The Walking Dead 1014 – Look at the Flowers
With the Whisperer War seemingly on its last legs, Look at the Flowers picks up some of the narrative threads that remain unresolved. Carol continues her internal battle and feelings of self loathing, Beta struggles to come to grips with his past and his future, Negan tries to find someone to believe his good deed for the day and Eugene embarks on a journey to meet Stephanie.
Even though he’s been a good soldier and delivered on his promise, Negan doesn’t quite get the reception he’s expecting. Carol leaves him in limbo by refusing to take him back to Alexandria to reveal that he was operating under her orders and is responsible for killing Alpha. Without her there to back up his claim any return to Alexandria for Negan would be met with a heavy dose of skepticism. Carol however continues her strange behaviour and tells him that she’s not going back just yet and that he’ll have to wait to get his name cleared and find forgiveness. She has her own demons to exorcise and ironically ends up being trapped by the very thing she needs to escape.
Eugene reveals that he’s been incommunicado with Stephanie, his transistor radio pal from another community. After spilling the beans he is joined by Yumiko and an ailing Ezekiel for the rendezvous. Along the way they encounter some walkers trapped in a way not previously witnessed before hinting that they will be running into some new people with different approaches to surviving the apocalypse. Whether the people behind the novel way of restraining walkers are friend or foe remains to be seen but what is certain is that Ezekiel’s cancer is an immediate problem that will only get worse without treatment. The trio continues their trek and come upon a seemingly abandoned city. As they make their way deeper into the city limits there’s a world with a decidedly rosier outlook on the bleakness that exists around them.
Beta has a rough time adjusting to his new reality. With Alpha gone Beta is out of sorts but still loyal to the cause. He retrieves Alpha’s head off a spike and goes ballistic when one of the Whisperers refers to him as the new Alpha. Lets just say that things don’t go well for that poor misguided fool. Beta then proceeds to carry Alpha’s head around in a bag and later on finds himself in a small, abandoned town. Inside one of the buildings he sees a poster and a record featuring Half Moon, a popular recording artist from before the fall of civilization.
In fact Beta’s true identity was teased in a previous episode of Fear the Walking Dead and it doesn’t take too much detective work to make the connection that he’s the aforementioned musician. As Look at the Flowers comes to a close Beta finds a new purpose and essentially reclaims the mantle he held when he was a superstar musician with an army of followers, albeit a different form of deadhead, marching on behind him.
They say that art imitates life and with the COVID-19 pandemic altering lives all across the globe it was only a matter of time before it reached out to touch the world of make believe. Due to the rapid spread of the virus and the implementation of social distancing this will be the final episode of The Walking Dead for a while. The intended season finale will appear at some point down the road once the world returns to normal. Until then we’re left with Carol forgiving herself and ready to move on, the beginning of a new bromance between Negan and Daryl and a reinvigorated big bad in Beta to look forward to.
Stay safe everyone.
