As winter sets in, the Kingdom is evacuated. But the road is dangerous and survival isn’t guaranteed for anyone.

It turns out the only place to go after ‘five regular characters’ heads on sticks’ is not to mount an even larger atrocity but to go much smaller. The end result is possibly the strongest season finale the show has had in several years and certainly one of the best episodes of the season.

The maxim from Angel: ‘If nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do’ has been on my mind a lot lately and it’s central to this episode. The Whisperers aren’t present aside from a brief, season 10-hinting coda. The entire episode focuses instead on the horrible aftermath of the ‘border’ being established and the practicalities of surviving in the storm.

That first is cleverly explored most through Lydia and Carol. On two occasions Lydia tries to work up the courage to kill herself. On two occasions Carol stops her. There’s no hint of compassion to it either, or anger. It’s just that Lydia is alive and Carol wants more people to live. That’s all there is right now, as she breaks up with Ezekiel and withdraws into herself. That in turn leads to the best moment in the episode, with Ezekiel, dropping King Voice, and begging Daryl to move out of Hilltop when they get there so he and Carol have a chance. It’s a great, desperate moment of honesty and in a lesser show it would set up a season of antagonism. Here it’s a quiet moment between two newly quiet men with bigger things on their minds. Like frozen solid Walkers, a sneak across Whisperer territory and being forced to shelter in Sanctuary for a night. The journey is arduous, dangerous and one they all take together even as they’re locked into their own heads. The fact it closes with a small, but defiant, snowball fight tells you the most important thing. These people, wounded and damaged so many times, are still human.

That’s doubly true of the other plot, which sees the people of Alexandria shelter in the few houses that have functional chimneys. This, bizarrely, leads to the repositioning of Negan begun a few episodes ago to complete. He’s actually fun here, for basically the first time ever. Jovially happy about being trapped with Rosita, Gabriel, Eugene and the ‘love quadrangle’, he’s a sincerely cheerful presence who steps up when called upon. Judith goes looking for Dog. Negan goes looking for Judith and before you know it the man who beat two season regulars to death with a barb wire covered baseball bat is, if not redeemed, then certainly recontextualized. Negan is going to be a big part of next season and for the first time in a while that’s a sentence that doesn’t fill me with dread.

Verdict: The Walking Dead has weathered the departure of its leading character. Next season it has to do that again with Michonne, deal with the introduction of a third show and explore the Whisperers more. Four years ago that would have seemed like the show staging an actual crewed mission to the Moon. Now, it seems like Monday. The Walking Dead has hit its stride again. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart