The new season of The Walking Dead is about to reach its mid-season finale,  and things are beginning to heat up after a few episodes of calmness.

In the past three episodes, the focus has been on Maggie and Sasha, Tara, Enid and Carl when he sneaks into the Saviors’ territory and encounters Negan.

In the fifth episode, titled “Go Getters”, we got to see where Rick and the crew had chosen to hide Maggie to keep Negan away from her and her unborn child, and that place turned out to be at Hilltop. It is then discovered that Sasha is also at Hilltop and that Jesus is trying to reason with Gregory to let the girls stay. Although the episode was a bit slow at times, it was still interesting to see how Maggie was getting along after the tragic loss of Glenn.

Even in the slow moments of the episode, the story quickly grabbed hold of the viewers again as tension arose when the Saviors arrived at Hilltop and Maggie and Sasha were almost given away by Gregory. By the end, I was relieved that Maggie was safe and I found myself hoping that she would be the one to avenge Glenn and Abraham by killing Negan in the end. Maggie has been through so much pain, and she deserves to be the one to avenge her husband.

“Swear”, the sixth episode, followed Tara as she ran into trouble when she crossed paths with a new, all-female group of survivors. To be honest, this episode did not interest me very much. The pacing was slow, and although the episode did have a few ardent moments, it just did not catch my attention aside from a few very small parts.

Lastly, the lastest episode was titled “Sing Me a Song,” and my, was it nerve-racking.

Of course dear little feisty Carl had to sneak out of Alexandria and travel to the Saviors by himself. Little did he know that Negan would force him to follow him around all day like a little apprentice and show him exactly what horrors go on in the Saviors’ compound.

It was even more nerve-racking when Daryl saw that Negan had a hold of Carl and couldn’t do anything to help lest another incident like the fate of Glenn be repeated.

It was truly unnerving to witness how Negan treated his numerous wives and how tame and broken-down those women had became. And the worst part wasn’t when Negan pressed a hot iron to the face of a man with whom one of his wives cheated, rather it was when Negan took Carl back to Alexandria and discovered that Rick had another child: baby Judith. Oh, how creepy it was to watch Negan hold Judith and rock her in a chair, acting as though he wasn’t a monster. One can only imagine what Rick will do when he comes back to Alexandria and discovers that a devil incarnate was holding his baby daughter.

All in all, the fifth and sixth episodes were too slow-paced for my taste, but the seventh episode certainly turned things up a notch. As the mid-season finale approaches, one can only guess what will happen next. But one thing everyone knows for sure is that the reign of Negan is going to last for a while, and the viewers and characters are going to have to hold on tight.

(4 / 5)