The balloon team are saved, just. But the reactor is going critical and everyone is about to make a string of tough choices.

What a massively weird and fun show this has become. The hot air balloon was an inspired idea and acts as the trailhead for two full episodes of basically constant jeopardy. When the team aren’t trying to recuse the ballooners they’re trying to save the kids. When they aren’t trying to save the kids, they’re trying to get back before the plane has to leave. If they’re not doing that they’re confronting the difficulties of the post-apocalyptic world and what happens when the people you love, and who love you, want you to save yourself and not them.

It’s heady stuff and it’s all character driven, small scale and internal stuff too. Which makes sense given the Whisperer War over on the main show, but I can see how some people might take this as nothing happening. A lot happens, basically constantly, but the show and its characters have a very different focus. Where Rick and the original cast are motivated to build a culture, this group are motivated to atone for their past actions and through that build a culture. It’s still the community and evolution of society plot that the entire Walking Dead franchise is engaging with, but it’s on a far more personal scale. That’s a subtle but important difference that makes this a far more intimate show than the core one at times but no less impressive for it.

It also makes the very smart play of showing us the evolution of the survivor mindset. The kids are basically where Alicia was when the show started; happy to shelter in place, refusing to accept the world as it is. Just as Morgan realises he isn’t prepared to let anyone die, and goes back fir Grace, Alicia realises she isn’t prepared to let the kids die through mistakes she recognises. What follows is one of the show’s best, most untidy action sequences that culminates in a moment where everything suddenly comes to a grinding halt and you’re reminded this show backs away from nothing. In the space of one episode we have Alicia possibly being exposed to radiation, the reactor definitely going critical and Morgan refusing to leave Grace behind. No decision is stupid, no victory unearned or unpunished.

Verdict: It’s a tough show that makes itself a tough show because it’s concerned with the fate of everyone, good and bad alike. This week, that comes together to create a great hour of TV. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart