Daryl and Rosita are pawns of a rich bastard on The Walking Dead

Photo: Josh Stringer/AMC

Wealthy dipshits really do think they can just buy their way out of everything, don’t they? We already hated Sebastian, the little arrogant prick of a governor’s son, when he was first introduced getting Eugene thrown in jail and then making Daryl’s life difficult. (He’s the kind of guy you would say was too cartoonish to be believable, if we didn’t all sadly know real-world versions of him.) But now that we’ve learned he’s gotten literally dozens of innocent people killed for his selfish, short-sighted personal needs, it’s not hard to imagine a future where Daryl, Rosita, and Mercer deliver what’s coming to him.

Not only that, but he serves as a handy symbol of everything that’s wrong with the Commonwealth. Despite the high-minded rhetoric (which Pamela Milton, for all her failings, seems to truly believe, albeit in the manner of self-justifying oligarchs everywhere), the society has brought many of the worst aspects of the old world back into its way of life, and every single member of our group is slowly having to reckon with that fact. It doesn’t make Maggie’s choice to forfeit desperately needed supplies right, necessarily, but it sure vindicates her suspicions.

In many ways, the two stories that drive “The Rotten Core” are flip sides of the same corrupt coin. Each one demonstrates the failure of the Commonwealth to provide a better world. In the case of Carlson, the sadistic ex-CIA assassin murdering his way through an apartment building, it’s the “kill first, sort it out later” mentality that our protagonists have continually struggled against—sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. But at least they try to respect a code of fair treatment, and absolutely condemn the notion of arbitrary cruelty. Lance Hornsby doesn’t give any such fucks.

And in the case of Sebastian ordering around Daryl and Rosita (and low-key threatening Judith and RJ, to boot), it’s even more cut-and-undead-dried: People with money and influence getting to do whatever they want and treating those beneath them like indentured servants is everything our people hate. It’s why the Saviors, despite some uncomfortable moral equivalencies at times, were ultimately less defensible than Alexandria. Sure, there’s a case to be made for just about any group of desperate people doing what they have to for survival—and the show has made it, many times—but the example of Sebastian in the Commonwealth has nothing to do with desperation. It’s greed, and venality, and a cocksure assumption that those with money and power are in the right, despite demonstrating time and again they are anything but.

But first: the assault on Negan’s new home, and it’s residents’ ultimate success in defending their property from the Commonwealth’s thugs. I mentioned last week that The Walking Dead’s timetables have a tendency to fall apart under scrutiny, and that gets highlighted this week. Negan is married? Hasn’t it been, like, what—three, four months, tops? We haven’t hit the six-month flash-forward that ended the first episode of the second arc of this season, so it’s gotta be something like that. Forgive me for thinking that’s an awfully short amount of time for someone like Negan to settle down and have a kid—and more importantly, live under the roof of a deranged religious weirdo like Ian. It’s a big ask for the audience to buy that, and this episode glides right past it.

Luckily, the actual fight scenes with Carlson are good, as our people and theirs band together and take out Carlson and his goons with well-staged action. (Bonus bonus for Elijah finally being the masked badass we initially met again, though it keeps his characterization oddly inconsistent.) And better still, Negan has a reckoning with Herschel, Glenn’s son. This was a story beat that felt inevitable, but it was handled effectively, with Herschel learning that he won’t always get to pick his battles, and Negan giving him the Kill Bill deal of returning in a few years to settle the score. It’s almost like Maggie’s vendetta passes to her child, since she herself gets confronted with yet more definitive evidence that people can actually change. (Plus, Maggie’s in quite the glass house. “None of us have clean hands,” Annie reminds her.)

Meanwhile, Daryl and Rosita are busy with their own life-and-death struggle, albeit over far more appalling reasons. Sebastian needs cash, because his mom cut him off. Sigh. But once the pair are in the house and opening up the panic room where a frantic woman has been trapped for days, things get interesting. After a standard-issue “smear blood and walk through the undead” ends with Daryl setting off an alarm (a nice close-quarters struggle, crisply filmed by first-time episode director Marcus Stokes), we learn the truth from April, the aforementioned woman: There were a dozen like her, now all dead.

While this sequence was potent in its editing and execution, the narrative dominoes its sets up are the most intriguing element. Mercer comes to the rescue, thanks to Carol; by the time he’s realized what’s happened, the head of Commonwealth security has slipped that much closer to the side of the angels. Plus, his stone-faced execution of Sebastian’s goons is arguably the most satisfying kill of the episode, were it not for Carlson’s all-too-fitting fate.

By the end, Hornsby is frustrated in his efforts to contact Carlson, and Carol has wormed her way even further into the Commonwealth middle manager’s good graces. This was a fun, violent, and zippy two-parter, exactly what the show could use at this point. There’s only two more episodes left before the middle act of the super-sized final season comes to a close; unless the show is saving everything for its final stretch, we have a lot of work left to get from here to there (there being the Commonwealth apparently heading out to seize Hilltop from Maggie, even though we know that’s not actually going to happen the way the flash-forward framed it). But it’s in a good groove—let’s hope this trend continues.

Stray observations

• The final reveal of Leah being responsible for the raid on the weapons caravan would’ve packed more of a punch if it didn’t feel like we just left her a few episodes ago. Like, yeah, we knew she was out there, presumably planning her revenge.
• Carol’s explanation for coming to the rescue with Mercer: “You didn’t show up for lunch.”
• Kill of the week: Mercer killing Sebastian’s guys was good, but the win still goes to Aaron straight-up shooting Carlson off the roof of the building, where he could then be ripped apart by the very people he sent to their deaths.
• Sebastian dropping the stack of bills on Daryl’s desk and saying, “I am so glad we’re friends again” was the biggest dick move in an episode full of them.
• Then again, the fact that he called Rosita “sweetie” makes me think she just jumped to the front of the line to eventually take him out.
• Another good line, this one from Lydia (who was so happy to see Negan, awww): The Commonwealth is “like the Whisperers—they just wear different masks.”
• R.I.P. April, you freaked out while walking through walkers. The bigger question: Why did no one have blood smeared on their faces? That’s blood-smearing 101, guys. Lazy.