The Walking Dead: The Damned

First Aired October 29th, 2017

Carol (played by Melissa McBride) and her group recover from a flash bang while raiding a Savior building. Meanwhile a group of Saviors preparing their weapons are ambushed by a group led by Aaron (played by Ross Marquand) while Morgan (played by Lennie James) leads another group to raid a satellite station run by Saviors.

Carol and Ezekiel (played by Khary Payton) lead their group against an onslaught of walkers and take off after the Savior who ran off. With the Saviors occupied with the fight Rick (played by Andrew Lincoln) and Daryl (played by Norman Reedus) sneak inside the building hoping to raid a stash of guns. Morgan, Tara (played by Alanna Masterson) and Jesus (played by Tom Payne) get inside the satellite station and begin stealthy killing Saviors, but their caught and the Saviors retaliate killing several people, seemingly Morgan as well. Tara and Jesus find a man in a closet who surrenders and claims not to be a Savior, Tara wants to kill him but Jesus refuses believing him to be innocent. But at first chance the man takes Jesus hostage but they disarm him, but to Tara’s outrage Jesus ties the man up instead of killing him. They leave with the others to chase the retreating Saviors unknowingly leaving behind Morgan who was only wounded in the attack.

The attack last week was like a fuse being lit, this episode was nonstop action all the way through. In the past whenever Rick and the others met a new hostile group it takes a while to build to these kind of fight scenes. Perhaps things will slow down towards the middle of the season but last season we saw so much of the Saviors antagonizing these communities it’s great to see the action kicked into high gear so early. And with the action spread to so many places it made the battle more epic in it’s scope and kept the action moving at a quick pace.

This episode might have even worked better as the premiere because it not only had lots of action there was plenty of character moment, like Tara’s anger over her girlfriend Denise’s (played by Merritt Weaver). But then again she’d been holding it in since last season and in the apocalypse significant others are hard to come by.

As the battle rages outside several of the dead reanimate as walkers and they begin advancing on the Saviors. Carol and Ezekiel lead their team through to catch the Savior before he can warn others, following a blood trail he left. While searching for guns Rick is jumped by a Savior and after a brutal fight he kills him, while Morgan moves throughout the station killing every Savior he sees. Outside Tara and Jesus manage to surround the remaining Saviors with their group and they surrender, Tara is not happy about letting them live and neither is Morgan who has to be talked down from shooting them.

Jesus is acting on orders from Maggie (played by Lauren Cohan) but Tara believes Rick would simply want to execute them all. Rick continues to search and finds a sleeping baby in a nursery and when he realizes the Savior he killed was just protecting his daughter it leaves him visibly shaken. Carol and Ezekiel catch up to the Savior but merely watch as his pet tiger Shiva mauls the man. Aaron notices that his boyfriend Eric (played by Jordan Woods-Robinson) was injured in the crossfire and drags him away to safety.

You may be surprised that Aaron has a boyfriend, understandable since I don’t think he’s had a speaking part in an episode for so long. Morgan went from somebody resolved never to kill no matter the reason to a killing machine, he was like the Terminator taking out Savior after Savior. It’s good his character is growing but seeing that weird trance he went into clearly shows he overcorrected with his stance on killing.

Maggie must have an idea of turning some of the Saviors to their side, it’s the only reason to let any of them live. Given how oppressive Negan (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is it’s possible to turn a few but taking a group that large is asking for trouble. Rick walking into that nursery was a hard dose of reality; it’s not as black and white as the Saviors are all evil people. Killing has become second nature to Rick and for the first time in a long time he’s seeing the real consequences it can have.

Although the Saviors know they’re coming Ezekiel refuses to retreat and urges Carol and the others to take them on. Rick is confronted by Morales (played by Juan Gabriel Pareja) a survivor who was with the group when they were was based in Atlanta. The shock of seeing Morales is overshadowed when he holds Rick at gunpoint and makes it clear he’s in league with the Saviors. Talk about a blast from the past, this guy drove off in season one with his family and now he’s back and he is pissed. It’ll be fun to see how this once jovial family man turned into a stone cold Savior although if I had to guess it’d be his family died tragically. It almost makes you wonder if Rick didn’t have his kids if he would have turned out like Morales.

Quotes/Thought

“There will be no fantasies of failure this day.”

Ezekiel’s long winded speeches still sound like he’s putting on a show but you have to admit he knows how to whip up a crowd.

“I don’t die.”

Morgan boldly stating that he doesn’t die sounds like foreshadowing that he’ll have a lot of close calls this season (he had one already), and he could likely get proven wrong eventually.

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