All roads lead…

The first thing we see in ‘Family’ is a montage of the last eleven years, intercut with a trunk of familiar weapons being claimed. As the narration, delivered as it has been for the last few episodes by Judith, wraps up we see her take the last two weapons. Her father’s revolver. Her second mother’s sword. She gives her dad’s hat to RJ, and smiles.

‘Family’ is an episode about family and every scene hums with the profound love we as a species have not just for the people we’re related to but the people we choose to stand with. Judith gets the first word and the last. In the middle we get moments with everyone we’ve seen up to this point.

Writers Magali Lozano & Erik Mountain & Kevin Deiboldt tie the disparate threads of the season together very well. The newly liberated Alexandrians head back to the Commonwealth via train, where Mercer and Alex are helping Eugene and Yumiko get to safety and foment revolution against Pamela. Pamela meanwhile orders a herd steered towards Alexandria to help unite people behind her. The herd intersects with Aaron’s team who are carried along with it. Voila! Everyone in the same place or heading there!

It pays off three big ways too. Sharat Raju’s direction, full of top-down shots of the herd, never lets you forget the scale of what’s happening and the episode does a brilliant job of showing just what a few Variants can do. Mercer’s army do everything right. Everyone’s had a decade of dealing with Rotters a specific way and they literally don’t see the Variants coming. The moment where one climbs a tank in the final minutes and Negan mutters ‘What the f—k?’ is a moment of absolute empathy between audience and characters. This is new and it is not good and everyone we’ve spent a decade learning about is caught in the middle.

Negan and Ezekiel get the best material of the episode by some distance. Khary Payton has been an MVP from the moment he arrived but this, which is I think only their second scene together(?!), is incredibly good. Dean Morgan’s Negan has evolved from the swaggering violent profanity magnet of his early appearances to a man making his peace with who he isn’t and trying to work out who he is. Ezekiel, a man who hid behind a fictional suit of armour for years only to find he didn’t need to, is a perfect scene partner for the former Savior. Ezekiel’s revisiting of his ‘Yet I smile’ speech is one of the most poignant moments in an episode full of them and Payton and Morgan land every single second of it. All Negan can see is his past and how much better everyone else is. All Ezekiel knows is he’s still here despite everything. Two men, similar paths, and at last, comparing notes.

Team Aaron also get some good stuff here as Lydia is bitten trying to stop Elijah being swept away by the herd. It’s so cool to see the characters using the techniques the Whisperers used against them and speaks to the core motif of the show: that survival is better together. It also feels dangerous in a way the show often hasn’t. They’re walking with killers and their only protection is caution. That makes the deeply gory moment where Lydia is bitten trying to stop Elijah being swept away all the more impactful. In turn, it leads to Aaron tearfully reassuring her as she undergoes the identical physical trauma he did. What finished me off was Jerry, big, funny, kind Jerry, apologising before amputating her arm. The fact Jerry then volunteers to go back out and find the others is just the icing on the cake. They want us to think Jerry’s doomed and Aaron’s little sub-family is not far behind him. I really hope that isn’t the case.

But where the episode really shines is in the final act. Pamela outmanoeuvres everyone even as she dooms them. Abandoning the ‘lower’ part of the Commonwealth to the dead, she leads an assault on the Alexandrians, ambushing them as they return. In the fight, Judith is badly wounded by Pamela and her first response is to blame the Alexandrians. It’s a great beat, Laila Robbins relishing the chance to finally pull the civilized mask off the Commonwealth’s hypocrite-in-chief.

It also leads to one of the strongest closing scenes the show has ever had. The way that everyone seamlessly comes together to give Daryl a shot at getting Judith help is deeply touching. Negan standing shoulder to shoulder with his worst enemies, every dispute of the past forgotten. Standing together as family. And just as you realize this, Judith opens her eyes, looks at Daryl and says one word:

‘Daddy?’

It’s a perfect sequence at the end of an episode that capstones the season so far brilliantly.

Verdict: I have no clue how it’ll end. I do know this is the best possible set up for it. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart