The Walking Dead season 8, episode 3 review: Is Ezekiel going to die?

Last week’s episode of The Walking Dead reintroduced us to a character we haven’t seen since the beginning of the show: Morales. He’s back in play and even though him and Rick have a bit of history, they are on opposite side of the coin now since Morales is with Negan’s crew. These are both very different men from the last time they’ve met and neither will think twice about killing each other if they have too… and Rick is probably going to have to since the last scene left us with Morales calling in for back up. Rick’s group has won a few battles against Negan with well thought out strategy, but after being given some bad information about where Negan keeps his arsenal it looks like he may be captured by Negan once again.

The Rick and Morales face off that went no where…

We picked up where we left off with Morales disarming Rick telling him that he, Maggie and Ezekiel are all prizes to Negan and on his “not to be killed” list, so at least Rick has some time to figure out his next step. He tries to reason with Morales, playing to his emotions by talking to him about losing Glenn and that Maggie is his pregnant widow. Morales explains that after losing his own family that Negan took him in and helped him so he is staying loyal. Luckily, Daryl shows up and puts an arrow into Morales, but they aren’t able to get out of the building before the Saviors show up. After some quick thinking (and a little help from their friends) they are able to get out of this situation alive… but they still don’t have Negan’s guns. At least they found out where they were moved to.

The prisoners

Jesus, Morgan and Tara are bringing back their prisoners to the Hilltop for Maggie to decide what to do and there’s still fighting among them as Jesus keeps trying to push his agenda of keeping them alive where Morgan and Tara still feel that this is a terrible idea. When walkers attack, some of the prisoners see this as an opportunity to take off – so Morgan goes after them. When he catches them he starts executing them, but Jesus stops him saying that Maggie is going to find another way. Morgan reminds him that the Saviors killed Glenn and that she may not want them to live, but Jesus says that they are going to have to live with these people after the war is over. This sparks into a physical battle between them and what a fight it was! They were beautifully matched and it was like watching a dance between two professionals. This ends with Morgan once again feeling like he can’t be a part of this and he leaves… is he gone for good? When Jesus gets the prisoners back to Maggie (and Gregory who has returned) he tries to reason with Maggie saying they can’t let them go, but they can’t kill them either, so they decide to lock them in a trailer and keep them under guard until this is over.

Eric and Aaron’s goodbye

Aaron is someone that we’ve become very fond of, and we love his relationship with Eric, so it got us right in the feels to see him get shot. Luckily, there is an exit wound so we had hope that he would make it out of this okay, but we were heartbroken to see their goodbye when Aaron knew he had to leave Eric to go back to the fight. It felt like goodbye forever, especially since in this world you never know what’s around the corner. When Aaron returns, Eric is gone and thinks he sees him off in the distance as a walker, but instead of giving him mercy he just left him to wander the earth with an insatiable hunger. For us this just didn’t make sense for the Aaron character who loved him so much. After getting to know him and seeing how much he loved Eric, we have a very hard time buying into the idea that Aaron wouldn’t have given him peace.

CarterMatt’s overall thoughts

With so much hype around Morales coming back, we thought that the exchange between him and Rick was going to be one of the best face-offs of the season, but this conversation just wasn’t as engaging as we thought it would be and we were thankful for Daryl coming in and killing him just to end this dry exchange.

Our favorite part of this episode easily has to be Ezekiel and Carol working together. It took a long time to get her to warm up to him, but now that she has we are seeing them work together like a well oiled machine and there is a lot of smiles between them. We know that there are a lot of Carol and Daryl shippers out there (and we are one of them too), but there’s something that we really like about these two characters together – not necessarily romantically, but just sharing screen time. Nice chemistry.

Of course, right at the end of the episode we see his group ambushed and many bullets flying at Ezekiel as some of his followers jumped on him to try to save him… but did they? There was a lot of blood and we saw a lot of bullets hitting his men, so we feel that he’s going to be okay, but you never know with this show.

What did you think of this week’s episode of The Walking Dead and what do you think of the season so far? Leave us a comment in the box below with your thoughts. If you want more scoop on what’s coming up next time on The Walking Dead season 8 then head on over to the link here where you can check out a preview.

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