Airing in the UK on FOX, Mondays at 9pm
Writers: Matthew Negrete & Corey Reed
Director: Larry Teng

Essential Plot Points:

• Jadis opens Rick’s cell and takes photos of him with an old fashioned camera while a fellow Scavenger draws him, When Rick asks why all she’ll say is ‘Sculpture. After.’
• At the Sanctuary, Eugene confronts Dwight with what he knows. He gives him a choice; stop, and he won’t tell Negan. Dwight responds by telling him Sanctuary and Negan are finished. All Eugene has to do to be on the winning team is wait. Dwight asks if he can do that.
• Eugene refuses. But instead makes it clear that as long as Dwight does nothing to harm anyone inside Sanctuary, Eugene will keep quiet about what he knows.
• Eugene visits the barricades. He’s told they have, maybe, a day left.
• He visits Gabriel at the Doctor’s and is promptly left alone with the Priest while the Doctor searches for meds.

• Gabriel comes round and asks Eugene to help him break Doc Carson out. The two men discuss faith and what’s impossible. Eugene is comfortable in his doom; that he’s a small person who only looks after himself. Gabriel responds that not so long it was impossible for the dead to walk so it’s not impossible that, when the time comes, Eugene will know what to do.
• On the outskirts of Sanctuary, Morgan has set up a sniper’s nest. He’s monitoring Saviour frequencies and hears them discuss a truck. It’s Daryl’s team. Morgan sounds the all clear.
• Eugene is met by one of Negan’s wives, who he’s been working on something for. Despite being late, he begs her to leave the booze he was due to be paid in; Eugene is having trouble sleeping…
• Morgan meets up with Daryl and the others. It turns out he wasn’t on the horn with the Saviors but with a ring of snipers they have positioned around Sanctuary. They discuss strategy, and whether this is something they actually want to do. Rosita is done, and leaves them to it.
• Negan meets with Eugene who, in his own twisted way, sets the world’s smartest mullet back on track.
• Eugene goes looking for the coffin Sasha died in. More specficially, the ipod she died with…
• Morgan is working overwatch for Daryl’s battle truck. In the truck, Michonne is beginning to change her mind. Things are working, the plan they’re imposing feels WRONG.
• Daryl disagrees.
• She leaves.
• The war party is down to Tara, Daryl and the snipers.
• Eugene fits the ipod to a homemade drone, planning to use it to direct the Horde away. He’s confident, focused in a way he hasn’t been before. Until someone says ‘Don’t turn around.’
• Tara is in position, as are Morgan’s ring of snipers. Daryl moves the truck into position…

• Dwight holds a gun on Eugene, demanding he step away from the drone. Eugene tells him he’s trying to save people’s lives. Dwight argues that he’s looking to save their lives too. And all he needs to do is wipe out Negan.
• Eugene toughs it out. He launches the drone.
• Dwight can’t shoot him.
• But he CAN shoot the drone.
• Daryl launches his assault. He puts a breeze block on the accelerator of the truck, dives out and sprints clear as the truck smashes into Sanctuary.
• And the Herd follow it in.
• Morgan sends Daryl and Tara home as the dead storm Sanctuary.
• Eugene watches in horror as Sanctuary falls. He goes to Gabriel, disgusted by what’s been done. He won’t rescue Carson, he won’t do a damn thing beyond SURVIVE.
• Eugene goes to Negan. He has a plan to get them clear and more too. Dwight and the others are called in and Dwight is convinced Eugene’s extra idea is to reveal his role in the assault. Instead, Eugene lies for him.

• Later, alone and deafened by gunfire, Eugene turns in on himself with disgust and drinks.
• At the Junkyard, Rick gets a rematch with the metal headed Walker. Because he is DONE with this nonsense, he USES IT AS A MELEE WEAPON, disarms Jadis and drops her next to its severed, still snapping head. Rick helps her up, gets the Scavengers back on side and does so with no idea of just how bad everything has gone in his absence. He’s freed, climbs an electricity pylon to try and get a signal and sees Sanctuary.
• With no Walkers around it…

Review:

We’re officially over the top of the slope and sprinting downhill towards the mid-season finale. It shows too, as this episode sees three separate groups interact with the war in three separate ways.

Daryl’s war party is the most interesting and the way that it fragments speaks, very cleverly, to the show’s critics. The Walking Dead is regularly cited as being survivalist wish fulfillment and, well, it is. But this episode also shows just how awful that world would be. Daryl, Rosita, Michonne, Tara, Morgan and the snipers. All of them go rogue, all of them take it on themselves to be boss. None of them do a good job of it. Arguably, the only people who follow through, Daryl and Tara, actually do the most damage too.

And the crucial thing is, they have their reasons. Daryl’s torture at the hands of the Saviors and Dwight’s offhand murder of Doc are perfectly valid reasons for doing what they do. That doesn’t mean what they do is right though and the show does a great job of exploring that contradiction.

And nowhere does it explore that better than with Eugene and Dwight. The complex dance they do around each other, and their need to survive, takes what could have been a pedestrian episode and turns it into something immense and powerful. Josh McDermitt in particular is amazing as a man who knows his worth, knows how worthless he is to his friends and is tormented by the fact that his survival will lead to so many other deaths. There are no easy answers, even in this war and even though they aren’t on the front lines, Eugene and Dwight are taking just as much damage as everyone else.

And that brings us to Rick, who in contrast has something of a holiday this week. Yes he spends the episode in his pants, being drawn and then fighting a Walker but Rick, freed from the war, is actually completely at peace. He knows what he’s doing, he’s sticking to the plan and he knows it’ll be okay once he’s out.

And it works. Until he gets out.

This is where the central lesson of the episode really hits and oddly, it’s one that echoes all the way back to Lost; live together, die alone. The Coalition, shattered by the loss of the Kingdom, have taken it upon themselves to all be Rick. None of them have actually thought to go find him, almost none of them have stuck to his plan and now, the war is shattered, the Saviors are out and vengeance is coming.

And it’s everyone’s fault. Rick for playing his cards so close to his chest included. The plan is out of the window, now everybody’s just improvising. And next week we’re going to find out just how much damage that can cause.

The Good:

• Eugene’s list is the most adorable thing he’s done in a season and a half.
• The moment where Eugene thinks Negan wants him to kiss his hand is funny, terrifying and sad all at once.
• Josh McDermitt and Austin Amelio are incredible this episode. Amelio’s poker face, especially in that final scene where you think Eugene is about to expose Dwight, is this amazing mix of calm and total feral terror.
  Likewise McDermitt embraces the Shakespearean level monster Eugene is and constantly shows us the man under it. He’s arrogant, bloviated, utterly unsocially capable and absolutely self centred. And he KNOWS it. That horror is one of the most insidious things on the show and McDermitt is doing amazing work with it.

• Rick using a Walker as a close combat weapon.

The Bad:

• The effects on the drone are a little ropey. Which is especially weird as it looks like they may have just flown a real drone off the side of the building.
• Eugene’s speech pattern and Negan’s in the same scene walks right up to being utterly unbearable but they just about manage it.
• Gabriel’s illness still seems a little sudden and out of the blue.

The Random:

• Larry Teng directed and produced for much-loved psychic series Medium. He’s also worked on Criminal Minds, Supergirl (Where he directed the first part of Crisis on Earth-X this very week) and Elementary. He also worked as music and post-production supervisor on Ed, a little-known deeply weird and lovely series starring future Harrison Wells (All of them) Tom Cavanagh.
• Matthew Negrete and Corey Reed have been all over this season’s scripts. Negrete co-wrote ‘The Damned’ and ‘Monsters’ with Channing Powell while Reed co-wrote last week’s excellent ‘The King, the Widow and Rick’ with Angela Kang.

Best Lines:

• ‘It’s not worth risking US.’
  ‘It is for me.’
• ‘Negan’s not the dying type.’
  ‘BUT YOU ARE, EUGENE!’
• ‘After that? Maybe you should just run.’

Review by Alasdair Stuart

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