… Scavengers to the big reunion.
"…When we last saw Rick, Michonne, and the others, they were in a garbage dump, surrounded by a group of bleakly dressed survivors encircling them with violent intent. Rick's smile, which punctuated last week's episode, was intended to throw viewers off. But when "New Best Friends" picks back up with the Alexandria crew, we realize Rick may just be gambling with his and the others' lives. It becomes quickly clear he doesn't know who these people are, but he asks their leader — a stone-faced woman with a bizarre speaking pattern — to join forces against the Saviors nonetheless.
The women flatly refuses, forcing Rick's hand and leading to a brief tussle that gets Aaron injured. It turns out that Gabriel was forced to leave Alexandria with supplies from the boat that Rick ransacked earlier this season — the boat was a trap to draw out other survivors and steal the supplies onboard. Yet Gabriel grabs a high-ranking member of the group at knife point, demanding that they hear Rick out, and the leader abides.
In one of the best scenes of the episode, the mysterious woman takes Rick to the top of a trash heap, out of earshot of her fellow group members who appear not to speak and defer to their leader in a eerie, almost cult-like reverence. There she plainly spells out the predicament in a way that feels realistic, the kind of no-bull
conversation you'd imagine real post-apocalyptic survivors would have in times of desperation. This group is running out of food, and they're willing to make a deal with Rick if he can help them. But not before a test of his abilities, as the woman shoves Rick off the trash heap.
Rick's trial, if we can call it that, is a textbook example of TWD's goofy, surreal comic book roots clashing with its gritty, visceral realism. While I can't say for sure whether this was a scene out of the comics or purely invented by the show, it still felt like it veered right into Mad Max territory to have Rick face off in gladiatorial combat with a helmet-clad zombie covered head to toe in sharp spikes.
Still, Andrew Lincoln pulls off the scrambling disorientation of someone facing a zombie nightmare, and the scene mostly works to prove how bizarre and otherworldly this group must be to keep this monster as a horrifying pet. Rick ends up stabbing his hand with a spike just to hold the zombie's head away for a moment, and he scrambles around in a relatively tension-filled scene until he's able to trap it under a heap of garbage and neutralize it with a shiv made of broken glass. In the aftermath, we see Rick and Gabriel go through a showing of mutual respect, a hard-earned transformation for the pastor over these past few seasons that makes him one of the most compelling characters left on the show.
One of the most compelling relationships in the entire history of The Walking Dead has been the bond between Daryl and Carol, and last night included one of the most evocative exchanges we've seen yet. After a group from the Kingdom visits Carol, bringing her some cobbler, Daryl arrives for a reunion that I have been waiting for ever since Carol left Alexandria in March of last year. "Why'd you go?" he asks her, his face crumpling like a distraught child instead of the warrior we've seen him be. Carol can't help but cry, too, explaining that she had to.
I'm not going to lie. I got chills.
Daryl ends up staying for dinner, and as they talk over the night he sees just how damaged and distraught Carol has become. She's the same person he's always known, but her pivot toward merciless killer has nevertheless changed her, broken something inside her that he intuits may never be repaired. When she asks him if everyone is okay, he doesn't tell her about the carnage Negan and the Saviors have wrought, or that friends like Glenn are now dead. Instead he shows her mercy, lying that everyone is still okay — much to her relief.
I don't know where the show intends to take Carol's story from here. If it wants to go the lazy route, Carol will eventually find out that Daryl lied to her, and it will drive a wedge between them in the meandering, purposeless melodrama that The Walking Dead sometimes stumbles into. But there's another opportunity here, one that could see the show exploring the cost of giving into our baser instincts, and developing Daryl even further as he becomes a man that not only has hidden reserves of empathy and compassion, but possesses a deeper understanding of the human condition, and knows when it's time for those we love to stop fighting and let go…"
Imho this was the best part of this chapter
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