Episode 5 of the current tenth season of The Walking Dead aired at the weekend (November 3), and contains a very meta easter egg.
The episode, entitled What It Always Is, sees Magna listening to music on a gramophone during a scene with herself and Yumiko.
Eagle-eyed (or eared) fans have spotted that the song playing in the scene is ‘The Turtle and the Monkey’, which is written and sung by former Walking Dead star Emily Kinney, who played Beth Greene on the show. Kinney has since confirmed in a tweet that the song playing is indeed hers.
Yep ☺️? https://t.co/eaHLp7N3GK
— Emily Kinney (@emmykinney) November 4, 2019
With the meta connections not stopping there, the version of ‘The Turtle and the Monkey’ playing in the show is actually sung by a male voice, and fans believe that it’s that of Beta, the Walking Dead character who’s a major part of The Whisperers.
Fans believe that Beta had a celebrity past before he became the masked villain, and actor Ryan Hurst recently responded to the speculation, saying: “I can’t say too much. All I can say at this point is maybe Beta was a large personality in the world before the apocalypse, and that sort of letting go of that might have been tragic to his psyche. I can’t say much more than that.”
In a recap of the new Walking Dead episode in question, NME‘s Sam Moore speculates that Negan may have returned to his previous bad ways.