The Walking Dead 7.11 Review – ‘Hostiles and Calamities’

But there was still enough carnage for me to assume that Eugene was being taken away to be killed by the Saviors, having admitted that he made the bullet that took a chunk out of Lucille. The twist here was that these women were’s just out to allow their friend to die; they also wanted to kill Negan, and clearly, this is not a risk that Eugene wanted to take. Apparently, the fence walkers are starting to fall apart, so Eugene comes up with a way to not only keep said walkers bodily-intact but also to protect their heads from “hostiles and calamities”.

Shiny by the standards of The Walking Dead. By the end of the episode he spurts how he’s “utterly, completely, stone-cold Negan”, but it doesn’t feel believable. To his surprise however, Negan’s intentions are to schmooze him as much as possible – providing him with fancy living quarters, video games and even Easy Street primed for endless stereo rotation.

Eugene’s asked what he wants to eat, and the options include… drumroll here… It was an incredibly amusing moment when Eugene turned on the boom box and “Easy Street” began playing.

The latter option is the most compelling – Eugene has always been a socially awkward weasel with creeper tendencies, so going Dark Side might make him vaguely more interesting – and he certainly has the smarts to be useful to Negan, as he’s already proven. His early moments with the Savior henchman and Negan’s wives are especially amusing. Except it wasn’t. At all. Negan then releases Dwight from his cell and tasks him with finding Sherry and bringing her back. They ask him if he can make her a pill to end her life.

The episode’s director, Kari Skogland, keeps Dwight in the foreground and the focus on his face in key scenes like the one where he studies the note urging Daryl to escape, recognizing Sherry’s handwriting, or when he heats up the branding iron for Negan, whose torment of Dr. Carson plays out as a backdrop to Dwight’s carefully camouflaged reaction.

Is Dwight swaying from Negan’s clutches? You didn’t want to live in that world and I made you. He’s done it before, though he was without much success the first time, as we know. The note said that she did not like what she turned Dwight into. Being there isn’t better than being dead, it’s worse. You got it! The only thing they apparently don’t have: lobster, sorry ’bout that.

– “I loved you who were”.

Here’s the problem with using zombies as your security guards – they lack structural integrity. “And between the desperate actions of Negan’s habitually raped “wives” and the grisly murder of the Saviors” (very innocent) doctor, “Hostiles and Calamities” somehow felt even more miserable than all of the previous Negan episodes combined.

Negan even brought Eugene some women, and let’s just say that this had a rather unexpected result. The babes storm out of his room and in walks the boss, promising what Rick never really could. Negan underestimates Eugene as a physical threat, and that’s what allows the man with the golden mullet to slink his way into a position of power. When we learned this lie, we learned that Eugene had come up with it in order to survive: by making himself out to be someone important, since he didn’t have any martial skills to offer, he could surround himself with more capable people. Not only has he easily figured out their plan to try and kill Negan, he coldly informs them why he isn’t anxious, because he knows that they are replaceable and he is not. Sherry takes responsibility for who Dwight has become. “You don’t have to be scared anymore”, Negan tells the quivering mess stood in front of him – somebody who has been waiting to hear those words ever since the apocalypse began. However, realizing it was actually intended for Negan, he bowed out of the agreement. Is he saving them for himself in case things go bad?