‘The Walking Dead’ Season 8, Episode 10 Review: ‘The Lost And The Plunderers’

The Bad

This week’s episode of The Walking Dead was far from perfect. For instance, I’m still unsure why it was chopped up into sections labeled for various characters. Why open to the word MICHONNE and then do a bit with Michonne (Danai Gurira) and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) then move on to NEGAN but have a scene with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Simon (Steven Ogg) then move on to ENID but have a scene with Enid (Katelyn Nacon) and Aaron (Ross Marquand) and so on and so forth? It felt a bit likeThe Walking Dead trying to be Pulp Fiction but for no real reason and to no great effect. I don’t mind that we moved from one group to the next like this at all, but I’m not sure why they felt the need to spell it out for us. Once again, The Walking Dead feels like it’s trying to be artsy but it just feels tonally awkward instead.

Sure, they play around with the chronology a bit. We see Rick and Michonne show up at the Garbage People’s base first, then move on to Negan telling Simon to go there, then see Simon slaughter the lot of them. But it’s nothing out of the ordinary for this show to mess around with timelines, and this one didn’t do it in any particularly clever way to justify suddenly changing up the format.

I also still can’t stand Enid and the whole Enid/Aaron subplot is ridiculous. Why does Enid suddenly care so much about Aaron and vice versa? They never had any sort of bond before this and now they’re hugging each other and making one another promise to stay safe (a promise neither makes, by the way.)

Also, what’s the point of recruiting Oceanside’s fierce female fighters if those fighters are A) unwilling to help and B) no longer in possession of guns and ammunition? Why does Aaron stick around to try again when Oceanside flatly refuses to help and only lets them go with their lives because Cyndie isn’t quite as bloodthirsty as her friends?

At this point I find both Enid and Aaron pretty extraneous characters, mostly taking up space (and precious airtime) rather than adding much to the story. Enid did have a couple good things to say this episode—chastising the Oceansiders for their propensity to just shoot any strangers that show up rather than fighting against the bad guys and working with the good guys—but I still have no clue who Enid is as a character and why she matters. I still can’t believe she’s alive and well while Carl is six feet under. Who saw that coming?

The Good

Fortunately, the rest of the episode was actually pretty good. For one thing, the Garbage People are all dead except for Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) and she finally dropped the Mad Max act and started talking like a normal person, speaking in a normal voice. Apparently, back before everything went to hell, she was an artist who came to the dump to paint on canvas and metal. That’s…kind of a weird hobby, so I’m inclined to believe that even though the weird speak was probably just an act she and her people put on for outsiders, she’s still mostly nuts.

The slaughter of all her people and Rick’s refusal to help her in her time of need sets her up as a very possible Big Bad down the road a ways. She has reason to exact revenge on both the Saviors and Rick’s people now.

For once, I enjoyed every Jadis scene. When she tells Rick and Michonne about how she started the Garbage People community we see a side of her we haven’t glimpsed before: Her humanity.

Later, when she lures her entire community of undead into the trash grinder, you really feel for her. It’s a brutal scene, one of the more gruesome we’ve encountered so far in this show, which certainly says something. And after she’s done the deed, she has a murderous look on her face. Her role as Queen of the Trash People may be over, but Jadis’s part in this drama is far from over.

Negan orders Simon to go to the Garbage People, take their guns, remind them of their obligations, and kill just one to drive the point home. “Just one, Simon,” Negan tells his lieutenant.

Simon offers up his own advice: Maybe it’s time for Negan to cut his losses, for the Saviors to wipe the slate clean, kill off all these troublesome survivors and go further out to ‘save’ people. Simon treats his role as a Savior with all the irony you would expect from a thug. But Negan seems to take his job seriously. He really is trying to save people. People, he reminds us time and again, are a resource.

Then a delivery from Hilltop arrives. It’s Maggie’s present for Negan—a zombified Savior from the Satellite base. They learn that Maggie has 38 more hostages. Simon is enraged. Once again, his men have been killed or captured by Rick’s group. Once again Negan can’t seem to control the situation as much as he says he can. But Negan won’t let him retaliate. His mission is still to go reel in the Garbage People.

So it’s with a thinly submerged rage that Simon shows up at the dump. Steven Ogg is really wonderful in this role. You can feel his anger bubbling just below the surface. He’s ready to snap right from the get-go, so even when Jadis gives up the guns and submits, he’s not ready to back down. He wants a real apology and when she won’t give him one, he shoots her second in command. When she still fails to say sorry, he shoots her other lieutenant.

This is too much for Jadis, and she punches Simon right in the face, knocking him to the ground in her fury before realizing what she’s done. “Light ’em up,” Simon says, having finally gotten what he wants. And the slaughter commences.

This is a great scene thanks to both Ogg and McIntosh’s performances. Finally we get Jadis acting human, acting frightened rather than detached and smug. And Simon, beneath the smiles and the thinly veiled threats, is a powder keg ready to ignite.

Later, when he returns to the Sanctuary he lies to Negan, telling him everything went according to plan. He doesn’t even make up a story, hoping that his secret remains just that despite all his men who could very easily talk about what actually happened, and despite the fact that while he left Jadis to die, he had no guarantee she actually would. Oops.

I love Simon as a bad guy. I really enjoy how they’re playing him and Negan against one another, both for the conflict and for the contrast. We actually do get to see some of Negan’s good side, especially in his unwillingness to just kill everyone. But that doesn’t mean he won’t kill Simon. Simon’s days, I fear, are numbered.

Speaking of Negan’s good side, he ends up talking with Rick on the walkie-talkie after Rick discovers that Carl had not just written letters to Rick’s group, but to Negan as well. Carl asks them all to stop fighting, to make peace, but Rick—blustering and stupid as ever—threatens to kill Negan repeatedly, just ignoring whatever his dead son had to say completely.

Negan, on the other hand, speaks hard truths. It’s Rick’s own fault that Carl is dead, he tells Rick. He was so busy waging war he wasn’t around to protect his son, to stop him from making bad choices. It’s Rick’s long series of terrible choices that has caused all this death in the first place. And Negan isn’t wrong. Rick decided to attack the Satellite station based entirely on an agreement with the vapid idiot, Gregory, at Hilltop. He attacked without doing any research on the enemy he was taking on. And he didn’t fight fair, choosing instead to sneak in during the dead of night and kill Negan’s people while they slept.

That isn’t the action of the good guys. It’s the action of villains. The Saviors had done nothing to Rick’s group at this point. In fact, the only encounter the two groups had up to this point was when the Saviors tried to take Daryl, Abraham and Sasha’s stuff and Daryl blew them all up with a rocket. And for all this killing, what does Negan do? He kills just one of their people. Sure, he kills Glenn after that but only because Daryl attacked him like an idiot. So two people was the extent of Negan’s revenge for Rick and his group killing dozens of Saviors, many of them in their sleep, in cold blood.

Negan isn’t a good man, but when you think about it like this he’s hardly any worse than Rick. And, like Rick, we see him grieving the death of Carl.  He’s even worried it was the Saviors’ doing, and is relieved when he learns that’s not the case.