Yesterday’s installment of The Walking Dead featured another one of the show’s patented massacres, with Whisperer number two Beta breaking into Alexandria and wiping out a dozen or so residents. There weren’t any huge deaths, but the villain’s kills did include a couple of familiar faces.
First of all, the Whisperers set up word of a fictional walker attack on the community to draw the best fighters away. Beta then sneaked in through a hidden tunnel that opened out at a grave, as set up by Dante prior to his murder. The first victims of his attack were Alfred, the last of the highwaymen introduced in season 9, and his friends. He was labelling the Whisperers “a joke” after bragging about beating up Lydia (see “Silence the Whisperers”) when Beta found him and killed him.
The rest of his kills were redshirts, but Beta’s final victim was another recurring character, one of the few surviving Saviors. With the fresh dead reanimating and causing havoc as walkers, Beta got on with his main goal: reaching Gamma/Mary in her jail cell to bring her back to Alpha. Laura got the jump on him, however, when she stabbed him with her blade. The pair tussled for a while, before the bigger Beta threw her against the cell bars, breaking her neck.
It looked like Beta was going to manage to kill Rosita, too, as the new mother bravely stood up to the Whisperer, armed with a studded baseball bat. She got a couple of blows in as well, but was ultimately overpowered by the brute. He would have finished the job, too, but Gamma threatened to kill herself unless he let Rosita go, volunteering to go with him. Mary is saved, however, when Gabriel and the others returned and scared Beta away.
Expect even more death when The Walking Dead season 10 continues next week and the Whisperers’ siege on Hilltop begins.