Maggie struggles with the demands of leadership, Rick struggles with the realities of letting go of leadership. Daryl struggles with letting go of what the Saviors did to him.

This is one of the strongest episodes the show has produced in years and the reason for it, weirdly, is in that oddly samey description. Every character is engaged here, right down to relatively minor ones and all of them orbiting the attempt to get the bridge between the colonies repaired. It’s a metaphorical bridge as well as a physical one and the episode does great work using it to explore these extraordinary people as they realise they no longer have to just survive.

Lauren Cohan and Andrew Lincoln are especially good here and both seem to relish finally being allowed to grow. Both have a telling moment which speaks to their departures too. For Maggie it’s the sense that she may be the architect of Hilltop’s success but may not be able to live there. For Rick it’s a moment where he watches his people, every colony, around a campfire and hesitates before joining them. Like Ezekiel says in relation to Henry, they’ll be off to college before you know it.

Joking aside, there is a real sense of the show and characters growing here and that growth becoming a defining struggle more telling than the war ever was. The episode’s best sequence is a herd attack which may, genuinely, be accidental. However, tempers are running so high that it doesn’t matter, especially after the panicked evacuation leaves Edith forced to amputate Aaron’s arm. These two largely overlooked characters get a double moment of crisis and focus, one which is given emotional heft by Aaron finding time to comfort Edith before she has to mutilate him. It’s heavy stuff and the cost of the attack weighs heavily on everyone, especially Daryl.

But, brilliantly, it doesn’t make people stupid. There’s an assumption that the Saviors who have vanished simply walked off. There’s tension between Hilltop and Sanctuary because an ethanol shipment left for Hilltop but never arrived. People still have one eye on their gun but Rick gets solid evidence something else is going on. And so do we. Someone else is in the area and the shift from the Saviors’ endless monologues to an enemy who is silent, invisible and efficient is a chilling one.

Not to say the Saviors aren’t present here. Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan makes a return that will make comic fans happy and former Saviors are central to the narrative of these struggling communities trying to be a struggling society. It’s complex, untidy and difficult work. They do it anyway because that’s what survival means in this show now. And, bluntly, it’s so much better for it.

Verdict: Complex, even handed and clever this is a fantastic hour of TV. Season 9 of The Walking Dead continues to impress. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart