#especially when he has so much survivors guilt that he cannot feed himself properly most days

[ask-utayaboy]

Th— the… the goat. The goat… talked to you?..!

Kabru—what did it do…? What it tempt you with? What… what is your desire…?

Did you—no..no you… can’t .. but—

- @ask-mithrun

Mithrun — Mithrun, breathe. It's okay. You know me, I'm okay. Remember, you said it yourself; there's nothing to worry about. It's said maybe two things to me maximum, I didn't and I wouldn't. You know that.

Kabru takes a breath himself.

I — okay. Well.

I'm not going to keep this from you, you at the least deserve to know - It's .... trying to tempt me with my birth mother, with speaking to her again. I know any version of her that it likely presents me with isn't ... her ... I can't — I can't figure out a logical way that it would ... work like that. At - at all. And - and I do want to speak to her. I knew I did, but it's an impossible thing so I hadn't really thought about it much.

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 14: The Mourning After

Episode 14 of the Walking Dead, and we get to see all sorts of people trying to deal with their many and varied sorts of problems - some far, far more successfully than others. 

Full review and spoilers below. 

After last week's excellent but very focused arc, it was a little comforting to find ourselves back in one of the Walking Dead episodes with multiple ongoing plotlines - three sets of characters all working their way through things, and one fun adventure in the hopes of making new friends. 

We'll start with the fun adventure, because it was genuinely pretty fun. The time has come for Eugene to go and meet Stephanie, his Friend with a Radio and, to his credit, he doesn't actually just vanish off by himself. Breaking some of the rules laid down by Stephanie, he finally tells the few survivors of Hilltop what he's been doing, after the gentlest of nudges from Rosita. He doesn't make excuses for not telling them earlier, and he doesn't waste a lot of time getting defensive when they're angry - he just wants to be able to believe in people again. 

It's a nice line of thought, especially given how difficult the communities have found things since the Saviour War, and it's especially nice that Ezekiel, who literally built an entire kingdom on little more than hope and a good voice for Shakespeare, backs Eugene up in his quest for hope - both when talking to the other survivors and by volunteering to go along on the adventure. Yumiko also goes along, for reasons that are a little murkier, but probably have something to do with vague optimism and the need to give Magna a little space after, well, everything. 

This most unlikely of trios sets off - but not before we get a very sweet scene between Ezekiel and Jerry, who say goodbye just in case. Adorably, Jerry's concerns about Ezekiel going on the adventure aren't because Ezekiel's sick, but simply because Jerry's going to miss him. It's entirely fitting that Ezekiel passes the legacy of the Kingdom to Jerry, who always worked so hard for a king and an ideal he believed so much in. I would very, very much like to see more of Jerry in the future, please and thank you. 

On their merry adventure, we see two walkers trapped in a cage (deeply concerning), Ezekiel struggle to take out two other walkers (also deeply concerning) and then a horse having to be put down because it's been bitten (deeply unsetting). Interestingly, I don't think Ezekiel has told Yumiko and Eugene about his illness - he makes one attempt to get Yumiko to agree to leave him behind if he should "fall", but it was too vague to tell if Yumiko knew why Ezekiel was suddenly so concerned with slowing the group down. 

Finally, one horse short, the group arrives at the edge of the city. And there they find some super messed up tableaus of "normal" life, made with actual walkers in the place of all the people - and these are still active walkers, chained in place but still biting. What the heck. 

Ezekiel finds the whole thing pretty funny - although he stops laughing pretty quickly when a young woman in a bright pink jacket with a machine gun, appears out of nowhere and starts yelling greetings. 

I cannot wait to see what that's all about next week. 

Meanwhile, we get some answers to the whole "what the heck is Negan up to?" question that has been tormenting us for a while now. As the fandom predicted, it was Carol who let Negan out of his cell with orders to find Alpha and take her head. In exchange, he would get a hero's welcome back in Alexandria. Negan's only concern with such a plan, interestingly enough, was the potential for the whole thing to blow up in Alexandria's face if he screwed up, nevermind that Negan himself would almost certainly be dead in such a situation. 

Back in the present day, Carol finally gets to put the head of her enemy on a spike and then, much to Negan's displeasure, swans off by herself to do a little processing. Carol is, I think it's safe to say, a pretty darned complicated character at the best of times, although I would dearly like it if the writers could stop killing children to make her character suffer. We've seen Carol mourning before, and we've seen Carol pull away from the group in times of stress. At the end of season 6, she exiled herself from Alexandria, remember, when she could no longer accept what she herself was willing to do for the people she cared about. 

So it's not all that surprising that her plan post-Alpha is to get the heck out of dodge. This time, the plan is to get a boat and head out on the water again - but that plan is pretty neatly derailed by the guilt-induced hallucination of Alpha which invites herself along for the ride. 

Samantha Morton is a fantastic actress, and it's really nice that we got some more scenes with her - the version of Alpha that apparently lives in Carol's head is gloriously bitchy and spiteful, calling Carol out for lying to herself ("I want to be alone." / "That's not it.") and dredging up all the old wounds, from Ed's low opinion of his wife to all the children Carol's lost along the way. 

The title of the episode always made it very clear that this episode was going to be about Carol - the phrase "look at the flowers" being so tightly tied up with maybe one of the worst days of Carol's life - and I'm glad that, in the end, Carol made the decision that she didn't want to die, and that she didn't want to be alone. She chooses, at the end, to return to Alexandria. No one asks her to, no one makes her, and I hope that the fact that she made that decision entirely by herself is a sign that she's finding her way through what has happened to her and what she's done to others. 

Finally, we get to see Negan and Daryl interacting properly for the first time in, I think, years. Negan, realising that Carol is not going to walk him back through the gates of Alexandria like a conquering hero, heads back to the hut where he stashed Lydia - only to find a really pissed-off Daryl waiting for him instead. Crossbow to the face, it never gets old. 

Negan's attempts to explain himself go maybe a little worse than he was hoping - with the only other conspirator AWOL, he does look incredibly guilty and he more of less freely admits that. His attempts to prove what he's done are poor - Alpha's mask proves nothing, really, and even taking Daryl to visit the spike when Carol left Alpha's head is unfortunately ruined by the fact that Beta has already taken the head - more on that later. 

Unfortunately, while at the spikes, they are sadly surrounded by a handful of the Whisperers, who recognise Negan as their new Alpha. Daryl ends up being the one tied up, on his knees and surrounded by enemies, and there's a brief moment when Negan really leans into the whole "maybe I will be the new Alpha" thing, largely because he's a huge Drama King who has really had to behave himself for way too long. 

The act only fools the Whisperers, who hand over the precious Alpha's shotgun to Negan and then are properly quite bitterly disappointed when he shoots one of them in the face rather than Daryl. The remaining two Whisperers are quickly dispatched and Daryl, for one, maybe feels a little bit better about the whole "where does Negan really stand" thing. 

The two settle down to wait for Carol to return; while waiting, Negan admits to Daryl that he did like being part of the Whisperers, just for a moment - after so many years in a cell, it was just nice to feel like he mattered and had power again. But it was just for a moment, and he doesn't seem to regret what he's done to the Whisperers at all, because even he can see that Alpha had to be stopped, no matter how much he might have been able to enjoy being her right-hand man. 

The morality of Negan is more twisted that a box full of snakes, but he does seem to have one line that he's not willing to cross - you don't kill kids. It's an interesting line to have drawn for himself, or more accurately, an interesting place for Negan to act like everyone knows that that's where his line is, considering that the children killed by Alpha were older than Carl was when Negan nearly beat him to death at the end of Season 7, but it is at least a line that makes sense for the character when you think about it. 

Daryl finally decides to head back to Alexandria - and presumably, he lets Negan tag along too. 

Finally, we have Beta, who is having maybe the worst day of his life. Alpha and Beta were always, always a match made it hell - we've known that since the fantastic flashbacks to their meeting from way back in episode 2. And, the longer this episode went on, the more disappointed I was that nobody has ever openly worried about what Beta would do without Alpha to keep him under control, because I've been worrying about that for the entire season. 

As it turns out, what Beta does without Alpha to keep him in line is, firstly, feed one of his own men to Alpha's reanimated head and, secondly, set himself up in an abandoned tavern to, I don't know, reforge his own destiny by listening to what the newly reanimated head of Alpha has to say to him. 

He is insane. He is absolutely insane. 

But, before he was insane, he was apparently a country music star, which I have to admit I did not see coming. Looking at his own on a poster is too much for Beta to handle, but he does listen to some of his own music - specifically, recordings of his old shows, which I was sort of expecting him to burn on the grounds that they 'proved' that he hadn't always been Beta. 

(Sidenote, it turns out that Ryan Hurst has a rather lovely singing voice)

It would probably have been better if he had burnt them, to be honest, given that instead he uses the music to lure in as many of the undead as possible to start reforming a brand new horde. I am certain that I am not going to like what he does with all those walkers.

Finally, he takes a little inspiration from an insane note he finds ("These 2 eyes see 1 truth", which in either a terrifying post-apocalyptic log, or someone's attempts at new lyrics) and finally puts down Alpha with one clean stab to the brain. Normally, I would assume that this was a good sign - putting down a loved one is normally a good thing in the world of the Walking Dead, and I was genuinely a little bit worried that Beta was going to carry around the head of Alpha in a bag for the rest of the war, using it as some sort of messed up talisman and/or Magic8 ball. 

Unfortunately, Beta is clearly not moving on from anything. Instead, he skins Alpha's skull and uses half of it to repair his own mask. 

I am definitely not going to like whatever this man does next. I just know it. 

Previous season 10 reviews are available here.