In ‘The Walking Dead’ recap, Siddiq’s waking nightmare finally comes true when he discovers the source of the illness in Alexandria as Carol looks to strike a blow back at Alpha…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
For the first half of “The Walking Dead” season 10, Siddiq has been haunted by memories of the past with his PTSD flaring up at random times as he remembers the night he was forced to watch Alpha and the Whisperers kill 10 members of the community including Enid, who he was training as a medical assistant.
While that experience would be terrifying for anybody, Siddiq constantly goes back to that night —partially due to the horrific acts he witnessed but also because he felt helpless in that moment as his friends were butchered.
Add to that, Siddiq is now watching Alexandria succumb to a mystery illness that he can’t stop and nobody has been able to contain because there’s no common denominator amongst those who are seemingly getting sicker by the day. By the end of episode 10, Siddiq not only gets the answer to that illness but he also realizes why he’s been so haunted by that tragic encounter with the Whisperers and it goes beyond the flashbacks that creep into his head constantly.
Carol’s vendetta against the Whisperers also continued this week after she captured a member of the group to bring back to Alexandria for questioning. She’s working under the guise of finding Alpha’s horde and wiping it out before she can launch a herd of the undead at the communities the likes of which they’ve never seen before. Carol also has an insatiable thirst for vengeance because Alpha killed her surrogate son Henry, which only furthers her need to make the Whisperers pay.
Carol’s hunger for revenge eventually costs Alexandria the one weapon they had to use against Alpha but also planting a seed of doubt within the Whisperers after one of their members finds outo that Lydia is still alive.
With that said, let’s get to our recap for “The Walking Dead” with the latest episode titled “Open Your Eyes”…
Down With the Sickness
With more and more people falling sick in Alexandria, Siddiq is struggling to figure out how to slow down whatever illness is afflicting everybody. To make matters worse, his flashbacks are only growing more intense by the day as he continues to see his friends being decapitated while the Whisperers forced him to watch every gruesome second of it .
Siddiq does his best to keep to his job while paying special attention to Rosita, who was amongst the first people in the community to fall ill. What was once a momentary hook up has now turned into co-parenting as Siddiq is learning to work with Rosita while they raise their daughter together.
While Siddiq cares for the sick, Carol brings back her prisoner to Alexandria much to the chagrin of Father Gabriel, who doesn’t like that she’s taken matters into her own hands rather than consulting the entire council about her actions. At this point it’s too late to just set the captured Whisperer free so they are forced to put him into the cell that was once occupied by Negan.
Lydia sees the Whisperer being brought into the cell and she recognizes him as one of Alpha’s most loyal soldiers, who typically spends his time watching over her horde. That means he knows the location for the massive herd, which is exactly what Carol wanted to learn in the first place.
Carol speaks to Lydia about the prisoner as Alpha’s daughter tells her how much she hates her former people but she also understands them. Alpha’s influence is powerful and it casts a spell on anybody willing to truly follow her but the smallest seed of doubt that could be planted might sprout and eventually cause a dissension in the ranks.
That’s when Carol decides to kill the prisoner with kindness by showing him the way they live in Alexandria — a community that exists much like the world did before the zombie apocalypse — and perhaps Alpha’s wisdom about what it takes to survive isn’t as infallible as she makes it seem. The idea is that if Carol and the survivors can make the prisoner see how Alexandrians live, maybe he’ll be convinced that Alpha is just spouting lies rather than the unblemished truth as she claims.
At first it appears the plan is working until the prisoner spits a mouth full of bread and jelly back in Carol’s face as a show of faith that his loyalty to Alpha is unwavering. She ultimately loses her cool and punches him before finally being dragged away as the prisoner more or less just laughs in her face.
Those who serve Alpha won’t be broken so easily and definitely not because they are offered some bread and jam.
The breakthrough with the prisoner finally comes when he’s spouting off about all the ways that Alpha has proven her loyalty back to the Whisperers — just like when she sacrificed her own daughter who had betrayed them.
Remember the Whisperers believe that Alpha killed Lydia when she infiltrated Alexandria back in season 9. Her followers believed in her even more after finding out that she would murder her own daughter for them but what would happen if they discovered that Alpha was lying to them the entire time and she couldn’t let go of the ties she shared to a child who no longer wanted her as a mother anymore? Alpha’s entire philosophy is that the only way to survive this cold, dead world is to sever ties to anything and everything that means something to you — but in reality she couldn’t let go of her daughter no matter how much Lydia betrayed them.
Familial Ties
After receiving a bandage from Aaron to help a cut on her hand, Gamma revealed to Alpha that she had interacted with one of the members of the Alexandria community and she was urged to cultivate that relationship to find out additional information that could be usefel to the Whisperers.
So it seems in the days after that initial meeting, Gamma has returned to the same spot near the creek where she’s sat and talked with Aaron.
The two of them share a conversation about the past without either of them giving up too much information. Aaron does show Gamma a picture that his daughter drew and she seems taken back that anybody could have children in this world much less they are being raised in a way where drawing pretty pictures is even possible.
Gamma ends up keeping that picture before returning to the Whisperers where Alpha witnesses her killing one of the walkers that realized she wasn’t dead. Alpha then gives Gamma one of her infamous sermons where she tells the girl that she’s constantly being tested and the interactions with Aaron are just another example where she needs to remember where her loyalty lies.
She then whips Gamma with a branch several times as penance while preaching to her about the ways of the Whisperers. Alpha sends Gamma back to retrieve more information from Aaron that could be useful in the oncoming attacks against the different communities.
Back in Alexandria, Carol decides that the only way she could potentially break the prisoner is by revealing to him that Lydia is actually alive, which might sow seeds of doubt in his devotion to Alpha after realizing she lied to them. Daryl doesn’t like the idea because Lydia is still dealing with the fallout from the members of the community attacking her, which ultimately resulted in Negan killing somebody before escaping Alexandria.
Still, Carol insists on the idea but she never gets the chance to enact her plan after the Whisperer she captures starts dealing with an illness of his own. He falls sick, which brings Siddiq and Dante back to check on him but before they can even administer any medicine, the prisoner vomits blood and then falls over dead.
Siddiq wonders what medicine that Dante had given him while he was giving him stitches earlier that day and his new assistant claims to offered him something to help with the pain. Siddiq discovers that Dante actually gave him hemlock, which is poisonous. Just when Siddiq accuses Dante of killing the prisoner, Dante reminds his mentor that he’s the one who packed the medical bag.
That means Siddiq accidentally grabbed hemlock when he was reaching for a different herb that would help the patient rather than kill him. Siddiq is once again horrified by what he’s done as the PTSD continues to not only haunt him during every waking moment of the day but now he’s making crucial mistakes in his job and it cost somebody their life.
The Devil in Our Midst
With the Whisperer who was being held prisoner dead, Carol decides on another course of action instead. Carol asks Lydia if she still truly wants to help and the two of them jump on a horse bound for the border between the land controlled by the Whisperers that separates them from the communities.
As this is happening, Aaron is returning for another meeting with Gamma where she throws the picture that his daughter drew back at him. She decides she wants nothing to do with his lies and temptations about this utopian society that he’s claiming they’ve built behind the walls of Alexandria.
Just then, Gamma puts a knife to Aaron’s throat and demands that he tell her how many people live in Alexandria so Alpha can have a better count of the people she needs to kill in order to overrun the community. That’s when Carol shows up with an arrow pointed at Gamma’s head but she doesn’t back down.
It isn’t until Lydia emerges from the shadows that Gamma believes she’s seen a ghost.
According to Alpha, she killed Lydia for betraying them and their way of life but in reality her daughter is still alive and well and living behind the walls of Alexandria.
Gamma is stunned — and with that she drops her knife and runs back into the woods on the Whisperers’ side of the border. When she finally stops, she removes her mask and begins crying because it appears she’s figured out that Alpha is nothing more than a snake oil salesman who has been feeding everybody lies about their way of life and the loyalty that it demands.
Back at the road, Lydia lashes out at Carol, who asked for her help but never bothered to tell her that Alpha informed the Whisperers that she was supposed to be dead. Instead, Carol always intended on using Lydia as a weapon to show the Whisperers that Alpha had deceived them by saying she killed her own daughter.
Lydia decides that the only person she can trust now is herself and so she leaves Carol and Aaron behind as she wanders in the woods on her own. Lydia was the only reason why Alpha hadn’t launched her horde ta Alexandria and now she’s gone. If Alpha discovers that her daughter is no longer living behind those walls, she could easily launch her nuclear weapon at them and that’s the end game.
Finally back at Alexandria, Siddiq is not only haunted by memories of what he was forced to watch when Alpha killed his friends but now he believes he’s responsible for taking a man’s life by giving his assistant the wrong kind of medicine.
Siddiq decides he can’t go on any further so he runs and jumps into the reservoir just inviting the water to sink into his lungs until the last breath has escaped his body. That’s when Rosita jumps in after him and rescues Siddiq before he can drown.
Back on dry land, Rosita and Siddiq share a heart to heart about the torment he’s been suffering through due to the mental torture he endured when captured by the Whisperers and now trying to figure out why people in the community are getting sick without any single relation between any of them.
That’s when Siddiq has a revelation — he sends Rosita back home to rest and he discovers the culprit behind the illness in Alexandria.
Several episodes back when Gamma cut her hand by the creek, she was dumping parts of the dead into the water. At the time it appeared perhaps she was building a barrier that would eventually prevent water from reaching Alexandria, which would effectively kill the community. Instead, Gamma was actually poisoning the water under instructions from Alpha but that still doesn’t quite explain the sickness.
See Alexandria has a water filtration system set up to distinguish between what is raw and what’s been cleaned. Siddiq goes to investigate the filtration system and he realizes that one of the handles has been twisted and turned to make it appear that it’s filtering water but in reality it is just feeding the tainted water back into the community.
The people who are sick have been drinking the poisoned water that was supplied to them by the Whisperers and because somebody inside Alexandria screwed with the filtration system.
Siddiq is shocked but what happens next finally reveals the person behind the dirty water as well as the culprit who has been feeding Alpha information about the communities including the three times when they crossed over the border when there’s no possible way the Whisperers should have known.
When Dante pays a visit to check on Siddiq that night, he makes a clicking sound with his mouth and the memories come flooding back. Siddiq keeps flashing back to that moment when he was forced to watch Alpha behead his friends but he’s now remembering that the Whisperer who held his eyes open also made that same clicking sound in his ear.
Dante is a member of the Whisperers and he’s been the inside man this entire time.
Siddiq tries to escape but Dante strikes first by attacking him and then locking up a choke hold on the ground. Siddiq desperately tries to escape but Dante only tightens his grip. Finally, Siddiq’s outstretched hand goes limp as Dante chokes the life out of him.
Siddiq has perished and it’s finally been revealed that Dante has been a spy throughout the season — feeding information back to Alpha and even helping to orchestrate the poisoned water that has been taken out members of the community for weeks already. Sadly, Siddiq had to die to find out he had been betrayed — and his death will prevent him from telling anybody else what he’s learned about Dante.
Alpha’s plan to slowly dismantle the communities from the inside out has been working all along. She preached patience to her followers, particularly Beta, when they questioned why the Whisperers don’t just roll over Alexandria, Hillside and Oceanside with the massive herd at their command.
Alpha has now shown that she’s smart enough to understand it’s easier to wipe out her enemies one by one rather than blindly launching a bomb and hoping it detonates with maximum destructive force. Now when she finally decides to launch her horde at the communities, they will be weakened and unable to resist — and the Whisperers’ way of life continues unimpeded.
“The Walking Dead” returns with the mid-season finale next Sunday night at 9 p.m ET on AMC.
