That’s the risk and reward when it comes to basing the bulk of the episode’s B and C plots around comedy characters. Negan, despite everything, is still funny. Eugene has never not been funny, particularly when Josh McDermitt starts motoring his mouth around that very thick dialogue provided by Channing Powell’s excellent script. Negan’s supposed to be scoffing and rolling his eyes, even when he’s being threatened, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan really leans into it when Negan is given a chance to be put in a position of power over Daryl again courtesy of the three Whisperers who catch him at the border with Daryl.
Generally all of Negan’s interactions with other characters are kind of funny, until they’re not, and this week, they were mostly funny, allowing Morgan to flex his charisma a little bit and giving Norman Reedus a chance to play into his strong straight man instincts as Negan’s sounding board. McDermitt, when traveling with Eleanor Matsuura’s Yumiko, exhibits some beautiful comic timing pretty much throughout Eugene’s story about the chocolate bunnies, and it’s nice to see Yumiko getting some time as something other than the more dynamic, action-oriented Magna’s girlfriend.
Balanced against this sense of fun are a few different minor plots, and a major one involving Carol and, of all people, Alpha. Carol might have let Negan off the leash to do her dirty work, but that won’t end Carol’s guilt, and the vision of Alpha she has in her head picks at her constantly throughout the episode, echoing both her own negative self image and the negative talk Carol no doubt received from Ed in her pre-apocalypse life. For Carol, Alpha is the perfect embodiment of all her failures, and a mirror version of who she could have become under different circumstances. Michonne had her drug trip, and Carol has the vision in her head to chastise her for all of her mistakes, selfishness, weakness, and general human failings.
These sequences are 100 percent in Carol’s head, and yet, thanks to great performances from Melissa McBride and Samantha Morton, they feel completely real. It’s easy to see why Carol would talk to herself in such a fashion, having internalized years of abuse prior to the outbreak, and why the many deaths and failures around her would cause her to look at the one common thread among all of these things—herself—as the reason why everything crumbles around her while she usually escapes unharmed. Particularly, when Carol and Alpha talk back and forth to each other, the cycle of mental self-abuse is palpable, especially when Carol accidentally causes a ceiling to collapse on her and get her trapped with at least one zombie coming to investigate the huge amount of noise created by that attempt to get a canoe down from the rafters of an old barn.
Another relatively simple task, another failure. Channing Powell makes sure that Samantha Morton gets the most brutal lines possible to use on Carol, not for the shock value of hearing someone be called “a stupid slit” on basic cable, but to put across that Carol has been beating herself up for years with this kind of talk. Every small failure brings about a heaping serving of abuse, to whittle her away to nothing every time she tries to build something new with someone new, be it a surrogate daughter like Lizzie or a relationship like with Ezekiel.
