‘The Walking Dead’ Season 8, Episode 5 Recap: Negan Takes Gabriel Hostage, Rick & Daryl On Mission

The Walking Dead spends the majority of this episode in flashback, right before and after Rick’s initial attack.

THE WALKING DEAD RECAP

We start with Father Gabriel praying in the Sanctuary. Last we saw him, he was trapped in an RV with Negan, with dozens of walkers clawing at the doors. We also see a flashback to some Savior generals planning how to combat Rick’s uprising against them before it happened. We spend a majority of the episode with Eugene, Dwight, and Simon after the attack, as they assume that Negan must be dead. Most of the episode is rather pointless, mainly because Negan is obviously not dead.

In the RV, Negan has taken prisoner Gabriel as his prisoner, but the pair get to talking. Gabriel tries to get Negan to confess some of his sins, but Negan insists he has nothing to confess. He sincerely believes all of his actions are done in reaction to something else, taking the blame off of himself. He has a justification for everything he does, and really thinks he his saving his people, hence the nickname the Saviors.

Gabriel asks Negan about his very first wife, of which at this point, Negan has had many. He holds his bat and says, “Lucille, give me strength.” Just then, Gabriel attempts to steal a gun off of Negan and kill him, but Negan stops him and barricades him in another room. He agrees to let him out only if Gabriel will work with him. Gabriel responds that he will only do so if Negan confesses to one of his weaknesses.

“My first wife was a real wife — my only real wife ’til death did us part. It was before this,” he says. “I lied to her, I screwed around on her. She was sick, and when she went…it was during this. I couldn’t put her down. That is how I was weak. That is what I will confess because, yeah, maybe we do bite the big one here.”

The conversations between Gabriel and Negan are the real meat of this episode. The rest could be skipped without losing anything of importance to the current story. The generals plan how to proceed sans Negan, and a lot of infighting ensues. Finally, Negan shows up with an eery whistle. He and Gabriel escaped by killing a walker who broke through a window, covering themselves in his entrails, and walking through the horde undetected.

Everyone kneels to Negan, including Gabriel, before he is carted off to a cell. They all know someone in the group betrayed them, and Negan is determined to find out who it was. He blames Eugene at first, and it is up in the air if he’ll betray Dwight. Later, Eugene goes to bring Gabriel some pillows, but finds him in fits of fever – it’s thought that close proximity to the dead could make you ill, and that seems true for Gabriel. In his delirious state, Gabriel tells Eugene that he came there to take Dr. Carson back to the Hilltop for Maggie.

The last storyline in the episode is that of Rick and Daryl’s mission. They spar about the morality of killing innocent people who got tangled up in Negan’s web, and Daryl, a la Negan, thinks that killing them is not their fault, but Negan’s. Their words turn to actual blows, and while they are fighting, the explosives go off by the machine gun they’d been tailing, destroying any extra supplies.

They make up and talk about blowing another hole in the Sanctuary home base so that walkers will infiltrate. With Rick’s car blown up, he is forced to walk home, while Daryl rides off on his motorcycle. Rick mentions “the last play,” and we see a helicopter in the sky at the end of the episode. It seems this last play will have to do with Jadis and the Scavengers.