'The Walking Dead' Season 11, Episode 3: "Hunted" Recap and Review
‘THE WALKING DEAD’ REMEMBERS HOW TO GIVE SCREENTIME TO MORE THAN JUST ONE OR TWO CHARACTERS WITHOUT COMPROMISING ON STORY, IN THE FINAL SEASON’S BEST EPISODE SO FAR.
“Hunted” is a pretty good archetype for “The Walking Dead” when it has been at its most consistent, its episode-to-episode best. Of course, there are episodes such as “Here’s Not Here” and “Here’s Negan” that rise above and beyond what this show is - a genre thriller with solid characters and oftentimes great performances - but if I were to take someone who had never seen an hour of “The Walking Dead,” and give them one episode to watch that might compel them to watch more, I would go for “Hunted” before either one of those two masterpieces. “Hunted” works because it gives us a requisite amount of zombified, bloody action without shoehorning it in, finds a way to give several characters a piece of the hour while remaining narratively and thematically cohesive, and propels the plot forward in a way that enriches both story and character. As a result, “Hunted” - in contrast to the ping-ponging two parter “Acheron” - is easily the season’s best entry so far.
We pick up directly where “Acheron: Part II” ended, with Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Daryl (Norman Reedus) and the rest of the party from Alexandria, caught in the throes of Pope and the Reapers’ ambush. It’s an intense, chaotic opening minute, where Negan gets a throwing knife to the leg, one of Maggie’s group gets his throat cut, and another, Duncan (Marcus Lewis) is hit by at least three projectiles while shielding the others. Daryl and Dog appear to escape in one piece, but Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) gets the side of his neck slashed during the chaos, and Elijah (Okea Eme-Akwari) finds himself dragged upwards by a lasso around his neck while freeing Maggie from another trap. Both Gabriel and Elijah’s fates are left open during this opening - with Elijah in particular, it looked like he was being hung, but when he disappears out of frame, Maggie loses track of him as well. Finally, Maggie gets the upper hand on Pope, missing him by barely an inch with one of his own weapons, a sort of throwing scythe, before disappearing into the darkness.
“Hunted” isn’t the first episode of “The Walking Dead” to use this plot device, having a sizable piece of the cast experience a catastrophe together, and wind up separated into smaller groups afterwards. The most iconic example of this is the back half of season four, when everyone suffered the destruction of the prison, and it took the entirety of those eight episodes for everyone to find their way back together again. Considering the way this final season’s broadcast is being divided - three blocks of eight episodes each - it’s entirely possible we might see the group remain splintered for the next four or five hours. In any case, this is easily one of the more successful instances of that setup being used, where it’s not immediately clear who has even survived, let alone where everyone is. We don’t see Daryl again for the rest of the hour, and - apart from the B story with Carol, which we’ll get to - Maggie owns the episode, with Gabriel getting all of about two minutes of screentime as an aside.
We pick back up with Maggie the morning after the ambush, pushing towards Meridian on her own. Just as she comes across an abandoned building where she can take a breather, Reapers catch up to her, forcing her to head inside whether she wants to or not. She heads up a dark stairwell, where a run-in with a walker reveals that the stairwell’s railings are falling apart. As a result, Maggie nearly falls to her death in dispatching the walker, and loses her flashlight in the process. On the next floor, she lights her lighter, revealing Pope standing right behind her. It’s a striking visual, allowing director Frederick E.O. Toye - another filmmaker making their “Walking Dead” debut - to showcase his particular eye. There’s one stylistic choice in the episode that doesn’t quite gel - again, we’ll get to it - but overall, “Hunted” is a magnificently crafted hour of the show. Toye will be returning to helm next week’s episode as well, and very quickly establishes himself as a filmmaker the show should endeavor to hire as often as it can.
In the ensuing fight with Pope, once again the rusted railings give Maggie a victory, as she slashes his leg and sends him falling down at least a couple floors’ worth of steps. However, given that this looks to be our villain for at least this segment of the season, Pope of course survives, and when his footsteps rush back up to Maggie, she makes her exit. There, in some sort of storehouse-like room, she runs into Alden (Callan McAuliffe), who barely has time to greet Maggie before another Reaper tackles him. At the same time, Pope catches up to Maggie, engaging in what seems like a fight to the death. Maggie, however, gains the upper hand by taking advantage of Pope’s injured leg, stabbing him in the side of the head with a smashed bottle before Negan shows up and knocks him out with his crowbar. Maggie dispatches the other Reaper with a throwing knife to the back, but not before he’s managed to maul Alden in the abdomen, and not fatally enough to prevent him from dropping flashbangs, which - in the confusion after they explode - allows Pope, who seems able to fight through any injury by means of sheer willpower, to elude Maggie and Negan before they can finish him off.
More vitally, Alden’s wounds make it so that he cannot walk under his own power, forcing Negan and Maggie to assist him as they leave. Negan initially resists this, counseling Maggie that they cannot use roads to get to Meridian as the Reapers will in all likelihood be patrolling them. Maggie insists that they continue forwards, as it’s the only plan they’ve got. They don’t get far at all before they encounter Agatha (Laurie Fortier) fighting a group of walkers, protecting a mortally wounded Duncan. Maggie gets to spend a moment with Duncan, who makes one last request - promise to get Agatha home - before dying, where Maggie puts him down before he can turn. Forebodingly, Maggie cannot form the words to make that promise, her spirit visibly taking a big hit when she loses someone who appeared to be one of her closest allies. We’ve only seen Duncan in these past three episodes, so it’s a testament to the show that this death actually carries the emotional weight the scene is trying to make you feel. A lot of this comes down to Cohan’s performance, who has fully settled back into playing Maggie after needing a couple of episodes last season to find her groove again, but the show also did a great job of building up Duncan during “Acheron,” to the point where he seemed on the verge of being a big part of the season. “The Walking Dead” has gotten a lot of mileage out of unexpectedly killing off the character you expect to survive, again to mixed results, but this particular instance of it is a resounding success.
While this is happening, in Alexandria, we pick up on a jumpy Magna (Nadia Hilker), who, while guarding the walls, almost turns her bow on Carol (Melissa McBride) when the latter returns from a supply run with Kelly (Angel Theory). Inside the town, Aaron (Ross Marquand) and a group of other residents pull a section of the outer wall back up. Aaron questions Carol when he sees her preparing to head back out, as she was assigned to help in town that day. Carol insists that she needs to find the town’s horses, as without them, their hope of being able to go far enough to find supplies is all but nonexistent. Her case made, Carol ventures out with Kelly and Magna, running into Rosita along the way (Christian Serratos), who is out foraging to occupy her mind, and decides to join the trio. They quickly find one of the horses, but fail to capture it; they later find that horse, and three others, torn apart by walkers, which understandably demoralizes the group. Carol attempts to press onward to find the remaining horses, despite the fact that the group are losing sunlight; Magna convinces her to come home with a hug, which is a rare moment of tenderness for both characters, particularly between them.
As they accept what has happened and head back, however, by chance they cross paths with the remaining horses, who gallop past them towards a dairy farm, allowing the group to recapture all four and bring them home. This is kind of a cutesy moment in an otherwise dark episode, but it’s nice to see Carol score a victory for once, after what seems like an endless run of dour and nihilistic episodes for the character, such as “Diverged” from last season. And, in classic “Walking Dead” fashion, finding the horses is not quite the sunny reunion that Carol masqueraded it as. They do bring the horses back to Alexandria, and for three of them, that’s good news. For the fourth, it’s a death sentence: Carol leads the horse to the stables, and euthanizes it, revealing that she needed the horse for its meat, left with no other viable food source in Alexandria. It’s a heart wrenching scene, with McBride pouring out all of Carol’s sorrow in having to kill the creature, barely able to get the blood basin under the horse’s head, which creates a nice moment between Carol and Aaron with the latter helping her. Considering that Aaron is on screen here for all of fifteen seconds, Marquand delivers a masterclass that reminds us why he’s one of the show’s most talented performers: he conveys a sense of betrayal at Carol once again hiding her true motives, that gives way to sympathy as he both understands why she is doing this, but also feels for her sorrow in needing to do it. In any case, Alexandria now has enough food for a couple more days of survival, and three horses - the closest thing to a car that exists this long into the apocalypse - to give them a fighting chance of finding more. The one issue with the Alexandria scenes is the cliche blue filter that’s been put over them, which is at odds with the aesthetic of the rest of the episode, and really calls attention to the fact that “The Walking Dead” is now shot on digital instead of film, which is a transition the show has otherwise managed to hide fairly well.
Also baked in this blue filter are Gabriel’s scenes, which amount to very little screentime but shoot the character a mile forward. We also rejoin Gabriel during the morning after the ambush, where it’s revealed that his neck wound was little more than superficial, but he also suffered a stab wound to the thigh. Given the latter injury - and the time spent on showing Gabriel remove the object - it seems a little cheap to have had that moment in the opening where his throat gets slashed at all, as the episode immediately revokes any stakes attached to it when it cuts back to him. However, what follows - him tracking down a wounded Reaper, refusing the latter’s request for a prayer, and denying the presence of God before executing the Reaper - builds upon the darkness that Gabriel was left in at the end of “One More,” and leaves the character in a realm of exciting possibilities for the rest of the season. The brief moments with him might be something of a sidebar for the episode, barely even qualifying as a C story more than a glorified cutaway, but the episode is stronger for having those two scenes: it’s pretty easy to argue that any episode would have been improved by them.
Returning to Maggie, her group continue to press forward when they encounter a walker who has been shacked to a tree, immolated, and left in a grotesquely reanimated state with a sign labeled “JUDAS” nailed above its head. The group barely gets to register this when they find themselves surrounded by walkers on all sides. Alden attempts to convince the group to leave him and save themselves, but Maggie refuses to do so; instead, Agatha becomes the victim of a walker devouring, with Negan dragging Maggie away despite her efforts to pointlessly “save” Agatha. Unless I’ve counted faces wrong, assuming Elijah is also dead, I think that’s curtains on everyone in the Meridian group except for Maggie herself, her son Hershel (Kien Michael Spiller), and Frost (Glenn Stanton). It’s kind of shocking how quickly these characters all entered and then exited the show, but it also raises the stakes in the fight against the Reapers, and opens up a lot of possibilities for Maggie. Will she seek no-holds-barred vengeance? Will she keep her head and focus on feeding the family she has left? For now, that’s up in the air, as is Alden’s fate. The trio arrive at an abandoned church, where Alden insists that Maggie and Negan leave him, get to Meridian, save the rest of their friends, and then come back for him.
Maggie refuses to listen to this, forcing Negan to initiate another standoff with her. Maggie insists that Negan - being the one to blame for a lot of Alexandria’s circumstances - does not get to decide who lives and dies. Negan accepts this, but makes one last declaration: “you still have to decide.” Ultimately, Negan and Maggie leave Alden with a gun and barricades on the church door. “You better be here when we get back,” Maggie teases. “You better come back,” Alden responds, and then the already splintered group splits up further into two. Outside the church, Negan dispatches a walker with his crowbar, resulting in another gorgeous composition: Maggie, in the background, eyeing Negan’s bloodied weapon in a shot that echoes Glenn’s murder in “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.”
Then, the unlikely duo departs together, and so the book closes on “Hunted,” making for one of the most engaging episodes of “The Walking Dead” in years, even among the general excellence that has been the Angela Kang era of the show. Kang - having crafted the best individual year of the entire show with season nine - doesn’t seem to have any intention of letting the show bow out with anything less than a powerhouse of a season. “Acheron” might have been a bumpy and overstuffed two-parter, but neither of those two episodes is anywhere near some kind of nadir for the series. So far, season 11 has just gotten better with each subsequent entry, and while it’s a tall order to expect a 24-episode season - featuring not one, but two breaks in its broadcast no less - to hit it out of the park every single week, if “Hunted” proves to be an accurate litmus test for what remains, Kang might actually pull it off. Don’t be surprised if we get at least a couple entries that are even stronger than “Hunted,” but don’t also be surprised if this remains in the upper tier of the season. If this is somehow your first episode of “The Walking Dead,” and you’ve had a good time with it, stick around: this is the show for you.