‘The Walking Dead’ Season 11, Episode 21 Review: ‘Outpost 22’

I’m a bit late to this review. I won’t bore you with excuses. Sometimes I fall behind (in more ways than one) and quite frankly, AMC has not given us much to look forward to in the eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead.

The Commonwealth storyline has been a shambles. Dull and goofy all at once. One of the only highlights of the season was Lance Hornsby, who was killed off in the previous episode. We’re left with Pamela, who I don’t find interesting or plausible in the slightest.

Fortunately, the pace is finally picking up and last Sunday’s episode marks the beginning of a more exciting arc, just in time for this show to wrap up (and then we wait for the many spinoffs).

Since I’ll be reviewing Episode 22 and 23 today as well, I’m going to keep my recapping of Episode 21—titled Outpost 22—brief.

Basically, our group is split up as some of our heroes are captured, some escape capture, some plan their escape, and some chase down the capturers. And then there are the children, who have been taken and whose whereabouts are unknown.

Ezekiel, Negan and Kelly are taken on a busload of prisoners to a work camp called Outpost 22, where it looks like people are tasked with carrying random sticks and rocks around. It is very “Hollywood thinks this is a what a work camps looks like” but I’ll let it slide.

Kelly wants to escape since there are so few guards but Ezekiel is cautious—with good reason, it turns out. The Stormtroopers, for once, can shoot with deadly accuracy, mowing down escapees without ceremony or any attempts at recapture.

Negan eventually enlists Ezekiel to help him hatch an escape plan. He’s worried about Annie, who was taken somewhere else. Ezekiel isn’t happy about working with Negan. “For the shit I’ve done,” Negan says, “I probably deserve to be in a place like this. It fits. But it doesn’t fit you, Ezekiel, and it sure as shit doesn’t fit my wife and baby that’s on its way.”

Negan tells Ezekiel that the only way to inspire the prisoners to an uprising is through hope, not fear. “And that’s your thing, Ezekiel. It’s definitely not mine.”

Elsewhere, Maggie, Gabriel and Rosita are being held prisoner in a truck. They break free, causing the truck to crash and Maggie escapes on foot. Gabriel and Rosita are left lying in the dirt.

Maggie is almost discovered by a Stormtrooper when a child zombie appears walking toward them. With the soldier distracted, Maggie leaps to action, stabbing him through the armpit and grabbing his gun.

Carol and Daryl, fresh off the killing of Hornsby, are looking for their friends. Soon, all three groups converge. They question the dying Stormtrooper and Gabriel eventually gets some information out of him.

There’s a train coming and they waylay it. After a fun shootout, they take the Conductor prisoner and free Connie, though one of the Stormtroopers tries holding her at gunpoint first.

The Stormtrooper is caught off guard when Connie breaks free, and escapes on one of the motorcycles. Carol shoots halfheartedly at him and misses, and Daryl hops on a bike and chases him down. It’s a fun chase. When the bad guy loses control and runs off on foot, Daryl does a cool motorcycle slide-under-a-fallen-tree move that knocks the goon to the ground. Without a word, Daryl takes out his knife and stabs him to death. We could have used more badass moments like this throughout the season, but at least we’re getting them now.

The train conductor is taken prisoner and tells them that there’s a map in the train that will show them where everyone is being taken. The conductor then kills himself rather than let his family be killed over him betraying the Commonwealth. Damn.

They end up getting in radio contact with the Commonwealth, pretending to be members of the convoy who got separated and basically ask for directions on where to meet up. The surprising answer? Outpost 22 is actually Alexandria, repurposed as a prison camp. This is where Ezekiel and the rest are taken at the end of the episode. I guess the first stop along the way was just a temporary “move sticks and rocks” spot.

“Pamela is gonna pay,” Maggie says. “And she’ll never see it coming.”

Missed Opportunities

I think that one issues I’m having with this show right now is all the missed opportunities for this final season to have been so much better. The story beats they chose to skip over (or were forced to skip over, in some cases) are important ones that could have helped flesh out this final showdown.

For instance, Negan talks a lot about how much he loves his wife Annie and how she’s made him a better man. He’s willing to sacrifice himself (though we know he can’t, given his spinoff with Maggie) for Annie. But we didn’t get to see them meet. We didn’t get to learn how they fell in love or walk that path with them. The audience should care about Annie the same way Negan does, and we should see Negan through her eyes, too. But this was all skipped over. Instead, we spent lots of time with our group fighting the random Reaver group, which just felt like retreading old ground.

Same goes for the overly bloated cast. Instead of really being able to focus on just the core group, we’ve spent far too much time this season introducing new characters or hopping between established secondary characters. This is actually one thing I enjoyed about this episode. We’ve slimmed down the focus essentially to two groups: Daryl, Carol, Gabriel, Rosita and Maggie in the first (and Connie, eventually); Negan, Ezekiel and Kelly in the second. It’s finally starting to feel more focused.

Scattered thoughts:

• I liked Gabriel’s line: “Because you’re a coward” when he’s talking with the dying Stormtrooper. I am less fond of the fact that Random Commonwealth Guy gets a more dramatic death than many of our heroes. A lot more screen-time than poor Hornsby.
• The motorcycle chase was fun but why is Daryl so much faster than the other guy?
• The train conductor ends up killing himself rather than have the Commonwealth discover that he helped our heroes because the Commonwealth “will torture me and then they’ll kill my family.” I feel like a lot more work needed to go into building the Commonwealth up into that kind of place before we got to this point. It’s never come across as even remotely that sinister. Bad? Sure. But nothing like this.
• Was Connie the only prisoner on that train? I don’t think we see any others. And how did that Stormtrooper know to use her as his bullet shield?
• The zombie kid was a nice callback to some other traumatizing events in The Walking Dead’s history, but the moment felt a little forced to me. Too on-the-nose with Maggie’s own fears about her kidnapped child. (I’m not sure about her naming the kid Hershel instead of Glenn also, the more I think about it, but whatever).

Overall, a pretty good episode. We’re finally making up for lost time and covering some ground. The pacing was much better than most of this season, with fun action scenes and some dramatic twists and turns. No Eugene romance, no ice cream, no protesters at the Commonwealth chanting, blissfully unaware that their families will likely be killed and they’ll all be sent far away to work camps.

What did you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.