This post contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 9, Episode 15, “The Calm Before.”
To be honest, it’s kind of surprising it took this long for The Walking Dead to mimic this iconic Game of Thrones image. On Sunday night, in the penultimate episode of Season 9, several heads wound up on spikes—and some of those heads belonged to major characters. The biggest death, by far, was Alanna Masterson’s Tara, who joined the series in its fourth season. At this point, Tara was the leader of the Hilltop Colony—acting as a replacement for the disappeared Maggie and the now-dead Jesus. Her murder leaves the allied communities’ weakest fighters, once again, without a leader. By her side in beheaded undeath were the skulls of both Enid and Henry—each of whom had just begun to enjoy the bliss of budding romance this season.
Somehow, though, it still appears this season will end on a hopeful note. Despite all the devastation, the episode ended with an emotional speech from Siddiq, who eulogized the dead with a message of hope—telling the story of how all of those people, despite being strangers, fought together in the name of hope against their captors.
To backtrack a little: this week finally delivered that long-promised festival, which fans naturally expected would usher in a few deaths. (It didn’t hurt that this episode, as the penultimate in the season, was already bound to be a bloodbath.) Alpha managed to infiltrate the event by wearing the scalp of an abducted Hilltopper—and it appears she took a few captives before she left. She won’t be coming after Lydia anymore, though; during a confrontation, her daughter made it clear that she intended to stay in Alexandria, and Alpha let her do so in disgust.
Instead, her group surrounded Daryl, Carol, Michonne, and most of the show’s other M.V.P.s in the woods. Alpha took Daryl alone to show him the horde she and her group have been amassing in a ravine—and promised that if the allied communities intruded into her territory again, this undead mass would be unleashed upon them. But how would they know where the border is? Well, that brings us to the spikes.
Siddiq told the communities that he was captured alongside the dead, but that Alpha left him alive to tell his horrifying tale—perhaps in the hope of dividing them all. “But I want to tell you a different story,” he said instead. “In the end, their time was cut short. Ours keeps going. So we have to keep going. For them and for all of us. We need to honor them. We need to honor them, and we need to remember these friends—our family—died as heroes. That’s the story that I want to tell you. That’s the story that I want us all to remember.”
By far the most devastated person in all this will likely be Carol, who took Henry in as her adoptive son years ago. She lost her daughter, Sophia, in Season 2, and was forced to kill a little girl, Lizzie, with whom she had developed something of a maternal bond, in Season 4. Now, she must deal with the loss of another child. Daryl was, at least, thankfully present to tell Carol not to look at Henry—pulling her into his arms and telling her to look at him instead. Hopefully, she and Ezekiel will be able to come back from their loss and rule the Kingdom without being too broken by what they’ve seen—but they will no doubt be shaken for quite some time to come.
All of these deaths, though narratively significant, will likely not hit too hard for fans, with the possible exception of Tara. Henry had a bit of an obnoxious presence on the show, and his relationship with Lydia was too fresh to mourn too deeply. Enid, though not particularly grating, was mostly a non-presence, especially in recent seasons, until the time jump randomly landed her in a relationship with Alden. That romance, too, was so out of the blue and new that viewers hadn’t really had enough time to invest in it—making her death something of a waste.
Oh, and I guess we should mention Tammy Rose. She and her husband, Earl, just adopted a yet-unnamed Whisperer baby a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, Earl will now have to tough it out as a single father, because Tammy was among the dead. Aside from adopting that baby, Tammy was best known for being mad at Maggie after some captive Saviors killed her and Earl’s son, Kenneth. Since then, pretty much all she’d done was adopt that baby, with very little screen time—so it’s unclear why her death was meant to be as much of a gut punch.
All told, this episode was par for the course in a season that has clearly wanted to telegraph hope as its main message, but hasn’t been able to find the solid narrative footing to get its viewers there. Perhaps once show-runner Angela Kang, who began her tenure this season, has some more time to gain equilibrium and right the ship, the series will set a more decisive course. For now, though, it’s hard to tell what on earth the finale might bring. But given that this week’s installment was titled “The Calm Before,” it seems safe to bet there’s still some kind of big storm brewing. The Whisperer War, it seems, is upon us.
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