Spoiler warning for anyone who hasn't yet seen tonight's episode of The Walking Dead. Mild comic spoilers will also come into it.
At this point in Season 7, The Walking Dead looks almost nothing like it did 3 seasons ago, and not just because of the casting changes, but because of all the new locations audiences have been introduced to in recent weeks. Tonight's "Swear" expanded the live-action universe even further, bringing in another new setting: Oceanside. While the name may have been familiar to comic book fans, the location itself provided a completely different take on things, and it also showed up much earlier than it did in the source material. That said, here's what we know about the location from Robert Kirkman's comics.
Oceanside Is A Friendly Community
While everyone residing within this watery new TV setting had some frightfully murderous intentions for Tara, the Oceanside from The Walking Dead's comic books offered up some much less horrific situations, in as much as not everyone living there was into murdering outsiders. No, when readers first laid eyes on this narrative's first big coastal area, the mood was much more genial, and no one wanted to kill anyone. At least not in an out loud kind of way.
Oceanside became a part of the Walking Dead universe after the time-jump, and if its name didn't already heavily imply it, the ocean's resources are a big reason why it is such a key community. Its inhabitants mainly trade fish and other seafood with Alexandria and the other major areas for just about everything that's needed for life on boats. That's good eating.
Oceanside Provides A Few Interesting Characters
Rick and his gang of survivors found out about Oceanside through one character named Siddiq, who made his way up the coast from his Miami home after the walker outbreak. Siddiq is a good guy, whose strength and handiness are ideal for construction and other jobs of the manual labor variety. He's not one to complain, though, since he tired of the boating life. Then there's Pete, also seen above, who is a kind and wise soul that also decides to leave Oceanside for greener and less wet pastures like Alexandria.
It's not clear if these characters - nor others like the Fairbanks, who were leads in The Walking Dead: Michonne video game from Telltale Games - will make it to the live-action series, considering how Oceanside was introduced on the show, with its "all the males were killed" story specifics. But it is possible within the overall timeline that Oceanside will become a different kind of community after Tara's intrusion, and that the vibe will be far less insane if and when we return to it. And we had better return to it.
Michonne Is A Big Part Of Oceanside's Future
While AMC's The Walking Dead is currently giving viewers an Oceanside that comes far before it did in the comic book timeline, I'm hoping that the story course-corrects in some way to stay faithful where Michonne's connection is concerned. Following the All-Out War storyline that centers on Rick and Negan's massive conflicts, there's the aforementioned time-jump, and it's during this period that Michonne left Alexandria and the rest of the survivors behind, eventually ending up at Oceanside.
Not a lot of information is given in the comics about what occurred during the narrative gap, beyond some of her continued emotional angst over how things went with her romantic interest, though we do get more of that in the Michonne video game. It's impossible to know if The Walking Dead TV show will go through the flash-forward on the TV show or if it will incorporate those aspects into a more steady timeline, but I think it would be extremely interesting if Michonne (or perhaps a stand-in character) did strike out alone in search of Oceanside in the future.
The Walking Dead airs Sunday nights on AMC. Check out our fall premiere schedule and our midseason debut schedule to see what else is on the way when The Walking Dead takes its winter hiatus.
