Replication¶

Replication is the process by which the skinwalkers of Ballard and Roosevelt replace people with copies, working from tissue samples taken in advance and from memories probed through tendrils in the mouth.


Type	Lore / process
Aliases	Cloning from tissue; body-snatcher cloning; brain download
Practised by	The skinwalker faction
Notable victims	Andrew Howard, Huell Kendrick (a copy made), the mayor
First appearance	Walkers 07

The method¶

The clearest account comes from the gym scene in Walkers 07. A naked double of Andrew Howard greets him in the high school gym and says, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Rita (as Andrew) replies, "What, replacing me? With you, I assume?" and the double, a little surprised, answers, "Well, yeah." The easy way is for the double to open his mouth unnaturally wide and extend fine gray tendrils from his throat to "kiss" Andrew. The hard way is the click of a shotgun. Andrew pepper-sprays the double and a fight follows in which a grenade carves a chunk from the double's shoulder. Pinned under a dead horse, Andrew is reached by the wounded double, who crawls over it; sickly-sweet vomit drips onto his face and the tendrils invade his mouth. "Everything goes black." (Walkers 07)

At that point Andre gives Rita private material, which the other players and their characters do not see. It establishes the following about the faction's methods:

Copies are made from tissue samples. Andrew's came from the cut that the mayor's ring gave him, and Huell's from the bite of the hobo in Ballard. Huell's copy has not yet replaced him, and it needs his memories to impersonate him.
Copies made in a hurry are flawed. Andrew's replica has leukemia ("because they made you wrong"), starts the game injured, and has a deterioration track that ticks down the longer it is fake.
The faction has suborned about 60 percent of the town and is close to dropping its pretenses (Walkers 07).

Memories and tendrils¶

In Walkers 09, the tendrils are shown probing memories. A naked copy of Huell pulls him off his horse and crawls on top of him, and a tendril enters his mouth for a split second, long enough for him to catch the smell of his childhood bedroom. Later a duplicate Howard lunges at Huell and gray tendrils extend from his mouth into Huell's; Huell just barely pushes him away. A tendril worms into his mouth and a flash pulls a memory from him: as a child in a sun-soaked living room, with his father Thomas Kendrick eating a big plate of bacon while his mother makes passive-aggressive small talk about cholesterol. Zack (as Huell) jokes, "I'm getting Ratatouille'd." (Walkers 09) The tendrils recall those of the tendril-mouthed man Doug, seen in earlier cold opens.

A brain-like creature lives in the mouth and can crawl out; see Pilot and host biology. The fluid from the crushed Huell copy is a rainbow-colored grayish slick, which Andre says matches what came out of the aliens in earlier arcs. Andre describes the Huell copy as looking pristine (Walkers 09).

Where the tissue comes from¶

Roosevelt's police officers are found dead in Walkers 08, each missing a small body part, usually a finger, though one is missing an ear; the cuts look clean and post-mortem. The surviving junkyard owner Yusuf was shot, knocked out, and woke up missing his pinky toe. McManley suggests that the raw material for a host could conceivably be a tissue sample, and the party reads these missing parts as samples for copies (Walkers 08).

The duplicate Howard¶

The copy of Andrew Howard is the best-documented replication. Walkers 06 contains nothing of it; the secret begins in Walkers 07. Rita plays the original Andrew until the tendrils enter his mouth at the end of the gym scene. Andre then hands her the faction's material, and from that point she plays the replica, who is the double that attacked him: when Rita asks whether she is "a new one, not the one that barfed in his mouth," Andre answers, "You are the one that barfed in his mouth," so the replica has to explain his injuries to the other agents. When Kurt and Huell reach the burning gym, Howard staggers out, badly hurt (Walkers 07).

In Walkers 08, the replica secretly works for the faction. In a post-session conversation, Rita explains that she was the one who stole the sugar from the Roosevelt station's break room, because sugar is all the replica can eat, and that she deliberately got hold of the Biz's blood so that the faction could start preparing a copy of him, though without his memories it cannot yet replace him. Andre adds that she can message him to learn what her faction is doing, and notes that the replica has leukemia. The episode ends with a scene of the original Andrew, who had been killed and woke up at the bottom of a pile of corpses in the police station morgue (Walkers 08).

In Walkers 09, the original Howard catches up with the party, saying he was shot in the chest and woke up under a pile of dead naked people, and he asks Huell whether he ever saw the other Howard eat solid food: "Just put your fingers in his mouth." Huell's walkie-talkie battery is found to be missing. Later, in the cavern, the other Howard lunges at the one who has come with the party; Kurt and Howard shoot him, and as he flees Howard hits him in the back, and a brain-like creature wriggles out of his mouth and scurries away. See Andrew Howard (duplicate) and Andrew Howard (the Monstrous). The Huell copy is seen in the cold open of Walkers 07, when his face rises from a tank of black liquid, and a Huell copy is trampled by his horse in the finale (Skinwalker Huell).

What remains unknown¶

The episodes never show a finished copy of the Biz, and Huell's copy attacks him in the finale before replacing him. Who took the battery from Huell's walkie-talkie is never stated.