Article may contain SPOILERS. You were warned.
Taking place in the aftermath of The Wolves’ attack, Now focuses on the people of Alexandria and how they are coping with reality after their “perfect, safe, and happy” bubble has been burst. With Rick’s plan more or less going to the pits, he had to leg it back, bringing with him half the zombie horde that they were trying to lure away. With the zombos chomping at the gates, it’s only a matter of time before they get in, or the people lose their nerves and get out.
Meanwhile, Maggie is getting tired of waiting for Glenn to get back and decides to go looking for his mangled, half-eaten corpse. Aaron finds out about this and decides to help Maggie, and it’s a good thing, too, because she nearly gets eaten on their escape, and we later find out that the zombies might have been eating for two as it turns out Maggie is pregnant.
With Rick running partial damage control, Deanna is basically losing her mind, trying to cope with watching everything she worked so hard to build crumble around her. It’s taking everything she has to try and keep it together, and it’s nothing that blowing off a little steam by stabbing a zombie repeatedly in the chest can’t fix.
At the end, Rick shares a steamy kiss with Jessie, which seemed weird to me, since he outright murdered her husband not even two days before. But he’s not the only one getting a little piece of the action. While Denise is freaking out over not being a very good healer, Tara gives her some pretty solid consoling words, giving Denise the confidence she needs to actually save a life. Afterwards, Denise finds Tara and plants a big one right on her.
Honestly, they should’ve called this one “Speeches: The Episode”, as it seemed like every five seconds someone was giving a motivational speech. There’s little in the way of any real drama, and it’s really just the same shlock we’ve seen over and over in this series. Something goes wrong and everyone is ready to hop on the blame train (as we see with Spencer basically blaming Deanna for everything that went wrong). People raiding the pantry to get all the food we can? Choo! Choo! All aboard the blame train to try and justify why what they’re doing is right.
For the most part, it was a pretty boring episode, and let’s face it: the only reason people stayed tuned to the end was the Maggie business to see if Glenn is actually dead. While Glenn’s death had a lot of weight in the comics, I can’t help but feel like they’re using it as a ploy in this season. A purposefully ambiguous plot point, coupled with the sporadic timeline to keep viewers hooked until the big reveal.
