In “The Walking Dead” recap for the season 10 finale, the survivors battle the Whisperers one last time as a familiar face returns to help…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
It’s been several months since “The Walking Dead” came to an abrupt end with the penultimate episode for season 10 due to the coronavirus pandemic forcing the series to stop production.
While the season finale episode had been filmed, post production work had not been finished. That ultimately forced “The Walking Dead” and AMC to hit the pause button until now to finally debut the last episode for season 10.
In the midst of all this, “The Walking Dead” also made the stunning announcement that season 11 would be the final season for the long running series. With a super-sized 24 episodes that will stretch over two years, the show won’t be going away quickly but it’s still the end of an era as the comic-book based zombie epic that became the No. 1 show on all of cable is going away sooner rather than later.
That set the stage for a gigantic season 10 finale, which aired on Sunday night.
The good news is “The Walking Dead” definitely delivered and the episode was certainly grand in nature so it made sense why so much time was needed to produce the finale.
The episode served as the final showdown between the survivors and the Whisperers, who have been at war for quite some time now. With Alpha dead, Beta is now leading the horde of walkers and he’s aiming them like a missile directly at the remaining survivors of the four different communities who gathered inside an abandoned hospital as refuge after their homes were destroyed.
The action was plenty, the surprises were well done and episode helped set the stage for “The Walking Dead” to make a final lurch towards the end game.
With that said, let’s recap “The Walking Dead” season 10 finale titled “A Certain Doom”….
A Mighty Weapon
The episode actually begins with an update on the travelers going by bicycle to meet up with a mysterious woman who spoke to Eugene on the other end of a HAM radio. For months, Eugene has been in contact with a woman named Stephanie, who finally agreed to meet up with him after agreeing to a rendezvous somewhere near Charleston, West Virginia.
After making a new friend named Princess along the way, Eugene, Yumiko and Ezekiel ended up riding bikes towards this destination.
Sadly, when we pick up with the season 10 finale, Eugene is bleeding from his head after a crash on the road left his bike mangled and the group teetering on the edge of missing the deadline to meet up with Stephanie.
Eugene is so discouraged by everything happening that he’s ready to just give up but Ezekiel refuses to let him cash in his chips so easily. He gives the lovelorn sap a pep talk and Eugene eventually comes around with greater determination to forge ahead in order to make it to the rendezvous to meet up with Stephanie.
Back at the abandoned hospital, Daryl, Carol and the rest of their group make it back inside while avoiding the horde. Upstairs, Father Gabriel is preparing everybody for the oncoming attack as Luke gets a trap ready that the survivors hope will lead the gigantic herd of zombies away from them long enough to make their escape.
As Daryl sets traps in the stairwells for the inevitable arrival of the Whisperers, he laments about the news that Michonne is gone. Carol does her best to comfort him while reminding her old friend that she’s still there and Michonne wouldn’t have left Judith and R.J. behind unless she was confident they were safe with him.
Once the booby traps are set, the plan is laid out to the rest of the survivors.
Luke is going to rig a stereo system to one of their remaining wagons to play music loud enough that the horde will follow them. Eventually, the wagon will reach a nearby ravine where the horde will hopefully just follow each other off the ledge.
The problem is the wagon is hidden on the other side of the horde, which means a group of survivors are going to have to camouflage themselves in walker guts in order to move through the zombies while also trying to avoid the Whisperers hidden amongst the dead.
The group from Oceanside objects to Negan being included in the plan after he helped the Whisperers attack Hilltop no matter what deal he had struck with Carol to kill Alpha for them. Even Negan isn’t exactly on board with the idea of going out into the horde because he knows that Beta will be gunning for him and that puts everybody at risk around him.
The same goes for Lydia, who is more than ready to volunteer considering her past experience dealing with the horde but members from the various communities are uncomfortable with her participation as well.
Ultimately the survivors decide on two people with four groups carrying pieces of the stereo system out into the horde to eventually reach the wagon where the entire ‘Pied Piper’ plan will be assembled.
Burning Down the House
Daryl leads the various groups out into the horde after covering themselves in blood and guts to disguise themselves. The journey through the horde is going well until they start running into the Whisperers, who are hidden alongside the dead. Thankfully upstairs, Lydia is pointing out the members of the Whisperers that she can identify and the archers are wounding them with arrows.
Inevitably, the Whisperers who get shot scream out in pain, which then leads the walkers to know they are very much alive and that’s like a dinner bell ringing.
As the survivors get deeper and deeper into the horde, it’s harder to spot them and the survivors can no longer differentiate their people from the walking dead. Lydia can no longer stand by and watch her new friends perish and as much as Negan doesn’t want to be a hero, he decides this is the day he’s going to fight.
So he ties a rope to a column and lowers it into the elevator shaft where he carries himself and Lydia down to the ground floor to join the survivors outside.
Lydia arrives just in the nick of time as Beatrice — a member from the Oceanside community — gets into a fight with a Whisperer and she’s wounded. She lets out a yelp, which turns the zombies towards her. They rip her apart but not before Lydia arrives to take the pieces of the stereo she was still holding in order to bring them to Luke to assemble his system on the wagon.
Finally, the entire group makes it to the edge of the woods where the wagon has been fitted with the stereo system and they begin blasting the song “Burning Down the House” by The Talking Heads and they begin leading the horde away from the hospital. Beta begins to realize what’s happening as he attempts to course correct the herd but a great many of his zombies are being led away.
That forces Beta to split his Whisperers into two groups — one going into the hospital and the others going after the wagon that’s leading the zombies away.
The survivors leading the wagon stave off the Whisperers attacks for as long as they can but once they start using zombies as human shields, there’s no other choice but to abandon the stereo system. The survivors are able to kill off the remaining Whisperers but not before the wagon is completely destroyed.
In the midst of all this, Beta is on the hunt and that’s when he hears a familiar voice — it’s Negan taunting him as he calls out ‘hey shithead!’
Beta stops lurching with the rest of the zombies, pulls out his blade and goes after the man who killed Alpha. First he tosses a zombie at Negan, which knocks him down and a split second later Beta is on top of him with a blade in the air as he prepares to avenge the woman who saved his life.
Before he can strike down on him, Daryl arrives and cuts Beta instead. Just as Beta turns to defend himself, Daryl comes at him with a pair of knives that plunge directly into his eyes.
In his final moments, Beta has some grand fantasy about joining Alpha on the other side while becoming one with the zombies. In reality, he’s just being ripped apart as the zombies eat him alive.
As Beta is being killed, Negan realizes his true identity as a famous country western singer but Daryl just refers to him as nobody as they both flee out into the night.
Upstairs at the hospital, the Whisperers have set off the booby traps but there are still more of them coming up the stairs. That forces Gabriel to send Judith and the rest of the people still there with him down the elevator shaft so they can rendezvous with the other survivors.
Gabriel promises to hold them back for as long as he can as he gives Judith a message to pass along to Rosita because he believes he’s already seen her for the final time.
As the Whisperers finally bust through the barricaded doors, Gabriel puts up as much of a fight as he can but he’s eventually overwhelmed. The Whisperers hold him down as they prepare to kill him but at that moment a hooded figure wearing a mask carrying a pair of kamas as weapons leaps up the stairs and wipes them out. One last Whisperer remains but an arrow goes through his heart.
As the last attacker falls dead to the ground, it reveals the savior was none other than Maggie Rhee, who received the message from her friends that informed her about the ongoing war with the Whisperers in hopes that she could lend a hand.
In the previous episode we saw Aaron and Alden being surrounded by Whisperers when this same hooded figure arrived and now we know that he’s part of the group with Maggie. We still don’t know his name but it certainly appears he’s a bad ass ninja of some kind.
Maggie embraces Gabriel after saving the day as she reunites with the people she left years earlier.
As for the horde, the survivors want to continue leading them to the cliff where they will all hopefully tumble over and die but without a wagon, somebody would be going on a suicide mission in order to force the zombies to follow them. Lydia volunteers for the job because as her mother’s daughter, she knows how to lead this herd and it’s the least she can do after the Whisperers caused them so much misery.
Lydia eventually leads the horde towards the edge of the cliff but before she can finish the job, Carol arrives to take over. She’s been grieving for the loss of her son for quite some time and her rage towards Alpha ultimately put the survivors in grave danger so she believes this is the way she can pay it all back.
But just as she prepares to let the zombies overrun her to the edge of the cliff, Lydia pulls her back. From nearby, they watch as the zombies all tumble over towards their perilous demise.
Finally, Carol and Lydia make it back to the rendezvous where they are reunited with the rest of the survivors. Maggie returns to see her friends and family from the apocalypse as she meets Aaron’s daughter and then gets a glimpse of Judith, who was still a baby when she left Alexandria. It doesn’t take long for Maggie to recognized Judith as she wears her father’s hat and holds onto her mother’s sword.
Even Negan has stuck around after helping bring an end to the Whisperer’s reign of terror.
In the end, Carol embraces Daryl as she finally puts the anger behind her as they prepare to move forward towards a new day. The survivors survived and now they will look for a new home together.
One Last Thing
Somewhere outside the last remnants of the herd, a person begins moving after being covered in blood, guts and mud and we begin to recognize that it’s actually Connie — she survived the cave in and eventually made her way out with the horde.
She’s barely clinging to life, however, but thankfully Virgil arrives on horseback after he originally went to Oceanside seeking help. Virgil was the lone survivor from the military island where Michonne discovered that Rick was still out there alive somewhere.
It appeared he was giving up all hope but it seems Virgil decided to take a second shot at life and now he’s helping to rescue Connie.
Meanwhile back with Eugene and his group, they arrive at the train station, which was set up as the rendezvous point with Stephanie. Unfortunately, she was only going to wait there until sundown and by this point the moon is shining out of the night sky.
Eugene is saddened that he missed meeting up with Stephanie and he’s failed to give his group any hope for the future.
A split second later, a group of spotlights turn on and flash down upon Eugene, Yumiko, Ezekiel and the Princess.
From behind the train cards a huge number of soldiers dressed in white armor looking like Stormtroopers emerge holding guns and ordering the survivors to drop their weapons. Eugene and the rest of his team are stunned as they lay down their knives and spears while being surrounded.
Did Stephanie double cross him and lead them into a trap?
More likely these are members of a community known as the Commonwealth that we will meet during the final season of “The Walking Dead.” The Commonwealth is the largest of the surviving communities with 50,000 people strong based out of Ohio led by a woman named Pamela Milton.
Many fans of “The Walking Dead” series were convinced that Georgie — the woman who eventually teamed up with Maggie when she left Alexandria a couple of seasons ago — was actually Pamela Milton. It remains to be seen if that’s the case or not but it’s almost guaranteed that Eugene and his group have just encountered the Commonwealth for the first time and that will undoubtedly become the primary home for the final 24 episodes of “The Walking Dead” starting in 2021.
