The Walking Dead twists time and space for a fun and deadly adventure

Recruiting strangers to join a community? This is what Aaron does. It’s literally how we first met him—remember when the formerly mellow and easygoing guy showed up and pitched Rick Grimes on the idea of Alexandria? That was his job: Finding wayward souls who seem reasonably non-crazy, and offering them safe haven behind the walls of a genteel post-apocalyptic community. Those walls have been destroyed (though are being rebuilt), and Aaron’s seen far too much death and devastation to retain the idealistic optimism he once held, but still. He knows how this works. So if he says confronting a bunch of wary zealots holed up in a fortress of a building is a bad idea, maybe you should listen.

Of course, part of the wicked fun of “Warlords” is how it keeps doubling back on itself, retreating in time to reveal another layer to the situation. And not just time, but space—starting with Hilltop, progressing over to the Commonwealth, eventually even zinging out to show Negan and his new associate on the road, ready to lend a hand. Everyone gets pulled into the same screwed-up plan hatched by Lance Hornsby (because of course Hornsby is responsible for this fiasco), but it’s not until the end that all the various groups catch up to one another, and we find our protagonists trapped inside a building with an unstable killer hunting them. That’s a good time—and a throwback to when The Walking Dead would routinely end on cliffhangers implying everyone, or at least a lot of folks, might be dead by the end of next week.

We know the plan is going to go south, thanks to the first act with Maggie. Lydia is planning to leave to join the Commonwealth, because she’s sick of just barely scraping by, always on the edge of starvation and collapse. (“It hurts,” she tells Maggie, after the latter regales her with a story of how Maggie’s family fended off a predatory company trying to buy out their family farm back in the day, in hopes of inspiring the younger woman.) But then an unknown guy shows up on Hilltop’s doorstep with a note asking for help, and off goes Lydia, Maggie, and Elijah to help. (This is a bit of a stretch—they have no idea what they’re getting into, which is not Maggie’s M.O.—but sure.) Suddenly, there’s dead stormtroopers in the middle of the road, and a frantic Aaron racing towards them. Something bad has happened.

And that’s what makes it so enjoyable to see Gabriel’s skepticism when we suddenly rewind the clock. After Aaron recruits the priest (who has rediscovered his faith off-camera; again, this is a little too much telling instead of showing) for a supposed humanitarian mission to invite a group of 40-some religious folks to join the Commonwealth, Gabriel takes one look at the plan—wander blindly into a heavily fortified building manned by zealots—and tells Aaron’s earnest supervisor, Carlson, to fuck off. “Yeah, I’m not doing this,” he says. And despite a cut implying Gabriel has laid out some clever plan, we quickly realize that’s not the case. After being threatened by the group’s leader (a delightful Michael Biehn, having a ball hamming it up), Carlson reveals his true colors, killing the leader, threatening our people, and beginning a plan to execute every single person in the building.

It’s all done with brisk, satisfying pacing and effective, close-quarters tension from director Loren Yaconelli, who mostly seems like they were marking time in the first half of the episode until they could get to the good stuff following the twist of Carlson’s duplicity. But the structure of the script is smart, too, allowing Carlson some unexpected depth (he really doesn’t want to be doing this, but Hornsby appeals to the weird humanitarian nature of the ex-CIA assassin) that makes him a more plausible killing machine. By the time he’s kicking innocent people off the roof of the building, he’s all the more unsettling for how deeply we know the guy is invested in this planned extermination in the name of revenge for (supposedly) murdered Commonwealth soldiers.

It’s all zipping along with such enjoyable elan (if admittedly gimcrack, but then, this is The Walking Dead we’re talking about), it’s almost an afterthought when Negan suddenly pops up. Apparently, it didn’t take him long to find some new folks with which to join up, though the idea that he’d take orders from Biehn’s skull-collecting oddball is pretty unlikely; it’s not until the episode is over that you realize how wobbly some of its narrative foundations are. But they kill the stormtroopers guarding Gabriel, the woman delivers a pep talk to the other residents inside, and suddenly, we’re doing an Assault On Precinct 13-style (maybe Home Alone is a better comparison?) invasion thriller. Or rather, we will be, next episode.

Sure, the timetable falls apart if you think about it too hard (by the end, Maggie and the others are also inside the building, ready to help fight off Carlson?), but the thing is, that’s often been the case with the more entertaining installments of The Walking Dead. From the beginning, the show has sacrificed logic here and there when it benefits the overall entertainment value of an episode, and in that regard, this felt a bit like a throwback to the days when the show would rush headlong from one disaster to the next, our heroes in over their heads and staring down death on a weekly basis. It was quite a bit of fun, in other words, and if next week’s continuation manages to stick the landing, this will be one of the more enjoyable two-parters the series has delivered in quite some time. Bring on the chaos.

Stray observations

• So Elijah 100% has a crush on Lydia, yes? “You’ll be back, though, right?”
• Maggie’s story about her family holding out against predatory farm developers is actually a really accurate parable of how predatory capitalism works, in all sorts of ways, from Starbucks putting local coffee shops out of business to, yes, family farms being plundered in the name of short-term profit.
• I guess it’s nice Gabriel hears God again, but still, this felt like a classic too-abrupt Walking Dead character shift. That being said, Gabriel being salty to Carlson was quite funny.
• Honestly thought the scythe-wielding badass woman was going to be the leader of the group, but if you’re going to pull that rug out, you could do a lot worse than have the real leader be good old Michael Biehn.
• Carlson, saying what we’re all hoping: “Are you tired of living, Lance?”
• “We know this place better than the assholes in our house.” Okay, I take back the comparison yet again: This is going to be like the final act of Skyfall, isn’t it? Which, yes, Home Alone, but a little deadlier.