The Walking Dead is a show about political intrigue in this exclusive clip from the penultimate episode

We are now just two episodes away from the actual, no-fooling end of AMC’s The Walking Dead. (Please prepare any 12-year-olds you know for this sudden and bizarre shift away from the reality in which they have lived their entire lives; potentially comfort them in the knowledge that several of the show’s more popular characters are getting spin-offs to keep the franchise eternally un-alive.) Today, to help the marking of this ending of an era, we’ve got a new exclusive clip from the show’s penultimate episode, “Family,” showing that things are getting tense—well, continuing to be extremely tense—around the Commonwealth.

Specifically, the clip focuses on a conversation between Paola Lázaro’s Princess and Michael James Shaw’s Mercer, formulating a plan for how they’re going to bring down the hyper-secure, but also highly stratified and classist, survivor society that’s gearing up to be the show’s final boss. (At least, until those new walkers who can use knives and do parkour shit make themselves more widely known…) The partners’ plan focuses on using the prisoners recently liberated from one of the Commonwealth’s labor camps to expose the lies powering governor Pamela (Laila Robins) and her corrupt regime.

And, no, we also were not expecting the final season of The Walking Dead to revolve around political intrigue and finding “legal grounds” to remove a public leader—but that’s what happens when your show runs for 11 seasons, i.e., long enough to go from post-apocalyptic into sort of…post-post-apocalyptic storytelling? Of course, there’s only so far you can ever get from the zombies in this world: The final moments of the clip see Mercer drop his call, with the reveal that there’s a swarm of walkers approaching the fortified community.

“Family” airs tomorrow night, November 13, on AMC; the show’s final installment, “Rest In Peace,” will run on November 20.