As the war with the Saviors continues, the Coalition engages on four fronts. Aaron and Eric lead a brutal firefight against the Saviors’ reservists, Ezekiel and Carol track a fugitive, Morgan, Tara and Jesus storm the relay station and Rick and Daryl hit the arsenal.

Or think they do…

The serialised approach is one The Walking Dead has used successfully in the past and this is no exception. The four plots are all pretty action heavy and the episode sprints along. Plus the four fronts give a really welcome sense of scale. This isn’t the skirmishes of previous seasons. This really is all out war.

Two of the four plots work brilliantly. The ideological clash between Tara and Jesus is the show at its best, neither wrong, neither fully right. Their interactions this episode are where this show always does its best work; in the clash not between the living and the dead but between the good and bad instincts of the living.

Morgan’s plot impresses too, as the pacifist warrior monk casually, and brutally, murders a dozen Saviors. Morgan is off the rails, knows he is and is voluntarily risking his sanity and long term well being for the greater good. Lennie James has been a mainstay of the show for years now and this is some of his very best work.

The Rick and Daryl plot is the slowest of the four but it has an absolutely brutal payoff. Rick engages in a scrappy, desperate fight with the Savior he thinks is guarding the weapons stash. It’s clumsy, frantic and desperate and will ensure you never look at shelf brackets the same way again.

And then Rick finds the baby. The real reason the Savior fought so hard.

Andrew Lincoln gets a moment where Rick sees himself in the mirror, sweaty and covered in blood and you can see he doesn’t recognize himself. It’s a brilliant moment and looks set, we hope at least, to change the show forever as Rick tries to raise the baby.

And then there’s the Eric and Aaron plot.

You may not recognise Eric. He doesn’t make it past the cutting room floor often. He’s Aaron’s boyfriend. And this week he gets a big action sequence and a possibly fatal chest wound.

This isn’t good. At all.

Both The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead have form when it coms to unnecessary gay character murder. This looks, at least right now, like more of the same. If it is, if cheap drama is going to be extracted from a character we barely see being killed so his boyfriend can feel sad, then that’s about as low rent as it is physically possible to get. The show is much, much better than this. Or it should be.

Verdict: That aside, there’s a lot to enjoy this episode. Ezekiel and Carol are a wonderfully sparky couple, there’s some nicely handled action and some great character beats. But we won’t know before next episode if this is a fake out or a return to one of the show’s lowest points. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart