The Walking Dead S06E14 Review: Denise and Eugene's Big Day

The Walking Dead, Season 6, Episode 14: Twice as Far

So yeah, this episode is a bit of an outlier, but definitely a welcome one. After the previous few episodes focused heavily on the new community at Hilltop and the raid on the Saviours base, as well as Carol's change of heart (which I bought last episode, but not in this one, which we'll talk about later), it's irritating that we're pushing the inevitable Negan revelation even further with what amounts to a filler episode. 

But, man, what a filler episode it was. It reunites the triad of Abraham, Eugene and Rosita, the 'we gotta find a cure' team who has, in my opinion, been the group of characters from Rick's travelling party that blends the most into the background. Well, there's Tara, too, who's honestly a bit of a non-entity who shows up to remind us she exists and does a thing or two, but compared to the likes of Rick, Carl, Daryl, Carol, Maggie and Glenn, or even second-stringers like Gabriel and Sasha, the trio really doesn't get to do much. Rosita gets the worst of the bunch, I think, being a generic badass fighter. Abraham doesn't fare better, only winning out from Rosita due to having badass facial hair and a strange way of articulating his words. Eugene is the most developed among them due to his strange, strange situation of both his robot-speak and the fact that despite being part of Team Rick he's actually a bit of a load. 

Here, we have a bit of a lesser characters' day out. Daryl shows up, of course, but his role is more as the big heavy badass of the team more than anything. After a brief montage of Carol going through daily life and talking to Daryl (who's squarely on the 'kill em all before they kill us' camp), and Morgan apparently building a prison cell in the time he's absent from the Saviours raid (to give Rick 'a choice' in the future), we go to two groups. The first consists of established badasses Rosita and Daryl escorting dr. Denise, who's never been out of Alexandria, on a medicine raid. The second has Abraham and Eugene investigating a factory, from where Eugene plans to manufacture bullets -- a premium and depletable currency as Hilltop shows.

Both Denise and Eugene are characters, who, while having been through hell, just aren't ready. Eugene struggles with killing a relatively benign walker, and gets pissed off at Abraham when he tells Eugene -- perhaps rightly so -- that Abraham's thing is being a badass and Eugene's thing is being a smart dude. Maybe it's the rush from joining the huge Alexandria-vs-zombies bit before the mini-timeskip in this season, or maybe Eugene is just having a bad day, but Abraham leaves Eugene to his own devices.

Meanwhile, Denise ends up trying to talk a big game of at least helping in scavenging in the big world (although it is still a monumentally moronic decision for anyone involved to send their only doctor out into the field, short mission or no short mission) but ends up freaking out when she finds one of those creepy unexplained tableaus that Walking Dead sometimes likes to show us. In this case, instead of a simple walker enemy that she can theoretically kill like Eugene, she finds a crippled corpse, an empty baby's crib, the writings hush hush hush hush written over the wall, and the corpse of a baby drowned in her own blood. On the other hand, she did show that she might actually be able to contribute as a badass in her own right in the future, having her first blood by killing the random zombie in the car to get the cooler. She disobeyed the established badasses, but surprisingly enough it bucks the trend by having Denise survive both her disobeying Daryl and Rosita in both the apothecary and with the car zombie.

Sadly, this is quickly staunched as Denise got one of the more brutal and surprising death via arrow to the head right after she has some personal growth, which is a shame. And I think this is the worst blow that the Saviours did to the Alexandrians -- most, if not all, of the other deaths were caused by the quarry zombies. Denise is easily one of the few remaining Alexandrians who can be feasibly called a character -- Heath is cool but doesn't have much in lieu of a personality; Aaron is also cool but inexplicably seems to have more or less disappeared this season; Spencer is kinda weird and also apparently shacked up with Rosita -- so her death is not without impact, but on the other hand it's another of those deaths that's just done seemingly for shock value, and we don't even get to see her girlfriend Tara's reaction in this episode.

Meanwhile, Eugene, who arguably was far more arrogant and learned near-nothing about overestimating his badassery, survives. He bites Dwight's dick! Dwight, by the way, is the now-scarfaced motherfucker who stole Daryl's crossbow, and also the dude that shot Denise, so maybe he'll be the season's final boss before we inevitably get to Negan? Dwight is a suitable douchebag for the role, for sure, even if he's probably minus his 'D' at this point thanks to Eugene. In Abraham's words, "you know how to bite a dick and I mean that with the utmost respect."

Abraham, Rosita and Daryl manage to kill half of Dwight's group (they outnumbered them, what, three to one?) and I guess Eugene falls more on the likable scale of the spectrum? It would be easy for Eugene to come off as being an annoying twit who's so self-absorbed in improving himself and damn the consequences -- regardless of how awesome his dick-biting skills or distraction skills are, he is far more valuable as a potential manufacturer of ammunition. Ditto for Denise, who can have character growth and stuff but is ultimately far more valuable as the community's healer.

While both Denise and Eugene's stories are actually far, far more enjoyable than I thought possible, Carol's story isn't. The last few episodes have her racking herself with guilt over her arguments with Morgan, the death of the kid she traumatized, and the brutality that she and Maggie inflicted upon the Saviours, and she leaves Alexandria because she... can't stand killing. It's honestly a development that seemed rushed and would've worked better if we actually had a full Carol-centric episode to properly explore this. Why is two short, truncated conversations with Daryl enough to drive her out of the community? It felt abruptly rushed, and honestly one that I disliked. I suppose the timeskip might be a reason enough, but maybe that one post-timeskip episode when Paul tangled with Rick and Daryl, we could've had more focus on Carol instead of leaving her out of two episodes for no real reason if you're planning this big character switch.

Oh, and Abraham and Sasha are now a thing. Which I honestly cannot care less about. We're two episodes from the end of the season, and I guess we'll be moving at a far more breakneck pace from then on?