Season 6, Episode 8
- All hell breaks loose when Alexandria's walls finally fall to the walkers.
The mid-season finale.
"Tip Toe Through the Tulips" plays on a record player in Sam's room. The cookies Carol baked for him are shown, having barely been touched and now being swarmed by ants.
Meanwhile, the guard tower collapses, unleashing the accumulated herd of walkers into Alexandria. Everyone scrambles for safety. Maggie barely makes it to the top of a platform, narrowly evading a group of walkers that tear down the ladder she uses to get there, trapping her there. Eugene manages to call for help when Daryl makes contact on the walkie talkies before he, Tara and Rosita take shelter in a garage. Rick tries to fend off the walkers to buy time for the group to escape, and is aided by Deanna. She ends up falling on a saw while fending off some walkers, and Rick is forced to half-carry her to safety. He is joined by Carl, Ron, Gabriel, and Michonne, and the group flees into Jessie's house, where Judith is.
Carol and Morgan also flee for safety, and Carol stumbles and grabs some bullets before she and Morgan take shelter in a house. Inspecting a nasty gash on Carol's head, Morgan suspects she's suffered a concussion. With the tension strong between them, Carol admits that she does not trust Morgan - but she doesn't think he's been lying to her, to Morgan's discomfort. In the basement, Denise is trapped with W Man. The killer continues to insist that the Alexandrians do not belong here and that he and his cohorts were "freeing" them, since they must die. Denise has a pregnant pause, and eventually asks to see his wound. W Man reveals he's suffering from a nasty infection from cutting his side on a rusty bumper a few days prior, and Denise gets to work.
At Jessie's house, the group barricades themselves in. Rick plans to wait it out until the walkers inevitably cluster somewhere, then sneak to the armory and use some flares to draw the herd away. Michonne works to patch up Deanna, but she reveals that it's a fruitless effort as she was bitten by a walker. Not too distressed by her limited time left, Deanna talks it through with Michonne, asking her to keep believing and admitting she's achieved what she wanted in life: working with her family to provide a better future for people. When she speaks to Rick, she asks him to truly take care of Alexandria the way he takes care of his family.
In the garage, Carl finds a crying Ron who believes they're all dead. Carl does his best to convince him that all is not lost, but Ron believes that Rick will just get them killed like he killed Pete. Ron then locks the door to the house and attacks Carl, and the fight breaks the glass of the garage door, luring the herd to the garage and they soon penetrate it. Rick breaks open the door to the garage and rescues the boys, but the walkers have penetrated the house. When Rick asks what happened, Carl covers for Ron and says that they accidentally broke the window while looking for tools, and that the yelling was from Ron being afraid. Ron accepts the cover story and takes Carl to his room to find furniture to help keep the walkers from heading up the stairs, but Carl is having none of it and makes Ron turn over his gun. When he complies, Carl tells him that Pete was an asshole.
Meanwhile, Glenn and Enid observe the chaos from afar. Glenn prepares to move in, but Enid refuses since she believes Alexandria is doomed. Glenn refuses to believe that, as they still have to fight for the people who are still alive - like his pregnant wife. Eventually, the pair climb the wall and witness Maggie's predicament. In a garage, Rosita despairs, believing Abraham might be dead, but Tara denies such a claim and convinces her to keep fighting. Eugene then goes to pick the lock of their garage so they can enter the rest of the house.
Carol is able to slip past Morgan to the basement and finds Denise treating W Man. Disgusted, Carol prepares to kill him, but Morgan arrives and puts himself between her and the Wolf. Carol snarls at him to step aside, but Morgan believes that they are no better than the Wolves if they kill him. Morgan is prepared to keep him imprisoned in the basement for the rest of his life if he has to - though W Man admits that Carol is wise to kill him since he'll try to escape and keep killing. Morgan ignores him and refuses to allow Carol to kill him, and Carol declares that the Wolves have forced them to kill them. The pair finally come to blows, but Morgan is able to overpower and knock out Carol after a lengthy fight. However, the Wolf knocks out Morgan while he's distracted and decides to use Denise as a hostage to escape Alexandria when Tara, Eugene and Rosita arrive on the scene.
Rick and Michonne kill two walkers and prepare to get the group out of there in bedsheets smeared with walker guts. Though disgusted by the grisly work, Jessie, Gabriel and Ron agree to it. Sam is horrified and refuses to look like the "monsters", and Jessie asks him to be brave, or at least pretend to be brave. Gabriel swears to Rick that he will stay the course, and Deanna is left with a gun to end her life when the time comes. The group removes their barricade from the stairway and slowly move through the dense crowd of walkers. With the walkers moving upstairs, Deanna takes her gun and begins fighting off the walkers, and roars in defiance when she runs out and the walkers approach her...
The others begin to slowly exit the house, the plan working. However, Sam begins to panic and cry for his mother...
In The Stinger, Daryl, Sasha and Abraham are still driving back to Alexandria when they notice a group of men on motorcycles parked on the road ahead. Daryl parks the truck, and the leader of the pack orders them to step out peacefully or they'll be slaughtered. The three comply, and the ringleader informs them that everything they have on them and in the truck is no longer theirs.
When Sasha asks whose property it is, the man replies that everything now belongs... to Negan...
- Armor-Piercing Question: From Deanna to Michonne: "What do you want...for you?"
- Badass Biker: A pack of them confront Daryl, Sasha, and Abraham in The Stinger.
- Bolivian Army Ending: We don't see Deanna finally go down, and the episode ends on a cliffhanger before any of the heroes make it to safety.
- Brutal Honesty: W Man plainly states that Carol is wise for seeking to kill him while Morgan literally fights for his life.
- Continuity Nod:
- Rick employs the old Covered in Gunge (in walker guts to be accurate) trick to get the gang out of Jessie's house, previously used prominently in "Guts" by him and Glenn and Carol in "No Sanctuary".
- Morgan continues to quote both himself and Eastman ("Sit down before you fall down" and "I will not allow that").
- Members of the gang that Daryl, Dwight and Sherry encountered in "Always Accountable" return in The Stinger.
- Gabriel makes some sort of peace with Rick after being hated by him all season for his betrayal in the previous season.
- Glenn reveals that he knows that Maggie is pregnant.
- The significance of Deanna's phrase in Latin she wrote down in "Now" is revealed.
- Defiant to the End: As the walkers approach her, Deanna - despite being weakened by the infection and barely able to keep on her feet - empties her gun on the undead, putting down several zombies before running out of bullets. Then she roars at them in defiance.
- Dying Moment of Awesome: Deanna goes down fighting against a horde of zombies.
- Face Death with Dignity: Deanna spends her last few hours of life cracking jokes and giving her friends sage advice before she allows herself to be left behind.
- Good Is Dumb: After trying to protect the Wolf prisoner, Morgan is unsurprisingly betrayed by him when his back is turned. Also, this mistake causes the only medic to get taken hostage.
- Good Versus Good: Morgan and Carol get into a heated fight over the fate of the Alpha Wolf.
- Handicapped Badass:
- Carol suffers a wound suspected to be a concussion and suffers from it for much of the episode.
- Deanna manages to headshot at least four if not all six walkers that she shoots, while being barely able to keep herself up.
- Hidden Depths: Turns out Eugene knows how to pick locks.
- A House Divided: Carol and Morgan get into a violent fight over what to do with the Wolves' Leader, with Carol threatening to kill Morgan if he doesn't cooperate. It leads to Morgan knocking out Carol, the Wolf knocking out Morgan, taking Carol's knife and then seizing Denise as his hostage.
- I Have Your Wife: The Wolf takes Denise hostage.
- The Load: Sam and Ron keep making things worse while trapped with the others in Jessie's house.
- Major Injury Underreaction: When Deanna finds out she was bit in addition to being injured by falling on a saw she simply says, "Well, shit."
- Mercy Kill: Inflicted on Deanna.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Morgan's attempt at protecting the Wolf results in Denise becoming his hostage.
- Pet the Dog: Shortly before making their way through the zombie-infested house, Gabriel pulls Rick aside and tells him that no matter what happens he is not going to give up. After having spent all season putting down Gabriel for his betrayal, Rick gives him a look of approval and responds: "Yeah, I know."
- Rule of Symbolism: Sam's cookies covered in a swarm of ants just as Alexandria is infested by walkers.
- Running Gag: We finally see what happened to Sam's cookies.
- Ship Tease: Tara flirts a little with Rosita, calling her "gorgeous."
- Sole Survivor: Spencer is presumably now the last member of the Monroe family.
- The Stinger: The fourth one in the series, though this stinger was pushed back into the first commercial break of fellow AMC series Into the Badlands. Daryl, Sasha and Abraham are stopped and apprehended by a group of men who inform them that everything they own now belongs to a man named Negan...
- A Storm Is Coming: The only way to describe the significance of The Stinger. Said storm is none other than Negan.
- Too Dumb to Live: Ron. Though not actually killed, he nearly brings a horde of walkers down on him and his entire family, plus Rick, Carl, Judith, Michonne, and Deanna. His brother qualifies too, since he doesn't turn his music off when he's asked to and when the group tries to move among the walkers while covered in entrails starts calling to his mother questions while surrounded on all sides by walkers.
- Took a Level in Badass: Gabriel is actively fighting alongside the others. Deanna also takes down numerous walkers.
- Which is a marked improvement from the start of the episode, where she fired several shots at a walker just a foot away and missed a head shot every single time. The walker followed her as she raced past it with an almost perfect expression of disbelief.
- True Companions: Deanna asks Rick to start treating all of Alexandria like he does his own pre-Alexandria family.
- Wham Line: The Stinger may confuse those who haven't read the comics, but for those who have, the final sentence is the unsettling confirmation that the most feared, nightmarish villain in The Walking Dead history is well on his way.Savior: Your property... Now belongs to Negan.
- Zombie Infectee: Deanna gets bitten while trying to help Rick fend off the invading walkers.
