‘The Walking Dead’ Aired Its Deadliest Episode Ever

Spoilers for The Walking Dead “The Calm Before” past this point.

Listen, fans of the comic book knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. But I had no idea it was going to happen so soon, or the way the show would play out these events. And as of the penultimate episode of Season 9, I think we can officially say “The Calm Before” was the deadliest episode of The Walking Dead, ever.

That’s not to say it was the most deaths per capita. The Wolves’ attack back in Season 6’s “JSS” or the double hit of the walker herd in Alexandria in “Start to Finish” and “No Way Out” probably killed off more background characters. It’s also not home to the most horrific deaths on the series, which were inarguably Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) getting killed by Negan’s baseball bat in the Season 7 premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.”

But this week’s episode ended with 10 – TEN! – speaking part characters kicking the bucket, and it was awful.

Here’s the deal, in case you couldn’t bear to watch. The long awaited cross-community fair finally happened (for the record, Jerry’s name for it, “F.A.I.R.,” was better than Ezekiel’s, which was like “New Beginnings” or something). While everyone enjoyed selling goods, signing community compacts and watching a movie for the first time since the zombie apocalypse started, Alpha (Samantha Morton) snuck around in a dead woman’s hair and clothes snooping on the fairgoers and confronting her defector daughter, Lydia (Cassady McClincy).

While this is happening, Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Carol (Melissa McBride) and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) are patrolling outside to make sure there are no Whisperer attacks. They get waylaid by some zombies and skin-walkers, and out from the crowd walks Alpha, not in makeup but in her bald, smudged, full on Whisperer glory. That’s when it becomes clear that there was a time jump in the middle of the episode: What was happening with Alpha and Lydia has already happened. And if you’ve read the comics, you immediately realized with growing dread that the thing that is revealed at the end of the episode had already happened.

Our characters don’t know any of this, and in fact first we get another comic moment, though originally it happened with Mr. Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). Alpha takes Daryl to a cliff, and shows him an absolutely massive herd of thousands of walkers. It’s her herd, she explains, as her people are down there shepherding them (since the Whisperers wear zombie skin, they can safely mill with the dead and guide them). If Daryl crosses the border he’ll see shortly, she’ll sick the herd on them. Stay on their side, and they’ll be safe.

I kid you not, when I heard that I screamed at the screen, because I did not want to see what Daryl is clearly about to see.

There’s a little back and forth where you wonder if maybe Lydia is going to die, but instead she rejects Alpha, who leaves to go take care of other business. That business, Daryl and friends quickly discover, is the pikes.

But first, they find Siddiq (Avi Nash), bloodied and tied up. He’s so horrified he can’t tell them what happened. They stumble up the hill, and see a series of heads on pikes, though they’re too far away for us in the viewing audience to see. And as they get closer, it plays out almost exactly how it did in the comics. We see the severed head of a character we know, zombified, mouth gasping for air. Then it cuts back to the fair, where someone else is wondering where that person is. The crescendo builds until the final reveal, which is Henry (Matt Lintz),as Daryl hides Carol’s face from seeing the severed head of her son.

Here’s the full list, in case you, like Carol, could not look: Ozzy (Angus Sampson); another Highwayman; DJ (Matt Mangum); Frankie (Elyse Nicole DuFour); Tammy Rose (Brett Butler); Adeline (Kelley Mack), which was particularly awful because they left her glasses on; Rodney (Joe Ando Hirsh); Tara (Alanna Masterson); Enid (Katelyn Nacon); and Henry.

There’s more to the episode which is a further gut punch, as Siddiq tells the story of what happened to the assembled communities, how this was supposed to demoralize them but that everyone broke free and fought back. The messed up thing though is… They lost. Ultimately in the span of the show it’ll bring everyone together, but as horrified as I was by the pikes, watching everyone lose to Alpha was the thing that got me. Seeing Enid’s face as she put up her fists, a supposedly heroic moment undercut by the fact that her head then got severed and stuck on a stick.

I’m sure everyone has their favorites, but particularly since Enid and Tara have been on the show so long (Tara since Season 4!), those were the ones who got me. Henry, ultimately, felt like the one we were supposed to be particularly gut punched for, but mostly I was thankful we’re about to (probably) see Ballistics Carol back after this traumatic event.

And as awful as the pike reveals were, there was a part of me that was relieved. In “The Walking Dead #144,” the issue of the comic where the piked heads are revealed, two of the fallen are Rosita and Ezekiel. Seeing Rosita (Christian Serratos), who is currently pregnant on the show, dead would be awful. Seeing Ezekiel (Khary Payton), who is even more of a fan favorite than he was in the comics dead would also be awful. The lineup here was extremely bad, and I felt physically ill afterwards, but it could have been worse.

Still, with a good chunk of the expansive cast taken out, Alpha has announced her intentions. She is not messing around, and the now united communities won’t take this lying down. Get ready for the biggest war since they took on Negan… Only this time, the enemy has thousands of zombies on her side. “The Storm” is coming.

The Walking Dead airs on Sundays at 9/8c on AMC

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