IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN!
We’re now halfway through this extension of season ten of The Walking Dead, and last week’s episode was both very bleak and surprisingly funny, as we followed Aaron and Father Gabriel in their desperate quest to find food using a map Maggie made of areas that her group presumably passed on their way to Alexandria.
We would see that their quest was mostly fruitless, with the only highlight, if you can call it that, was meeting the mysterious and brutal Mays and discovering his tragic story.
In last week’s episode of The Walking Dead, Aaron and Gabriel learn that just because the Whisperers are gone doesn’t mean things suddenly become good.
There were also many details, hints, clues, and trivia that were not nearly so obvious as all of that. Little bits of information that, if you weren’t careful, might have passed right by you without you even noticing.
Those things are, of course, exactly what I’m here for! If you don’t know, Things To Note is a series where I find all the aforementioned details, hints, clues, and trivia and put them all together in one place, so you don’t have to go looking for them!
Are you ready? It’s time for this week’s installment of The Walking Dead: Things To Note!
1) Just like the previous two episodes, this episode begins with a recap of the Whisperer War. This time by Father Gabriel, focusing especially on the loss of Siddiq and Beatrice and Gabriel’s murder of Dante (In “Open Your Eyes,” “A Certain Doom,” and “The World Before,” respectively).
2) When Father Gabriel and Aaron arrive at the house on Maggie’s map, they find it burnt to the ground, much like the safehouse Maggie’s group was using in the first episode of the season ten extension, “Home Sweet Home.” Was this also the work of the Reapers?
3) After killing the walker that was stuck to the telephone pole, Gabriel sets and tosses an egg timer to draw the attention of nearby walkers, a trick first seen used by Enid way back in season five’s penultimate episode, “Try.”
4) After clearing a field of walkers (Revealed by Gabriel’s use of the egg timer trick), Aaron and Gabriel come upon a pair of skeleton horses with skeleton riders, and not far from them, a line of cars occupied by walkers and corpses and riddled with bullets. What happened there? The road seems like an odd, out of the way place for a traffic jam, this “traffic jam” is rather small, only about six or seven cars and the fact that at least one of the occupants of the cars seems to have died inside paints a puzzling picture. Were those cars the beginnings of a camp similar to the one outside Atlanta at the beginning of the series? Were those people ambushed? By whom?
5) Judging by the “SAVE US” sign painted on the roof of the convenience store Gabriel searches, the group there used the store as a sanctuary when the outbreak first hit, as they were clearly looking for help from potentially passing aircraft. Had they seen helicopters from the CRM? From what we saw in The Walking Dead World Beyond, the Civic Republic does have an outpost in the general vicinity.
6) Additionally, it appears that at least some of the members of the convenience store group turned inside the store. The survivors escaped to the roof, but, for reasons unknown (Maybe the store was surrounded by walkers?), they chose to commit suicide rather than try to make the relatively short jump to the ground.
7) This episode takes place approximately two weeks after the Whisperers’ defeat, at least if what Aaron says is anything to go by.
8) During Gabriel and Aaron’s conversation about things not being able to go back to the way they were, Aaron puts Gabriel’s pessimism down to the Whisperers still being on his mind. This is the first time since Rick’s group arrived at Alexandra that we’ve actually seen how members of the group decompress after dealing with hostiles.
9) Additionally, Gabriel’s pessimism about people in general and the communities’ ability to keep going reveals that Carol’s strangely grim outlook (Considering their victory over the Whisperers) is not limited just to her.
10) Mays is, to the best of my knowledge, the first character in The Walking Dead to have a family member betray them. The fact Mays’s brother betrayed him after Mays had defended his brother’s family makes his story somewhat reminiscent of Abraham’s story, as he was betrayed by his original group, despite his dedication to their survival.
11) With his penchant for deciding life or death on games of chance and one side of his face being extremely scarred, Mays winds up resembling the notorious Batman villain, Two-Face.
12) Gabriel murdering Mays after getting through to him and convincing him to reject his anger and hate is very similar to Rick murdering several Saviors after promising to bring them back to Hilltop in season eight’s “Still Gotta Mean Something.”
13) Mays is at least the seventh named character to die this half-season.
14) Considering that Mays seemed perfectly happy to spray bullets around with his AK-47, it makes one wonder: Was he the person who riddled the cars Aaron and Gabriel passed by with bullets?
15) Robert Patrick is the first actor in The Walking Dead to play two separate characters: Mays and his twin brother.
16) According to showrunner Angela Kang, Mays’s brother was made to play Russian Roulette with his wife and daughter and chose to kill them rather than himself. With this in mind, it sort of throws Mays’s story into question. Why make his sister-in-law and niece suffer for his brother’s actions? Had Mays been the one to betray his brother and not the other way around?
17) With what we know about Mays’s brother, assuming Mays’s version of events is accurate, it’s possible that his suicide was him attempting to rectify a past mistake. Realizing what his brother was trying to teach him: That choosing to kill his wife and daughter instead of himself was selfish. Mays’s brother notably does look down at his wife and daughter’s bodies before pulling the trigger.
18) Assuming that Mays is the brothers’ last name, that would make the other Mays at least the eighth named character to die this half-season and second in this episode.
19) This episode gets its name from the phrase that Aaron and Gabriel keep saying to each other to compel each other to continue with their mission of searching possible supply caches on Maggie’s map (Particularly after a depressing stop): One More.
And that ends our installment of Things To Note for this week! Was there anything you missed? Was there anything I missed? Let me know! If you like this and want to read more of my writings, specifically about how to survive a zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! And you can get it from Amazon here and on iTunes here!