As our heroes are in the process of being taken away to an undisclosed location by the Commonwealth’s goons, Daryl and Carol have set off to stage a rescue. In this episode, we get quite an unexpected reunion in more ways than one.
Warning! This article contains major spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 11, Episode 21: Outpost 22.
Maggie, Gabriel, and Rosita are on a truck in the Commonwealth’s caravan that also includes the bus with Ezekiel, Kelly, Negan, and others. But the truck with Maggie’s group finds an opportunity for escape when their one and only guard falls sound asleep.
Gabriel and Rosita are able to jump off the moving truck, but Maggie is caught when the guard wakes up. The scuffle between the two ends up with one more hole in the driver’s head and a crashed truck. Luckily, Maggie escapes unharmed. When she hears the other vehicles in the convoy driving up, she takes off into the woods.
“The Walking Dead”- (s11e21) was so good…
— DepressedBergman (@DannyDrinksWine) October 23, 2022
The larger group of prisoners on the bus are told that they will now be laborers and they will no longer have names; they are now reduced to numbers. There’s also reassurance that the children are all safe, as long as the adults do what they’re told.
This is about the time that Carol and Daryl come strolling up to do a little reconnaissance. They find Maggie alone in the woods facing quite a moral dilemma. A small child who has turned undead is facing off against her. Of course, she could easily end this pint-sized zombie, but she just can’t help but think of her son, Hershel. She just can’t bring herself to kill this kid. Of course, she eventually does, and it’s a sad scene, but it tells a lot about the evolution of Maggie that goes right along with her (kinda) acceptance of Negan as more than just a target for her knife and evil glare.
Gabriel and Rosita also find the group and the five of them set off to rescue their friends. With word of a train being involved (Daryl and Carol got that info from Lance a few episodes back), the group sabotages the rail line and hijacks the train as it comes along. There’s an intense shootout with the troopers, but they end up eliminating all but one (and the train’s conductor) for questioning.
Daryl, being the master of questioning that we’ve come to know over the years, starts off with some friendly tactics but soon switches to threats. None of these tactics work on the trooper until Gabriel talks to the man about God. See, Gabriel recognized the trooper from his church sermons back at the Commonwealth. This trooper always sat in the back and never felt like he was worthy of being up front, so Gabriel took that opportunity to chat with the man and pray with him before he died of his injuries.
Meanwhile, Negan has a plan back at the labor camp. He sneaks a little chat with Ezekiel, who understandably can’t stand Negan (because of that whole thing where Negan’s henchmen wiped out The Kingdom). But Negan convinces Ezekiel to join him in an escape. Ezekiel reluctantly agrees to help.
So What Was the Big Surprise?
And now for the big shocker of the episode. As the convoy stops at giant steel gates labeled “Outpost 22,” we watch the faces of the survivors as they realize what these gates lead to. This new hard labor camp named Outpost 22 used to be Alexandria. Duhn duhn DUHN.
“Milton has underestimated us since day one,” Maggie says to the group at the end of the episode. “We are gonna get our kids, take back out home, and make it right.
“And Pamela is never gonna see it coming.”
Final Thoughts
Overall, I thought this was a great episode. It brought together many of our separated favorites like Daryl, Carol, Connie, Maggie, Gabriel, and Rosita. It also seems like it won’t be long before that group joins up with Negan and Ezekiel again.
But that leaves two more groups that are unaccounted for. We have the group with Negan’s wife, Annie, and we have Lydia’s group that set off a few episodes back to scout out the other towns like Alexandria. According to the sneak peek into next week’s early episode, we see Lydia for a split second in that preview. I guess that means they got captured, too.
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