At long last, really and truly, the LAST nearly-real time recap of The Walking Dead. Mr. Mouse returned our cable box to Comcast and - amazingly - got no push-back when he said he wanted to drop cable and keep internet only. We got a new modem and our bill will be cut in half. (My only concern now is that the speed goes down too, so we'll just have to see how it goes.) I did manage to watch S8E14 last night and take notes so here's a sparse recap; it was a lot of talking anyway. Sorry, friends, but you're on your own for next Sunday's season finale.
OMG we start with a VERY earnest Carl voice-over: Rick reads the letter his son wrote him and Chandler Riggs gets VO duty. Also, Michonne steals Carl's letter to Negan because Rick doesn't look to be delivering it anytime soon.
In other locations: Over at the Sanctuary, where (almost) everyone thinks Negan is gone, Gregory sucks up to Simon who is presuming to take over the place. One person who now knows Negan is back is Dwight, because Negan surreptitiously seeks him out to elicit a confirmation of loyalty. At Oceanside, Aaron is still lurking in the woods, slowly starving/dehydrating to death, trying to avoid walkers and convince the Oceanside women to join the fight. (They aren't interested.) At Eugene's bullet-making outpost, Eugene is lackadaisical about meeting bullet quotas but he's adamant about the cooks serving up garlic-sardine mac-n-cheese, which he says sustained him all through his college years. Also, Gabriel, still sick, is intentionally making bad bullets. When faced with reprisals, Gabriel: "I don't want to help you but I still fear death" and he's sad to think that he hasn't changed into a better person than when he locked his parishioners out of his church to certain zombie death.
When Negan makes his presence known to the Sanctuary at large, Simon tries to justify his disobedience with respect to the exterminate vs. infect attack on Hilltop. And we learn that Simon is also responsible for having killed all the Oceanside men and boys (which is something I think we should have been told sooner?). Negan says he forgives him and announces a new plan, with maps: they're going to set up small stations all around Hilltop and pick off its denizens with snipers whenever someone shows their face. They'll win the war by attrition rather than all-out assault.
Dwight is now playing a very dangerous triple agent game: he tells Simon he supports him against Negan; he tells Negan he is loyal to him; and he copies the attack map in order to get it to Rick and Maggie so they can defend themselves. At this point, both Simon and Negan appear to believe Dwight's respective stories but I have a feeling Negan is just playing with him.
Meanwhile, Daryl and Rosita kidnap Eugene from his outpost. He fears they will kill him but instead they promise to stick him in a dark hole and keep using him for his clever brain. They are seething with disgust and anger towards him. They're pretty bad at this kidnapping thing though: during a walker encounter that keeps Daryl's attention, Eugene manages to escape by self-induced vomiting all over Rosita (remember the garlic and sardine mac-n-cheese? SO GROSS). When she recoils in disgust, he manages to get away. I don't know how - I thought Daryl was a super-tracker and there's no way Eugene moves quickly. Whatever.
By the way, we still don't know who Negan's hitchhiker was, do we?
During Simon's "let's plan a rebellion against Negan" meeting, Dwight betrays Simon to the big man. Negan loyalists shoot all the conspirators (except Dwight and, for some reason, Gregory) but Negan wants to battle it out with Simon in a bare fist battle. It's Thunderdome time! Despite Simon starting things off with a sucker punch, Negan beats him down and finally throttles the life out of his former right-hand man. During the fight, while everyone appears to be distracted, Dwight hands Gregory the annotated map, hands him some keys and sends him off to Hilltop to warn Rick and Maggie.
After choking Simon (and the nascent rebellion) to death, Negan promotes Dwight to be his #2 guy. But it was all a ploy because when Negan walks Dwight back to Dwight's quarters, the hitchhiker / Lauren / the girl on Dwight's attack team whom we all thought Dwight killed when he shot the rest of the team is there and she has brought everyone up to speed on Dwight's duplicity. By the way, smirks Negan, that "plan" I came up with is a fake and you've delivered that bad intel to Rick just as I wanted you to. And now Negan has "plans" for Dwight - which are undoubtedly even worse than stealing his wife and ironing his face.
Eugene makes it back to his outpost and orders everyone to up bullet production. Even Gabriel is conscripted to work.
Outside the Sanctuary, dead Simon has become one of the fence-zombies. He's very bite-y.
Michonne has come within walkie-talkie range of the Sanctuary. She calls Negan and reads him the letter Carl wrote to him: "The way out is working together. It's forgiveness." But Negan has had enough: "[I'm going to be] killing every last one of you. That is [the way out]. Rick started this." And then he crushes his walkie underfoot, ostensibly to keep her from contacting him again but jeez, for someone who is so concerned about resources, couldn't he have just changed the channel?
And next Sunday is the season finale: will anyone important die? I guess Morgan is getting out of dodge and moving over to
Fear the Walking Dead. Good luck to him.
Previously on The Walking Dead /
next time on The Walking Dead
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