‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’: There Is One Impostor Among You (RECAP)
[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 1 episode 9, “The Deepest Cut.”]
Anyone else think Huck (Annet Mahendru) is sus? Anyone see Huck go into the vents? Okay, “Among Us” jokes aside, episode 9 of this season’s The Walking Dead: World Beyond picks up where last week’s surprising (or maybe not-so-surprising, depending on what you’d predicted) cliffhanger left off.
Yes, Lt. Col Kublek (Julia Ormond) is Huck’s mom, and yes, Huck is with CRM. She’s been tasked with bringing in “the asset,” one of the Bennett sisters, by any means necessary — even if it means the deaths of the rest of the squad. Meanwhile, Elton (Nicolas Cantu) has an unexpected reunion with a former group member.
Hope’s Huge Choice
When we catch back up with the group, everybody’s shivering on a cold night after the car got a flat tire (thanks to CRM double agent Huck, who drove right into some sharp debris). They get out and start walking, but soon they’re surrounded by walkers on all sides that have gotten caught in a barbed wire fence. (How did no one hear those walkers? Where is the fence from? Don’t think about it too hard — you won’t get an answer.)
Zach Dilgard/AMC
They manage to fight ‘em off, but Felix’s (Nico Totorella) ankle is injured badly enough that they can’t proceed with the mission. Well, they can keep going, as Hope (Alexa Mansour) notes, and not take Felix, but Iris (Aliyah Royale) refuses to listen to that kind of talk. “Sometimes I wish I had a map to figure you out,” she tells her sister. Everybody looks for supplies to fix the truck and/or Felix, and they look in every room except for one Huck says is filled with dead bodies. Yeah, that’s not suspicious at all.
Conclusions are reached: Felix wants the group to continue on without him, and he tells them as much. Iris still refuses to leave him and it seems they’ll all remain with Felix. But, in the middle of the night, Hope goes up to Huck and asks her to leave with her. She’s serious about finding her dad, and she knows Felix will slow them down. (Oh, Iris has already pegged Huck for a traitor, a sentiment Hope doesn’t seem to share). The duo head out on their own, leaving Iris and Felix to survive on their own.
Already Dead…?
Meanwhile, Elton (Roger Dale Floyd) stumbles upon Percy (Ted Sutherland), who’s in a bad way. Percy himself doesn’t do much talking, but Elton’s vivid hallucinations of him sure do. He guides Elton to discover he was shot, not stabbed with a huge wrench, so it seems doubtful Silas (Hal Cumpston) is guilty of anything other than being an angsty teenager who had to watch the girl he likes develop feelings for someone else.
Elton makes Percy a poultice and drags him along — literally — for the journey, but hallucination-Percy just ain’t feeling it. “I’m already dead,” he tells Elton on several occasions, trying to get him to save himself. Elton won’t abandon him, partially because he wants to be better than his mother and is having a hard time coping with the whole she-shot-Iris-and-Hope’s-mom thing.
An Unpleasant Realization
Well, predictably, Elton ends up surrounded by walkers with an unconscious Percy. Hallucination-Percy says, again, that he needs to let him go. Elton won’t. He manages to subdue or kill all of the walkers by himself, a huge triumph for him — and a regular Tuesday for Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs), Enid (Katelyn Nacon), Alicia Clark (Alycia-Debnam Carey) or any other of his similarly aged post-apocalyptic counterparts.
Credit: Macall Polay/AMC
Anyway, Elton knows they need help, and he jumps on the radio to try to get ahold of his friends. He reaches Huck, who — surprise! — won’t be coming back for him, as Percy awakens and tells Elton she’s the one that shot him. Huck sends her transmission to CRM that she does, in fact, have “the asset.”
Meanwhile, “the asset” earlier cracked the CRM code the group found a few episodes ago and realized the organization said everyone besides her is expendable, and that Huck’s in on it. She starts to pull out a gun, clearly intent on using it against Huck.
Other Observations
- CRM is starting to baffle me. They’ll use resources (and not to mention risk their own people) to get to Hope, but they won’t recognize potential “assets” in the larger campus community? I just can’t fathom an organization that burns entire prosperous communities — and all the potential within them — to the ground, but stages an entire elaborate operation, with a gigantic risk of failure, around one girl.
- I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. The dialogue just isn’t doing it for me.
- It was nice to see Felix’s boyfriend, and learn he’s still alive and no longer with CRM in the post-credits scene. Here’s hoping for a happy reunion. But I’m getting tired of all the flashbacks, all of which do more to slow the momentum of the story than they do to explain the characters.
- Rating: 2/5. I’d hoped World Beyond would start to pick up toward the end of its season, but this was a pretty slow episode. Here’s hoping the finale ramps up the intensity a little bit — on the main show, the episode before the finale is usually where something really shocking happens.
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