The Walking Dead: World Beyond is kind of a mixed bag at this point. Often it feels like an episode drags on at a snail’s pace until suddenly something big happens, or maybe nothing happens at all until the very end or the post-credits scene.
Sunday night’s episode “Truth Or Dare” is par for the course in many ways. We get a lot of conversation—whether that’s Hope opening up to Huck about killing Elton’s mom, or a super awkward game of Truth Or Dare—and some nice moments like when Tony talks fondly about his nephew or shows a delighted Elton his magic tricks.
Then there’s the expected flashback scenes, which are of Huck this week, detailing when she was a soldier during the outbreak of the zombie pandemic. I actually really enjoyed the use of thermal vision to help the soldiers distinguish between the living and the dead, though it seems that distinction made much less difference later on, when she’s ordered to shoot anything that moves.
But even still, I feel like I can recap much of the episode with just a couple paragraphs. Most of it is in the two preceding this one. Then there’s an awkward moment when a drunk Elton hugs Hope. There’s Percy acting like a real prick to Hope and then trying to get his game on with Iris. There’s Tony and Felix having a drink and talking.
Things only really pick up when a stranger takes Hope prisoner and Huck finds him with a gun to her head and a bite wound on his leg. Our group has a map that leads to a number of CRM caches where they can find gasoline and possibly other supplies. (So, kind of like the top of that building in last week’s episode of FearTWD where they found the antibiotics just in time).
The man—Walter—is feverish and rambling, accusing them of being part of the CRM. Apparently the CRM has been busy, taking out smaller colonies all over the US, which is kind of weird since we’ve seen so little of them even much closer to New York. Go figure.
Huck manages to talk the man down from the proverbial ledge. He let’s Hope go, in any case. Huck tells him that she needs to amputate his leg, but he says it’s been too long. (Interesting that both this episode and the most recent episode of Fear deal with amputation).
She was bluffing, in any case, and shoots Walter dead. This coincides with a flashback of when she was a marine. Instead of following orders to mass murder a bunch of civilians, she turns her rifle on her fellow troops, taking them all out instead. Damn. Stone cold, Huck. Stone cold.
The episode ends with a gruesome cliffhanger. Percy and Tony decide to accompany the rest of the group to the bitter end. They’re going to help them find the girls’ dad despite the danger from the CRM. Percy asks Iris to meet him at the truck later. He’s making a play but she doesn’t seem to really get it. We see Silas listening in to the conversation, and he glares daggers at Percy when he walks off.
When Iris shows up at the truck an hour later, however, Percy is nowhere to be seen. She goes looking and finds Tony, brutally murdered, his face caved in laying on a bathroom floor. Silas’s stupidly huge wrench is laying next to him and Silas himself is tucked off in a bathroom stall, apparently drunk. The episode ends there, with us left thinking Silas just murdered Tony and maybe wounded Percy in the process. But I’m thinking it was probably Percy who killed Tony and framed Silas. No clue why he’d do such a thing, but I don’t trust Percy at all and Tony seemed decent.
One final note: Are you kidding me with the Mountain Dew? Could AMC be any more flagrant in its product placement? I hear that the episode was actually sponsored by Mountain Dew (I didn’t see this in my screener) which is as unsurprising as it is gross. Just gross. It’s not even just garish product placement, Felix and Huck literally talk about how great Mountain Dew is and Felix says he used to drink it all the time.
While eating your Doritos, Felix? And playing your Call Of Duty?
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