Dwight, June and Sherry confront Strand over his abduction of Troy’s child, Tracy. Tracy claims she can bring Madison to Alicia’s body. Everyone is lying.

Or rather, everyone wants something and it’s usually Tracy. Antonella Rose has been handed an incredibly difficult task, asked to make a character, who is fundamentally unlikable and also vital to the plot and also brand new, compelling. The youngest cast member succeeds completely and Nazrin Choudhury and Calaya Michelle Stallworth’s script makes her less a hot potato and more an element of chaos that drags everyone into her orbit. There’s real darkness to these scenes, especially when it arrives at the herd Troy has frozen into place nearby. The image of them picking their way through Walkers frozen in place is one of the most frightening the show has ever done. The revelation that Alicia isn’t dead, at least here, cuts across it neatly.

The thematic muscle of the episode is just as impressive. Tracy’s reference to her mom being killed because she followed Madison’s ‘No one’s gone until they’re gone’ mantra implies so much. Did Troy try to follow the same beliefs? Is this not his second act but his third? It’s big, chewy fun stuff and it gives Troy and Tracy some surprising depth.

Not everything works, and the pitched battle between Luciana’s forces and Troy’s happening off screen is a really frustrating beat. Similarly, the Madison/Daniel/Strand terrible parent off is deeply annoying until the herd scene ties it off. The ghost of ‘characters do terrible things because reasons’ has been absent from this show for a long time and its brief return here is not welcome.

Strand, ironically, just wants the kid to live. He’s taken a real glass of ideological cold water to the face and is dedicated completely to the exact beliefs Madison is abandoning. Madison wants vengeance, and Kim Dickens does excellent work here showing how driven, and driven off beam, she is. It also puts her solidly in line with Daniel, and Rubén Blades and Dickens get some excellent work to do here as the two vengeful parents are led off the beaten path by the only person in the series angrier than they are.

That being said, it does lead to one of the most interesting strands of the show, in every sense. Strand is rescued by a group of women driving the MRAP, Al’s old SWAT Vehicle that Alicia took with her when she went. They have weapons on one hand, they dress like Alicia and they follow her teachings. Dead or alive, Alicia Clark is now the first patron saint of the post-apocalypse.

Verdict: This is a fun episode. It debuts a major character in a major way, it ties the thematic muscles of the show to its characters and it sets up the first act of the endgame very nicely. Big, nasty, fun stuff. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart