A storm ravages Alexandria as Maggie goes to war with Pope and Leah makes her choice.

This doesn’t quite work, and it’s for really interesting, challenging reasons. The vast majority of the episode is great and we’ll talk about that first, because it continues to embody what the show does best. Every moment that lands here, whether it’s Gabriel double checking his directions before heading off on a side mission, Judith and Virgil bonding or Leah’s choice, comes from character. The show is eleven years old and pretty much every character has been around a while so simply having them react helps. In particular, Christian Serratos as Rosita gets a moment of astounding badassery that has been seasons coming. With the dead swarming the house, she stands on the porch, dispatches a dozen or more and then wades into the herd in the exact manner you’d expect a heroic sacrifice to start. Only she returns a few moments later, exhausted, traumatized and unharmed. Rosita has been a safe pair of hands on the show for years. Here at last, she gets a chance to show why and it’s great.

Judith too has a lot of excellent work here and her scene with Virgil is lovely. Judith, like every child in the colony, has grown up faster than anyone has to and has enough emotional awareness to miss her mother in a manner that makes it clear she thinks she’s dead. Virgil’s response, that he sees Michonne in everything Judith does and, wherever Michonne is, Judith’s with her too, is lovely. It’s heartfelt, honest and pragmatic, people who live inside tragedy finding hope or peace where they can. It’s moments like this that, for me at least, more than justify the show’s continued existence. It’s a character drama with occasional ambulatory corpses and when it works, it works.

Which brings us to Daryl, Leah, Pope and what doesn’t work. The slow motion war between Maggie’s herd and the Reapers is really, really good. From the moment the first mine goes off it’s clear that this is still an uneven fight, and not uneven in the way Maggie wants. Ritchie Coster’s Pope is almost joyous in having a worthy foe and his growing need for blood, any blood, is well played and disturbing. But even that’s just the prelude to Daryl coming clean to Leah, Leah killing Pope and framing Daryl for it and continuing to lead her people against Maggie. Leah and Daryl are two sides of the same coin; intensely loyal to their families and unable to let anything else get in the way. Or anyone. This is really really well played, especially by Lynn Collins and assuming she makes it through the next episode, Leah is going to be a very different and even more dangerous type of foe than Pope.

That brings us to what doesn’t quite work: the ending. Pope is revealed to have anticipated Maggie’s assault and one of the Reapers, a combat engineer, has built what looks a lot like an old Chinese rocket battery. This is a fantastic idea, not just because it shows the level of organization Pope and the Reapers have but also that society really has rebuilt to the point where this sort of thing is possible again. That’s fantastic. What’s less fantastic is the ending where Maggie and Negan, in the middle of a three way infantry war between the Reapers, the dead and their people, stand and watch as the thing is fired at them. As a cliffhanger, it’s great. As a tie off for a season act that’s been defined by smart choices and character, it’s anything but.

That being said, there’s still a lot to enjoy here especially Sharat Raju’s pleasingly pragmatic, down and dirty direction (the shot of Rosita silhouetted in the doorway is especially great). Hopefully in four months, the second act will open a little more evenly than this closes. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart