‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’ Season 2 Premiere: Go Your Own Way (RECAP)
[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2 episode 1, “Konsekans.”]
World Beyond is back, and CRM is more mysterious — and deadlier — than ever.
In the Season 2 premiere, Hope (Alexa Mansour) faces another test that puts her in danger while Iris (Aliyah Royale) winds up in a new community with surprising ties to the Civil Republic Military. No one’s very happy, and by the end credits, both of the Bennett siblings have killed a human being instead of just “empties.” Here’s how it happens.
Hope’s story throughout the episode largely involves her wandering around an abandoned city, attempting to defend herself from both walkers and too-far-gone humans. How does this happen? She, Huck (Annet Mahendru) and Col. Kublek (Julia Ormond) make a pit stop on a rooftop, where Kublek gives Hope the option to leave, no questions asked and without consequences. If she doesn’t want to be there, if she’d rather backtrack and find her friends, she can. (This is an odd move for her, given how hard she’d worked to bring in Hope and the fact that she placed her own daughter in danger to secure “the asset.”)
Hope takes the opportunity and runs, winding up in a dilapidated high school—hey, it’s a teen drama, so of course we’re ending up in a high school. She takes a nasty tumble down some stairs and hits her head, which leaves her with a concussion that has her hallucinating all kinds of images from her past. Eventually, she makes her way out onto the street, where she finds a girl who was in some of the posters in the school. Unfortunately, the girl has since utterly lost it, and she tries to sacrifice Hope to a crowd of walkers reaching hungrily through a gate. Hope fights her off and tries not to kill her, but in the end, she has no choice: She shoves her into the “empties,” and they eat her alive.
Meanwhile, Iris, Felix (Nico Tortorella) and his boyfriend, Will (Jelani Alladin) wind up at a new community. As Will explains, it was a farming community once, then an artist’s colony, and now it’s a place for survivors to take shelter. They’re allowed to stay, so long as they don’t put anyone at risk.
Iris is eager to kick down CRM’s walls and take back her sister and her dad, but Will urges caution. “I want Hope and your dad safe from those assholes as much as you do,” he says, “but I know that place. They’ve got guards, patrols, long-range security. This is about the long game. Not just how we get in, but how we get them out.”
Hope eventually goes back to Kublek and Huck, and she asks if she can see her dad if she goes with them. “It’s okay to hate us, Hope,” Kublek says. “We carry that burden so others don’t have to. So there can still be good in the world.” She heads to the CRM headquarters, where she’s put in holding and Huck goes to talk to her. “You have every reason to hate me,” she says, “but I need you to listen.”
Huck explains that she sent Felix and Iris to a settlement a few miles from the headquarters, with people that will keep them safe. She says she told her mother they don’t know anything about CRM, which guarantees their safety if they’re found. But Hope argues that she should do the exact opposite and tell Kublek just how badly her daughter messed up the mission. “If you do that, you’ll put a target not just on my back, but on yours,” Huck says. “And Felix and Iris’s, and your dad’s, too.” She says she has to lie to her dad about everything, so she can keep everyone safe. She’s then taken to her father, and she collapses into his arms, sobbing.
As the episode ends, Iris has a nightmare about peeling off a walker’s face to reveal a CRM helmet underneath. She then goes out into the woods… and she runs directly into a CRM soldier. They grapple for a few minutes, then she stabs him, killing him. “That’s what you get,” she says to the man’s corpse. Yikes, Iris! Yikes.
The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC