A new friend tries to help Alicia overcome her doubts about herself.
Tropes:
- Action Survivor: On account of his age, Paul isn’t the best in combat, but he can still kill walkers and gun down people if given the chance.
- Bizarre Taste in Food: Paul cooks some haggis for him and Alicia. Despite being hungry and in the middle of an apocalypse, Alicia can’t bring herself to enjoy it, but Paul reveals he and his wife regularly ate it since the Fall since it was one of the few foods left in many grocery stores.
- Bottle Episode: The episode mostly focuses on just Alicia and Paul, occasionally joined by Arno and a handful of Stalkers; with Morgan only appearing at the end and the rest of the main cast only briefly appearing in a hallucination. Even though the sub was going to take in Alicia’s dozens at her command, only Alicia and Morgan appear in it at the end of the episode.
- Broken Pedestal: Arno lost faith in Alicia and declared her his enemy when her effort to follow Vasquez to PADRE only ended up getting Stalkers killed along the way.
- Call-Back: Once again, an episode ends with the Stalkers finding a potent, albeit non-conventional nuclear weapon, this time being a massive herd that has fallen into the impact crater of one of the nukes.
- Chekhov's Gun: The bagpipes Alicia asks Paul about come in handy at the end of the episode when Paul needs a loud instrument with which to distract Arno.
- Enemy Mine: Throughout the episode, it’s revealed that Alicia did try to re-team up with Arno and his Stalkers to fight Strand together. However, Arno was uninterested.
- Hallucinations: It wouldn’t be a Gimple-era episode of the franchise without them. Alicia is shown hallucinating Vasquez’s walker speaking to her and a young Stalker girl trying to reach out to her.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Having been shot in the stomach, Paul decides to stay behind to distract Arno long enough for Alicia to escape.
- Hypocrite: Arno hating Alicia for being indirectly responsible for the deaths of Stalkers holds no water considering he was part of Teddy’s cult that Teddy himself would ultimately abandon to their fates.
- Sixth Ranger: Invoked; Alicia tries to convince Paul to leave home and join her and the group, but he never gets the chance before being mortally wounded and ultimately sacrificing himself.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Subverted. Paul dies in the same episode he debuts in, but he leaves the show heavily fleshed out and with more screentime in one episode than some top billed characters like Luciana and Daniel have had all season.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Alicia suddenly comes to in Paul’s house with initially little to no explanation for how she got separated from Morgan during the previous episode.
- Zombie Infectee: Besides maybe Alicia, Arno gets bitten on the hand, but as he still has his hand by the next morning, it may be too late for him.
