Maggie wrestles with the demands of being a wartime leader. Eugene gets a promotion. Daryl and Tara lead the Alexandrian survivors through  hell and not everyone comes out alive.

After last week’s startlingly terrible episode the show had two choices: an all-out collapse or a step up. This episode, aside from one bum note, is a definite step up.

That bum note first, especially as it’s one that the show plays so many times it’s a miracle the string hasn’t snapped: hope or the lack of it. Gabriel’s absolute faith is front and centre here and Seth Gilliam does wonders with it. His calm, focused compassion could so easily play like the kind of banal, complacent faith that it’s in constant danger of. Instead, Gabriel is a man on a holy mission and with absolute belief it will succeed.

Until it doesn’t. Which, longform, may be the problem. The show has endlessly yanked the carpet out from under its characters and this episode could so easily have been a ‘Psyche! Ha Ha! The World Is An Endless Cruel Joke!’ ending. The fact it isn’t is down to both the always wonderful Gilliam and the rarely wonderful Eugene. Josh McDermitt is always great but the material he has to work with is not. This episode, especially the final exchange with Eugene, ramps up the self-awareness of both characters to horrific levels. Eugene knows he’s a monster. Gabriel knows he’s doomed. Hope dies, yet again, but this week at least dies in context and without yet another cast member joining it.

That, by itself, would be enough. However, the Maggie plot this week also impresses as she struggles to make her peace with her decision to keep the prisoners alive. Elsewhere, Tara and Dwight have problems of their own: Tara’s is Dwight. Dwight’s is his murder of Denise a couple of seasons ago. Neither one of them is right, neither is wrong enough and the result is a moment of brilliantly handled ambiguity that this show often reaches for but doesn’t always get.

Verdict: Grim, again, but with a sense of progress rather than wallowing, this is the episode the show needed after last week. Whether next week’s, especially given its return of Rick, will build on it remains to be seen. But we sure hope so. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart