Warning: Full spoilers for The Walking Dead episode “Stalker” follow…
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“Stalker” was a solid, intense mid-battle episode that pitted Daryl against Alpha and Alexandria against Beta. By, “mid-battle” I mean one of those gripping action-y episodes that’s meant to break up some of the solemness and kick up the excitement while we wait for things to finally get settled in the season finale.
Like how Rick and Shane had their big confrontation in Season 2’s “18 Miles Out” that didn’t solve anything. Or how Rick and Negan clashed in Season 8’s “The Key.” You know how it goes. No one of consequence dies, the stakes kind of remain the same, but we get some cool fight scenes.
Daryl and Alpha may have gotten pretty thrashed here, but “Stalker” was still a zero-sum entry. For the most part. There was some movement, story-wise, so let’s look at what managed to creep through.
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Gamma Quadrent
With no tricks up her sleeve, Gamma — real name: Mary from Santa Monica — effectively left the Whisperers and joined up with the main cast of heroes. As far as we, and Gabriel, can tell, she’s on the up and up. She’s also got the best vote of confidence of all – the approval of Judith, who began speaking to her when she was locked up in the Negan cell. If Judith starts peeking down at you, you’re pretty much in.
The other big reason Gamma’s now in (are we going to just call he Mary from now on?) is because she went toe-to-toe with Beta, who crept into Alexandria via a secret tunnel housed outside in an RV. Could she take him? Of course not. But her trying, and Rosita seeing her trying (and her actually saving Rosita’s life), were big steps toward leaving her old gross worm-eating life behind.
Now we’ll have to see how they’ll differentiate Mary’s story as a former-Whisperer newcomer from Lydia’s. Will she get the same treatment? At least she’s off to Hilltop.
Of course, I’ll have to eat my words if this is all just another giant long-con by the Whisperers. Hopefully, the show won’t do this considering what we just went through with Siddiq and Dante. Plus, I already care about Mary more than some of the last round of newcomers and this group needs more people that viewers actively give a s*** about.
Also, I do like the idea of redemption in the zompocalypse. I like envisioning a future crew consisting of Negan, Mary, and a few others who used to belong to terrible, ghoulish communities. It’s one of the themes Fear the Walking Dead played around with nicely the past few seasons.
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Rosita, Gabriel, and Alexandria
Gabriel’s romantic pairing with Rosita still seems a bit off, but this darker, grittier version of Gabriel, as the man who strangled a dude to death recently, is a much more interesting layer than we’ve ever gotten from him. He harsh, and willing to kill with impunity, but he’s not all the way gone. Like, Rosita called him out for being erratic, but he was still wise enough not to kill Gamma in the end when it totally looked like she was in cahoots with Beta.
Having to deal with, and contain, Gamma, for safety purposes, actually did a lot to make Rosita and Gabriel feel more like a couple than usual, but mostly it just helped them more like vital contributors to the story overall. Also, it was interesting to learn, because time seems to blend up into a blur, that Siddiq’s death only happened “two days ago” in show time. I guess I thought it’d been longer since Eugene seemed to arrive there fairly quickly from Hilltop.
Bottom line, it felt good to watch Rosita take on Beta. It lent to the forty of the episode as a whole and helped paint Rosita with an extra layer of courage after she had that dream about Whisperers going after little Coco. Also, she was “safe” from being killed off here since Beta already spent his big kill by “Jason from Friday the 13th Part VII’ing” that blonde woman down in the prison cell.
And, with regards to the “Alexandrians kicking round after round of walker ass” montage from the first part of the season, when Alpha was launching her herd at the town in spurts, we revisited two citizens, two bro-beans, who openly discussed making a game out of killing Whisperers. But this time, one of them didn’t want to eff around. He wanted to take them seriously as a threat. So that was cool to see, since the BSG “33”-style kill collage made the stakes feel super low at the time.
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The Return of Lydia
As we already figured, Daryl and Lydia make the perfect pair. Not romantically, obviously, and not just because they both had rotten and traumatic childhoods, but because they both can survive out in the woods eating twigs and sleeping in mud. Daryl, at his most reclusive, was very Whisperer-adjacent.
Anyhow, he was out in the woods this week, stalking Whisperers (one of whom was Alpha), asking “WHERE ARE THEY?” Can we assume he’s looking for Connie and Magna? How would Alpha know where they are? Were they taken? Is Daryl looking for a secret way back into the caves? Or was Daryl searching for Alpha’s camp, for revenge? None of that was clear, but he was out to take down a few grossos, that’s for sure.
And then it al came down to him vs. Alpha, which ended in a draw after they both seriously wounded each other and then Lydia came in to sweep up the mess. At first, Lydia’s arrival, to a bleary Alpha, felt like a dream, and we were meant to question her realness for a while. It wasn’t until we saw her with Daryl at the end that her presence was actually confirmed.
