WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 9 episode "Warning Signs," which debuted Sunday on AMC.


The Walking Dead this week provided decisive resolution to one mystery and some disappointing clarity to another. Overall, “Warning Signs” laid bare just how much of an illusion Rick’s “thriving” communities are.

The cold open reveals Justin’s zombified corpse, complete with a puncture wound through the heart. When his body is discovered, tensions erupt between the unarmed Saviors and the rest of the bridge workers. Jed, Justin’s friend in both life and attitude, throws accusations left and right, first at Anne, then at Daryl. He’s clearly bordering on irredeemable, but his insistence that someone is picking off Saviors isn’t wrong. After Arat goes missing, Maggie and Daryl discover evidence that leads them to Cassie and other members of Oceanside. They’ve been killing Saviors who had a hand in the mass murder of the men in their community, and Arat was responsible for killing Cassie’s brother.

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Daryl has no problem with that policy, but Maggie offers up a halfhearted recitation of Rick’s rhetoric that this kind of vengeance simply perpetuates more of the same. But after Cassie explains the conditions surrounding her brother’s death -- for all her protestations that she’s changed, Arat admits to taunting the boy and smiling as she pulled the trigger -- Maggie’s bitterness and desire for justice takes over, and she leaves the women to it. With that, she and Daryl agree that they’ve tried it Rick’s way, but they simply can’t arrive at that level of forgiveness, and they head off to see Negan.

It’s not surprising that there are some community members whose thirst for vengeance outweighs their desire for peace, or that Oceanside would be at the forefront of such feelings, given how traumatic and extreme their losses were before the war even began. The only victim that could rival their rage would be Anne, which is why Jed points the finger at her and sets into motion the other half of the episode’s action.

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After the confrontation at the bridge camp, Anne is disillusioned with her place in the communities and heads back to the heaps, where she uncovers a special walkie-talkie that puts her in touch with the owners of the helicopter we’ve seen tooling around since Season 8. Gabriel catches her talking to them, and she’s forced to admit she’s been trading people in exchange for supplies, which is, presumably, what some of the Scavenger traps were for. In some clear Whisperer foreshadowing, the person on the other end of the radio refers to the people that serve as his payment as As or Bs (in the comics, the Whisperers eliminate names and use a ranking systems that defines certain people as Alphas or Betas).

Any hope that surrounded that magical helicopter is dashed when we learn what its beneficence costs, as is any hope for Anne’s redemption when she reveals her part in it. And to complete her journey back to the dark side, after Gabriel refuses to go along with her plan to sacrifice someone for her own escape, she smirks, “And here I always thought you were a B.” and cold-cocks him with a pistol.

It looks likely that Gabriel will be her sacrifice of choice, given the price for her passage away from the communities (a journey she cannot make alone for some reason, be it distance or danger) was definitively “An A.” If the Whisperers are at the root of this arc, then it stands to reason this is a demented way of recruiting members and pressing them into service to increase their numbers. The Saviors operated in a similar capacity, but with more humanity. That should give you an idea of what to expect once this new nemesis finally does show up.

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The episode feels a little plodding and predictable, in part because the leftover vengeance mentioned above, but also because after the two-year time jump and the general exhaustion audiences feel surrounding the Savior conflict. Things aren’t as bleak or as bullet-ridden as they were in Season 8, and the show would’ve been the poorer for not showing the wounds left over after such a violent conflict, not to mention the performances remain at the heart of what still makes The Walking Dead such compelling television. But after nearly three seasons of murder, revenge and more murder, but the faster anything regarding the Savior conflict is wrapped up and a new antagonist shows up, the better.


Airing Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC, The Walking Dead stars Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Lauren Cohan, Danai Gurira, Melissa McBride, Lennie James, Alanna Masterson, Josh McDermitt, Christian Serratos and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.