The Walking Dead Episode 3 shock reveal: Officer Rick Grimes is dead
THE Walking Dead brought back an old face from season one — Morales from Atlanta, who is now a Saviour under Negan and has a gun on Rick. We knew this wasn’t going to end well...
THE Walking Dead hit us with a shocking thought this week, as Morales made the claim that Officer Grimes is dead. And, by the end, it looks like Rick agrees with him.
Beware, there are spoilers aplenty ahead as we review Episode 3, “Monsters” of season eight.
If you were getting frustrated because The Walking Dead was just blindly machine-gunning the plot at us, with its eyes closed, then the good news is, this week they remembered to include some characters amongst the mayhem.
Season eight’s title has been All-Out War and, for the first two episodes, that’s all we’ve pretty much had.
Like Aaron and Tobin’s team of gunmen attacking a Saviour outpost, the writers have been firing on full automatic, not caring what they hit and certainly not worrying about running out of ammunition.
This week started with more of the same. That gun battle is still going on, everyone is still blazing away and nobody even looks like running out of ammunition.
Around it, however, we got back to the familiar style of The Walking Dead.
Rick and Morales had a debate about morality, which had echoes of season four, when Rick and this crazy Irish woman (she carried the severed head of her zombie husband in a sack with her) discussed whether you could ever come back from the horrible things you had been forced to do. Morales made the bold, yet probably accurate claim that the Officer Grimes he had met back in Atlanta was dead and this was a new Rick.
That shook Rick and you could see him pretty much agreeing with the statement.
Sadly the debate was ended by Daryl putting a crossbow through Morales’s skull.
Ironically, Daryl and Rick then get caught by a gang of Saviours and run out of ammunition while fighting them and have to use ingenuity to get free. It’s another victory for Rick’s group but we see a change in Rick. He’s worrying that he’s becoming another Negan – and he’s also concerned that Daryl is too quick to kill. Especially after his closest friend shoots dead an unarmed Saviour that Rick promised could go free.
This is an intriguing development and hopefully one that will be explored further.
Meanwhile poor Eric was carried to safety by Aaron and they got to have their tearful farewell, the one that the comic didn’t give them because Eric got shot in the head there, not the guts. It was a beautiful scene, made more poignant when Aaron returns after the battle to find zombie Eric wandering off towards the woods.
I thought this was going to turn Aaron into a raging maniac, thirsty for Saviour blood, yet instead he offers to take the baby Rick found last episode back to The Hilltop. It seems like Aaron is turning pacifist but I do have a nagging fear for the baby’s chances. Kids don’t fare too well on TWD (especially if they are around Carol) but having Aaron take out his grief on an infant seems pretty dark, even for TWD.
Talking about going crazy, Morgan has gone back into full maniac mode and even has a fight with Jesus over whether he can kill Saviour prisoners. It’s a damn good fight and, you have to say, Jesus may spend a helluva lot of time on making sure his hair is perfect but he can really move as well. Morgan echoes Morales’s words. We’re all monsters now.
Most interesting of all, Gregory comes back to The Hilltop after betraying them to Negan and begs for forgiveness. Maggie actually lets him in and offers him a chance for redemption. I think we can all see where that one is going. Then Jesus and the Saviour prisoners arrive and a debate begins. Tara and Gregory want them dead, Jesus wants to keep them alive. Maggie is in the middle. Which way she will jump?
Over with Carol and Ezekiel, the king still thinks he can defeat the Saviours and not lose one of his people. After spending most of the episode yelling at the screen that this is the most obvious set-up for a disaster since Carol invited Lizzie to look at the flowers, I was proved right.
After several scenes of Saviours stupidly running into bullets, without ever once thinking perhaps they should fire their own guns, the battle seems won.
But it turns out the machineguns that Rick was looking for at his outpost had been moved to Ezekiel’s target and they open up on the Kingdom army. At least some are dead. Ezekiel will almost certainly survive and be left feeling terrible after leading his people to a slaughter.
Leaving aside the flaws in the action, now we are seeing the human cost of this fighting. And it’s far more fascinating than watching extras fall over.