutifully steps up where its predecessor disappointed. In Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2's "Exit Wounds," Elton and Percy are running from mysterious pursuers through the woods, but Elton stumbles over a branch on the forest floor. Initially believing the only harm is to his pride, Elton soon discovers he's laying on a bed of zombies camouflaged in dirt, leaves and roots. Before long, the two teenagers are fighting off mossy zombies as they arise from the ground below, all covered in various layers of natural growth.
Needless to say, Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2's use of overgrown Empties is far superior to season 1. The metaphor of plant life enveloping the undead was clever, certainly, but carried so much horror potential that went untapped. World Beyond season 1 ignored the possible practical applications, and used the eco-zombies as window dressing. "Exit Wounds" rectifies that error by using the overgrown Empties within a genuinely impressive set-piece. A forest floor covered in waiting corpses is a gloriously creepy idea, the sequence is executed in convincing horror-like fashion, and while the metaphor from season 1 still applies, viewers get the exciting practical application that was frustratingly absent before.
Walking Dead: World Beyond's moss-zombie payoff exemplifies the improvements made between seasons 1 and 2. When the second spinoff of AMC's Walking Dead franchise aired, the undead were treated as a non-threatening afterthought in a world where youngsters could stand right next to an active zombie and take a photo instead of stabbing it in the head. World Beyond season 2 deliberately brings its zombies into sharper focus. We've already seen Hope forced to accept the CRM's help after struggling to navigate through an infested school, and now the same kind of zombie Elton was using as a model in season 1 is trying to bite his arm off. And isn't that what The Walking Dead is really about?