How they’ll contend with Rick, whose shades-of-gray morals grow ever darker, should be fascinating. Last week, Rick was only dissuaded from returning to Terminus to wipe out any survivors by news that his baby daughter Judith was alive. This week, he adopted Gabriel into the group only with the utmost caution, warning that he’d kill him without a second thought if he posed a threat. Rick issues a similarly paranoid warning to his son midway through the episode, prompting Carl to sigh, “Everyone can’t be bad.”

Is Carl right? The end of the episode reveals that people-eating Terminus honcho Gareth (Andrew J. West) still lives, along with some of his companions, and takes poor old Bob hostage and cooks one of his legs. Rick, it seems, could have been right in his bloodthirsty notion to wipe the stain of Terminus off the map once and for all. The most frequently recurring theme of The Walking Dead—the extent to which Rick and company must embrace inhumanity to survive—is surfacing again, but it’s at least being explored with more nuance than usual.

A lot of that is perhaps due to the unsettling, almost banal nature of Gareth’s evil, unlike the totemic madness of The Governor. Last week’s premiere saw Terminus dealing with captured humans as if they were cattle, bashing them with a bat before slitting their throats on a killing floor, to prepare them as food for the colony. What could provoke such blank, mechanical malevolence? Brief flashbacks gave us a glimpse of Gareth and his family’s humanity being hammered out by unknown invaders, who captured the then-sanctuary of Terminus and tortured and raped its inhabitants.

Humanity’s capacity for monstrosity in a lawless world is another frequent theme on The Walking Dead, but Gareth and the Terminus folks represent an interesting new spin at the very least. With their city-sized base of operations torched, the show moves away from its familiar trope of malevolent sanctuaries. Gareth has gone mobile, and in doing so has become more terrifying, capturing Bob out of nowhere and (possibly?) scoring the trees with some kind of death symbol.

It’s fitting that given the new developments, and as Rick has further crises of compassion, a man of God would be introduced into the mix. Like any new Walking Dead character, Gabriel seems to nurse some secret from his past—in one scene, he recoils at a female walker wearing glasses, and only later does it become clear that he knew her when she was alive. Hopefully this secret can be drawn out quickly—I only have so much patience for everyone’s dark mysteries at this point—so that Gabriel (right now a stuttering mess) can more effectually balance Rick’s increasing nihilism. As Carl said, everybody can’t be bad.

My fear, as always with The Walking Dead, is regression to the mean. I have started many a season of this show with eager anticipation for its new direction, having shed whatever previous dull storyline or characters I decried. I am a fan of the current core group and situation, but who’s to say we won’t spend the next six weeks camped out in this church dissecting how bad everyone feels living in a zombie apocalypse? The audience can only pray for momentum and actually compelling character dynamics. So far, there’s reason to hope.

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