The Walking Dead season 7, episode 11 review: Eugene’s survival lies; Dwight’s heartbreak
Last time on The Walking Dead we had a Carol and Daryl reunion! While they dined by candle light and talked the night away, Daryl decided not to tell her what happened to Glenn and Abraham. He cares for her deeply and understands that right now is not the time for Carol to handle this kind of information otherwise (like she said) she may lose herself. Instead Daryl is headed to Hilltop to join the others and get this Negan problem squared away.
Tonight, we kicked things off by heading back to the Sanctuary, and while there, dealing with a whole chorus of problems that were geared around one person in Eugene. To the surprise of no one, things weren’t going altogether well for him. For one, he had to listen to “Easy Street.” Also, he got beaten to a pulp.
From there, the good news for Eugene is that he realized that putting up a fight to the folks in the Sanctuary wasn’t going to be the right move. He’s not the kind to struggle with dog-food sandwiches or with “Easy Street.” With that, he relied more on his typical skill set: Lying. He played up his good-old story about being a doctor, and tried to survive by integrating himself into this group using some arrogance and ridiculousness.
Negan even brought Eugene some women, and let’s just say that this had a rather unexpected result. The ladies having an “intelligent conversation” with him somehow led to him becoming MacGyver for a minute. They wanted to watch him make a bomb out of limited materials. Endlessly entertaining.
Unfortunately, things took a rather dark turn given that after the whole bomb lesson, we then saw these ladies of the Sanctuary basically try to convince Eugene to make a suicide pill. Not an easy position to put the guy in since killing living people is not necessarily his specialty. The twist here was that these women were’s just out to allow their friend to die; they also wanted to kill Negan, and clearly, this is not a risk that Eugene wanted to take. He’s a tactical man, and he saw that as a tactical error on his part.
Do we want to see Eugene kill Negan? Sure, but the timing wasn’t right, and he was certainly aware of that.
Dwight’s dilemma
While the Eugene story was going along, we turned things over to something a little bit darker. Sherry was missing, and Dwight had to track him down. What we found was devastating to put it lightly. He went to a meeting place that they had decided upon a long time ago, and in a note there with her wedding ring, she made it clear as to why she let Daryl go, and how badly she wanted him to break free of the Saviors. She felt a sense of guilt over for turning him into the man that he ended up becoming.
The bad news for Dwight is that he had to go back to the Sanctuary, and found himself in yet another situation where he had to torture and be the right-hand man of the show’s central monster.
The overall takeaway
Eugene is probably not everyone’s character, and as a result of that, there are probably people who didn’t love focusing so much on his and people like Dwight and Negan. Personally, we love Eugene, and we found it a thrill to be spending as much time as we did on the character. While things moved at a rather slow pace, this episode gave us more of an understanding as to how he’s adapting to his new life, and what sort of danger he could be in. For now, he’s at the very least still breathing. Episode Grade: B+.
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