WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2, Episode 4, “Family Is a Four Letter Word,” which aired Sunday on AMC.
The first few episodes of The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2 have started to pull the curtain back on the CR and the CRM. As was expected after the show’s first season, the oversized community is completely two-faced. On the outside, it’s a thriving place with positive intentions for the future and its inhabitants. However, as more of the CRM’s inner workings become evident, it’s becoming more and more obvious that some pretty nefarious things are happening.
To Hope, Iris and the others, that has always been obvious, but in this week’s episode, another character starts to see hints of the truth. “Family Is a Four Letter Word,” shows Huck smuggling Hope to the Perimeter community to see her sister, and what she learns there makes her commitment to the CRM start to falter.
Felix, understandably, doesn’t trust Huck and is convinced that she is there on a mission for her mother, Colonel Kublek. Huck denies that fact, saying that she’s only trying to help Hope, but no one is convinced, even though she is actually telling the truth. At one point, an argument starts about the destruction of Omaha and the Campus Colony, and that’s when real progress starts.
Huck is trying to be genuinely sympathetic about all of the deaths that happened and all of the friends that everyone lost, but then, Iris and Felix burst her bubble. They tell Huck that they are convinced that the CRM intentionally wiped out the two communities. At first, Huck dismisses the possibility, saying that anything like that would have gone through her mother, and by proxy, she would have known about it. To her obstinance, Felix accuses her of being either stupid or blind. Then, Felix really lays down some truth. He says that Huck has lived a lie for over a year, so nothing is saying that her mother isn’t capable of doing the same thing.
Huck has no response, and it’s clear that Felix’s accusations planted a seed in Huck’s mind because later in the episode, she goes to ask her mother some questions. After one of her mother's news briefings about courage and solidarity, Huck asks for specifics of the Omaha survivors, but the colonel snapped at her and refused, citing the information as above the privilege of her rank. Kublek’s response all but proves that she isn’t being forthcoming with her daughter, and Huck finally starts to see that.
Additionally, there were bookending scenes in the episode. In the beginning, Huck is found near Omaha on a riverbank. She had a broken arm and a cut on her face. Then at the end, she sees a memory of what had given her the broken arm – a CRM soldier with her mother watching. It shows how committed Kublek is to the CRM and its lies, even if it means sacrificing her own daughter’s wellbeing for the sake of a mission.
To see how Huck responds to what she has learned, tune into The Walking Dead: World Beyond. The series airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on AMC and is available to stream early on AMC+.