Spoilers

Maggie’s team is either slaughtered or scattered to the four winds by the Reapers. Back at Alexandria, Carol jumps the rails, and others pay the price while the kids, it turns out, actually are alright. For now.

So, let’s talk about violence because this episode uses it as punctuation and structure, especially in the opening scene. Maggie’s team is decimated by the Reapers, and director Frederick E.O. Toye throws the camera around the night-time forest where they’re slaughtered, only ever illuminating one person at a time. Negan gets hit! Gabriel gets hit! Daryl vanishes into the night! Maggie’s caught and then saved! It’s frantic and savage and the exact opposite of the ‘good evening, this large probably moustachioed biker gentlemen will be pummelling you now’ violence that the show has often done in the past. So, violence as structure (our heroes, scattered!) and violence as punctuation because, in the end, this world is always violent. Witness Gabriel ending the life of the one Reaper they manage to wound. Witness too, Carol, but we’ll get to that.

The core of the episode is Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan and it is rock solid. Maggie and Negan are having minus fun, and Maggie’s running fight with a reaper is one of the most truly frightening moments the show has produced in years. These guys are trained, and theatrical and utterly brutal. The sounds we hear when one is mauling Alden (Callan McAuliffe) are terrifying as the former Savior is dismantled by his opponent. It also manages to sell us on just how desperate the situation is; this is Maggie, Negan and Alden, folks who’ve been around a while and genuinely none of them feel safe. What makes it is that they know that too and Negan especially isn’t backward about coming forward when it comes to the Walkers and the Reapers. No one feels like they’re wearing plot armour and that makes the violence all the more impactful. Especially as Negan never leaves Maggie’s side and at the end of the episode, Alden may very well not be alive much longer. This is a desperate situation, one made all the more so by Maggie’s understandable rage at Negan for his past actions and Negan’s exhausted, dogged loyalty. These two will never be friends. But right now they’re all they have.

Elsewhere in the episode things are quieter but the violence is still there. Carol leads a team including Rosita, Magna and Connie out to look for the horses that escaped when Alexandria was burnt down. Without the horses they can’t move heavy loads. Without that, they’re starving to death in a ruin. Yet again, Melissa McBride, Angel Theory, Christian Serratos and Nadia Hilker prove just how good they are with a plot that could be trite but instead leads to one of the rare moments of grace the show allows itself. Is a horse wrangling scene cheesy? Probably. Do the same people who complained about last week’s relentless grim tone get to complain about this? No. They do not.

Because the horse plot returns us to violence as structure and in doing so illuminates Carol’s damage. She’s manipulating Kelly (Theory) into working with promises of finding her missing sister. When she’s called on this, she… does it anyway. Carol has always been a law unto herself and now more so than ever but she’s also always had an eye on what the community needs. Sometimes that’s been removing herself and here, it’s doing the hard thing. Doing the violence. Carol doesn’t kill one of the horses because she wants to, she does so because no one else can. The horses represent hope and possibility and sometimes you have to burn hope to survive long enough. Carol can do that when no one else can even though it costs her just as dearly and it’s a deeply disturbing, moving end to the episode that’s bookended by the children of Alexandria discussing what they have to eat when there’s nothing else. This time, there is. But there’s a price too and for her sins, or perhaps because of them, Carol is willing to pay it.

Verdict: This is already looking like an intensely serialized season and this episode feels like a pause for breath before the next developments. It’s a hard watch but it’s not a sensationalist one, despite or perhaps because of both the violence and its price. Uncompromising, intelligent, emotionally honest and impressive work. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart