Alpha recounts how she died, and we see just what she means by that.

This is a drastic steer back to the dark after the chirpy opening episodes and it’s hard to deal with at first. Samanthan Morton’s not-yet-Alpha is a deliberately unlikable character, a woman trapped inside how others perceive her and slowly forging her own identity into something she wants, not something inflicted on her by others. This is dark territory, and mutilation and suicidal ideation are at the centre of the third act. But just when you think this is performative brutality, Canning Powell’s script shows us what’s really going on.

The story opens in the middle, Dee (Samantha Morton) and Lydia (Scarlett Blum) on a river boat run by Brooke (Lauren Glazier). The boat is opulent, staffed, well-stocked and feels like an oasis from the world outside in the bayou. But the moment we see Dee, shorter than everyone else, practical where they’re still wearing the clothes of a gone world, we sense the tension. Glazier is great as Brooke, somewhere between an influencer and one of the core show’s settlement rulers and she and Powell make her nicely complex. On the one hand, Brooke has kept people alive and sheltered. On the other, this is very much a caste system and one that Brooke wants to save Lydia from. Oddly, despite every protagonist we’ve had so far living, she feels like the first one we could see again and it’s a great performance. In particular, the start of their journey towards being Whisperers is an incredible moment of gore-soaked invention, the pair hiding inside a gutted corpse as Walkers swarm.

Morton was a force of nature during her time on the core show and she’s a force of nature here. There’s a running beat with the fact everyone thinks Dee is a step away from knifing them that, ironically, never plays out and that gives her an added tragic air. Dee isn’t a monster, but she becomes one to save her daughter, not just from the world but from herself. She remains the heroine of her own story, even down to the end we know is coming. Blum too impresses vastly, an open, raw emotional performance that’s untidy and at times hard to like and absolutely a child of the apocalypse. You pity Lydia and her mom. You fear them and, marking this out as a great piece of drama, you understand every choice they make. Regardless of how horrifying it is.

Verdict: Difficult, terse, challenging and worth it. Tales of the Walking Dead just nailed its first gear change. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart