Penultimate episodes of The Walking Dead seem to follow a pattern.  This pattern holds true even for the episodes preceding a mid-season finale.  Simply put, the majority of the episode is moving the pieces around on the chess board for a while, ramping up the suspense, before smacking the audience hard on the nose in the final minutes.  And sure enough, that’s pretty much what happened in this installment.

              

 

Let’s dispense with the obvious point of angst for Daryl Dixon fans: he’s not dead (yet).  Dwight made it pretty clear that it was more about wounding than killing.  Not that this is an interpretation that should give comfort to Daryl’s devoted.  If Dwight let Daryl live, it’s most likely because the real Negan is out there, and wants any captured Alexandrians brought to him alive.  Why?  Because he has a little retribution and a serious message to deliver to Rick.  Count on it.

 

A lot of this episode was about giving characters reasons to roam beyond the safety of Alexandria’s walls, and in some cases, it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.  For the first time since the slaughter at the (apparent) Sanctuary, the Saviors struck back in the previous installment.  And it hasn’t been that long since those events, so everyone involved ought to be well aware that there is a clear and present danger.  I get that Carol is going through a serious crisis of conscience, but honestly, what was she thinking?  That no one would come after her?

 

 

Speaking of Carol, for someone who really would like to stop having to kill people already, she’s demonstrating a high proficiency for it.  Her dispatch of that gang of Saviors was rather impressive, to say the least, and I’ll be more than a little disappointed if Hiro managed to get a drop on her with that knife.  Even if he did, any massive amount of damage is going to seem suspect, given that there wasn’t even a trail of blood for Rick and Morgan to follow.

 

There are a lot of characters in the crosshairs by the end of this episode, and I won’t deny that the amount of spoilers from the source material and production details has actually enhanced the anxiety going into the finale.  One can cut the tension coming from the audience with a knife, and some of that is just from the dread dripping in every scene of this episode.  Add to that a wee bit of foreknowledge, and the fear and anticipation is almost unbearable.  Quite frankly, that is impressive, given that this is the tail end of the sixth season.

 

Oddly enough, I feel like this episode presented a new candidate for Lucille’s tender mercies: Morgan.  The writers for the show have indicated, slyly but openly, that they could very well continue their trend of having key deaths take place with different characters in the crosshairs.  They have been teasing Glenn and Daryl like crazy all season, but with Carol struggling with the possibility that Morgan’s philosophy might have been right, how interesting would it be to have that philosophy smashed to pieces?  It would be grist for the mill in terms of criticism over the death of black characters on the show, but Morgan’s scenes with Rick in this episode made me think he’s on his way out.

 

There are those who feel like Daryl is the obvious choice, but I disagree that he is a character that has come to the end of his usefulness.  Let’s just say that Dwight is a far more complex character than one would currently suspect, and having someone like Daryl around to oppose and then possibly align with in the future would make a lot a sense in the narrative sense.  Not that this necessarily means much if the writers are going for shock value, but that presents an even more cringe-inducing possibility.

 

What if the writers aren’t entirely sure which of the characters they want to kill off yet?  Or they want to torture the audience for months on end with the knowledge that someone important is getting brutally murdered, but the identity is still unknown?  There are a number of ways that they could lead right up to the iconic moment of that beatdown with a bat without revealing which of the characters has been killed, and after the tease that was the mid-season cliffhanger, would it be all that shocking if they delivered an even bigger punch to the gut in the season finale?  Time will shortly tell.