Let’s start with Morgan, still searching for Carol. He finds a saddled horse and tracks her. She is curled up on the porch of a library, which was once a small camp of people who we find out recently fell to the Saviors. Morgan takes her inside and patches up her battle wounds as best as he can. It is nearly dusk; Morgan will protect her, then they will move out in the morning. Carol refuses to go back. Morning comes, and Morgan again tries to convince Carol to come back to Alexandria. She knows that the people there love her, just as she loves them – that’s why she can’t be there. “You will kill to protect them,” she explains. “If you don’t want to or can’t, you have to get away from them. You can’t do both.” She even pulls a gun on Morgan when he refuses. She lowers it and asks again, nicely. I find this whole line of reasoning pointless and annoying. It is the first time I truly started to dislike Carol. She has given up. She is no longer willing to fight to live, fight so the ones she loves can live. Why not just kill yourself and be done with it?
Morgan walks the perimeter and kills a walker that is hanged from a tower. When he goes back inside, Carol is gone. He mounts up his horse and goes to find her.
But the driver from last week’s gun battle is still looking for Carol, and he finds her first. He disarms her and tackles her to the ground. His plan is to watch her die slowly. He is not long for this world, and wants to see who will die first. He shoots Carol in the arm, a “pretty good start.” Carol chuckles, which infuriates her captor. “I’m going to die, so there is nothing wrong with me anymore.” He shoots her in the leg and asks if she suffered enough. “No, probably not,” she admits. The man is infuriated that she isn’t scared to die, especially when she starts taunting him. He comes back to her, but before he can land the kill shot, Morgan appears, gun drawn. He tells the man that he can survive this, but the guy doesn’t care. He takes aim, but Morgan empties his gun into the man. He broke his cardinal rule for Carol. Carol still doesn’t want to come back. Two men appear in homemade suits of armor (made of football gear, I think); one is on horseback. They are non-threatening, and offer Morgan and Carol some help. If I had to guess, I would say these guys are from The Kingdom.
The main plot line tonight is with Rick’s crew. Maggie is in bad shape and they need to get her to the Hilltop, where there is a doctor. Rick and Maggie travel with Carl, Abraham, Eugene, Aaron, and Sasha in an RV. Gabriel is in charge of security back at Alexandria, and he seems to have a pretty tight plan in place. Rick trusts him. Enid really wants to go, too, but Carl won’t allow her; he worries that something will happen to her. So he locks her in a closet. It is not revisited for the rest of the episode, but I assume it will come into play next season.
Along the way they run into some trouble: a handful of Saviors have blocked the road and are waiting for them. These Saviors, led by a creepy guy with a mustache, had been chasing a bloodied man through the woods during the opening of the show. The creepy intensity of their hunt reminded me of The Last House on the Left. They capture the man and have him laid out on the ground when Rick’s group arrives. The guys get out of the RV and confront the Saviors – from a safe distance. Rick wants to make a deal with them. The lead Savior says sure. They want all of their stuff, but they will probably still have to kill one of Rick’s team. Rick has a counter offer: all of the Saviors stuff, and he doesn’t kill them – any more of them. The Saviors don’t flinch, and Rick and his crew eventually get back in the RV. They turn around, intent on finding another route to the Hilltop.
Back on the road, Abraham talks about starting a family with Sasha. She seems flattered that he didn’t start thinking that way until they started dating. The talk stops when, around the corner, are more Saviors. Carl wants to make a stand; end it. Rick points out that they had been waiting there. Rick wants to play it their way. Abraham turns the RV around and they head to a third route.
On the third route, there is another barricade, this one a line of zombies chained across the road. Abraham remains behind the wheel while the rest of the group get out and approach the zombies slowly. On one, they see someone has clipped two of Michonne’s dreadlocks; another was shot through with Daryl’s arrows. Before they can kill the walkers, shots ring out. The Saviors had been hiding in the brush. Rick commands everyone back into the RV. He quickly cuts free a few of the zombies, then hops back on the RV and continue. Rick contemplates what happened. The Saviors were firing at their feet. They wanted them alive, and wanted them to go this direction. Up ahead, Abraham encounters another troupe of Saviors, twice as many as they first met. Out of choices, Abraham turns the RV around and they search out a fourth route.
Route four is blocked off due to an enormous mountain of logs. The man who the Saviors were chasing at the beginning of the episode drops off a bridge behind them, choking him to death. The logs are set alight, and the voice of the unseen mustache man warns that they better get where they are going.
Sasha has found two more possible routes to the Hilltop. Aaron thinks the Saviors will be waiting for them on every route. Eugene points out that they aren’t waiting for them specifically; they are waiting on the RV. And they don’t know who occupies the RV from moment to moment.
It is night when the crew disembarks. Eugene is basically going on a suicide mission: he will drive the RV while everyone else carries Maggie on a makeshift stretcher through the woods in the hopes of getting her to the Hilltop. As the crew moves through the woods, they hear a whistle. Then another. Then they are coming from all around. It is a creepy, effective plot device. Rick tells his group to run, and they do. Suddenly a spotlight hits, and Rick’s group can see where they finally are: in a small clearing, surrounded by Saviors. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. All are men, and they already have Eugene there, down on his knees. Mr. Mustache is pleased: this was where he wanted them all along. A dozen men move in and disarm Rick’s group. They make them get on their knees – even the feverish Maggie. For the first time in a long time, Rick looks scared. Dwight opens up the back of a van, and pulls out Rosita, Michonne, and Daryl, and lines them up with their friends.
Mr. Mustache knocks on the door to an RV, and we finally meet Negan. With Lucille slung over his shoulder, Negan appears, looking like a background dancer from West Side Story. He paces in front of Rick’s group, a sh*t-eating grin on his face. Negan rambles on endlessly like he does in the comic book, but with far fewer “f*cks” (that is to say, no “f*cks”). Negan does not appreciate Rick killing so many of his men, and promises he will regret crossing him. He explains the New World Order: “give me your sh*t or I kill you.” They invested a lot to get all those different checkpoints set up, and now he expects Rick’s team to work for him. He doesn’t want to kill them, but he is going to have to kill one of them, to make an example out of them. He spends a lot of time pacing in front of the team, idly wondering who he should kill. He finally picks someone, but we don’t see who: the camera switches to a POV shot, and Negan approaches. He lands two hits with Lucille before the screen goes dark. The audio lasts a few more seconds and we can hear the sickening smushing noise as Negan delivers the killing blow to his chosen victim.
That’s it. We don’t know who Negan killed, which feels like a cop-out, particularly after last week’s phantom gunshot which suggested that Michonne and/or Daryl were shot. Daryl looked like he was bloodied up in tonight’s episode, but since it was never addressed, it ended up being a ploy.
Also, Negan didn’t feel particularly threatening. I think part of that was that he didn’t/couldn’t say “f*ck.” And that is a big part of Negan in the comic books. AMC is basic cable, so they have fewer rules, but not dropping the F-word is still a pretty cardinal rule. That said, FX’s The People vs. OJ Simpson is also basic cable, and they dropped a “f*ck” and a “motherf*cker” this season.
Overall, despite the fact that I didn’t like the end (that may just be bitterness talking), this was a great finale to a great season. I loved the slow roll-out of just how crazy and threatening and patient the Saviors are. It adds an ominous quality to the Saviors, something that I always felt was missing in the comics. In the comics, they felt like they were all about the brutal, senseless violence. The methodical plotting really amps up the threat.
So begins the long, long, long wait until season seven starts this fall…
