One of The Walking Dead‘s central mysteries for the last year has revolved around the voice on the other side of Eugene’s radio. Throughout season 10, Eugene talked to a woman named Stephanie (Margot Bingham) from a settlement in Charleston, West Virginia (as revealed in the episode “Morning Star”). After getting to know each other and earning Stephanie’s trust, Eugene decides to lead a group of Alexandrians to Stephanie’s settlement. On the surface, it’s a diplomatic mission meant to hopefully to establish an alliance to help protect Alexandria (and maybe even establish trading for the resources and supplies our heroes so desperately needs), but there’s more to Eugene’s journey than that. He’s fallen in love with the woman on the other side of the radio and feels that he needs to find her. This may be his only chance. But Eugene’s quest for love isn’t without peril, as we’ve learned over the last few episodes. Captured by the Commonwealth, caged, and forced to go through very intense interrogations, Eugene is pretty much at the end of his rope by the time he’s finally allowed to meet Stephanie at the end of season 11 episode “Acheron: Part II.” After being separated from his friends and fearing the worst, Eugene assumes he’s being ushered to his death by the Commonwealth soldiers, who instead reunite him with Ezekiel, Yumiko, and Princess. Together, the group is welcomed to the Commonwealth by the stone-faced Mercer (Michael James Shaw). As the doors open to the new settlement, it’s Stephanie who walks into the processing room to greet the group, asking for Eugene, who has a big, dumb smile on his face. It’s a nice ending to a stressful couple of weeks for our heroes. As we already know, Stephanie is the bridge that leads the main characters to the Commonwealth, a massive settlement of 50,000 survivors with its own government, army, facilities, and even a sports arena. The Commonwealth is the setting of the final arc of the comic, dealing with the question of how society will rebuild itself after years of survivors fighting among themselves. Can humanity bring back civilization as it once was? The Commonwealth storyline challenges the idea of digging up an image of the past and instead suggests that humans must figure out a new way to co-exist in order to prevent our systems from breaking down again. It’s perhaps Kirkman’s strongest work of social commentary in the series. In the comics, Stephanie isn’t even allowed to go meet Eugene, replaced instead by a Commonwealth bookkeeper named Lance Hornsby and a group of soldiers. It’s only later, within the walls of the Commonwealth, that Eugene is able to speak to Stephanie. The two eventually become romantic and the couple being a project to revive the railroad and trains leading out of the Commonwealth in the hopes of creating a faster way to travel between settlements. Eugene’s completion of the project is bittersweet, though. In the final issue of the series, which is set 25 years after their first meeting, we learn that Stephanie died before she could see the trains running again.
