YMMV / The Walking Dead S11E02 "Acheron, Part II"

• Spiritual Adaptation: There is a long sequence featuring Daryl alone in the subway tunnels where he encounters an old camp. There are dead bodies with money, paintings on the walls, and a note left behind by someone on a dollar bill for someone else to find. This atmospheric horror mystery is right out of the The Last of Us, where we know what happened generally, but we don't know what happened here. Furthermore, we're now 12 years into this Zombie Apocalypse, and all of civilization is in a state of rot and ruin.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Gage was the last survivor of the infamous Hilltop teens, who mostly acted like stupid kids, bullies, and liabilities to the communities (with the exception of Addie). He was even at his worst when he bullied and attacked Lydia. While the situation regarding his death has proven controversial, many fans ended up cheering that he met his end.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: While Gage may have been far from pleasant in any way, plenty of fans feel like he didn't deserve to die scared. The decision to not open the door so he can get inside is treated as a harsh but a right pragmatic move. The group is shown being able to clear out all the walkers coming from Gage’s cart pretty well afterward (they would later be surprised by another wave coming from behind them, but they didn’t know about them at the time). Plenty also argue that they could have just simply opened and closed the door, or just broke the old and not-well-maintained window itself. While still an Asshole Victim Gage essentially died for nothing because he was a scared teen and was never given a second chance, that the group has often given to characters older than him and in some cases could be argued to have done worse.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Angela Kang stated that the scene wasn't supposed to villainize Maggie, and ultimately Maggie’s decision to leave Gage behind is meant to be portrayed as as a right pragmatic move based on her experiences. The problem is that this makes Maggie look like a Hypocrite for being angry at Negan leaving her behind earlier, especially when her refusal to listen to Negan's rightful concern, which to be fair is because she's determined to get food for her people, was putting everyone in danger in the first place.
  • Some fans were horrified by Gage’s death deeming it to be one of the nastiest in the series, and this led to further argument that Gage didn’t deserve such a horrific death. In an amusing display of just how twisted the series has been, several fans countered that the deaths of characters such as Noah and Glenn were far worse and didn’t find Gage’s death as gruesome, and that Gage was able to make the choice to kill himself before the walkers got to him, a decision Glenn and other unfortunate characters didn’t get to make. Others contend that given his history of cowardice and bullying, he had wasted too much goodwill, and he was the main reason why the group felt they didn’t have enough ammo to hold off the approaching walkers.