‘The Walking Dead’ Season 8, Episode 6 Recap: “The King, The Widow And Rick”

The Walking Dead is adding to its slowest season by showing all the parts of the war against the Saviors, including the down time.

THE WALKING DEAD RECAP

Rick went off to recruit Jadis and her Junkyard group, but he is quickly taken prisoner. Ezekiel is still getting over the emotional losses from last week’s battle, Maggie and Jesus argue over what to do with their new Savior prisoners, and Carl finally reunites with the stranger from the gas station in the first episode of the season. Michonne and Rosita have the only real action of the episode, but it comes via unimportant side mission, so doesn’t add much to the plot overall. While slow, this episode seems to teach that the kid characters will be the ones making the best decisions.

“The King, The Widow, and Rick” gives us a little bit of each of those three things. First, the King. Carol attempts to wake Ezekiel from his depression with little luck – until Benjamin’s younger brother Henry approaches and wants to help the cause. She goes off into the woods toward the Saviors camp, and Henry follows, only to need saving by Carol because he can’t fend off walkers on his own. She calls him stupid, but he counters that she might be the dumb one as she set off to battle an entire group by herself. She concedes his point and gives him a gun, but they head back to the Kingdom to convince Ezekiel to get back in the game. She implores him to put his persona back on, even if he doesn’t want to, but he says he cannot.

Back at the Hilltop with Maggie, the episode’s widow, we see Aaron return with the infant Savior that Rick discovered a few episodes ago, and with it a note on the group’s progresses and losses. Maggie catches Jesus feeding their hostages turnips from the Hilltop food supply, and she is angry. She agrees they still don’t have a good answer for what to do with the hostages, but, she says, “We have to make sure what’s left is worth what we lost.”

The prisoners wake to the sounds of something being built, and they fear it’s a gallows. But Maggie rounds them up the next morning and leads them to a newly-built pen. She tells them they will keep them alive and not mistreat them, but will expect complete cooperation in return. When Gregory, who had been telling Maggie to kill them from the start, objects, she throws him in the pen too. Later, hostages Dillon and Jared argue and decide to just bide their time and maybe take over the Hilltop at a later point.

Aaron grieves Eric’s death to Maggie, and later runs out on his own side mission. Enid catches him and she decides to go with him.

Rick, meanwhile, is trying to convince Jadis to join him. But after getting thrown in a cell, he simply sits nude and peers through a bullet hole. Carl, on the other hand, makes progress of his own. He finds Sadik, the guy who Rick shot at at the gas station. Carl finds him in the woods and offers him food and water, and asks about his past. Sadik says he’s killed over 200 walkers, and only one person, when the walkers tried to kill him but didn’t finish the job. He explains that he’s fulfilling his mother’s teachings by setting traps for the walkers – she believed that killing the dead would free their souls. Carl appreciates Sadik’s dedication to his mother.

The pair head off together toward Alexandria, and kill some walkers along the way in a very unconvincing fight. “Sometimes kids have to find their own way to show their parents the light,” Carl tells Sadik.

Lastly, Michonne and Rita are on their own mission toward the Sanctuary. Along the way, they find two Saviors building a speaker system on two trucks, a mechanism to scare walkers away. They give away their position and a gunfight ensues, in which Rosita drops her pistol. She finds a grenade launcher, though, and threatens the man. She says she won’t shoot but then does and blows him up and his speaker contraption. This distracts Michonne and the woman, and she runs, but as she’s getting away, Daryl and Tara hit her with a garbage truck and shoot her. They were heading toward the Sanctuary to kill Dwight anyway, so the foursome join forces and head toward the Sanctuary together.