‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’: A Blackout Brings the Truth to Light (RECAP)

[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for AMC’s The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2, Episode 6, “Who Are You?”]

Nothing like a good ol’ blackout to get a story rolling… well, kind of. While tonight’s installment “Who Are You?” isn’t quite as intense as last week’s almost-escape from the Civic Republic Military campus, it does shine a little light (ha!) on how the CRM took down Omaha and the Campus Colony — and who was probably involved with that unpleasantness. Plus, we get a little more info on how Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) is connected to everything, and one character makes a decision to sneak into the CRM with disastrous results.

We all know that Lyla (Natalie Gold) is suspicious as heck, but Leo (Joe Holt), up until this point, has had no reason to think so. That changes in this episode, as he connects the papers that Huck (Annet Mahendru) gave him to papers Lyla was once carrying that reference a “Project V.” To determine whether he’s been dating a mad scientist this whole time, he has a dinner party with her under the guise of having her meet his daughters. That ruse, in theory, will allow Felix (Nico Tortorella) to sneak into her lab, with Huck’s help.

Steve Swisher/AMC

Except… keeping her murder serum in her lab would be a rookie mistake, and Lyla’s no rookie. Huck and Felix learn she’s keeping the super-secret stuff in cold storage. They can’t access the room without cutting the power to the whole facility, so that’s what Huck does: But before she goes, she warns Felix he’ll only have two minutes inside. She succeeds in cutting the power, and Felix heads in; he discovers that there are gallons and gallons of the weapon, and he grabs a vial (bet Lyla won’t notice that’s missing, right?). He has a close call when the power kicks on and he’s locked inside, and he starts to worry that Huck abandoned him — but she comes back for him, and he survives the frigid ordeal.

At the dinner party, things go (predictably) badly. Hope (Alexa Mansour), having come around on the CRM, is polite and kind to Lyla — Iris (Aliyah Royale), on the other hand, forces her to admit that part of her pharmaceutical job in the pre-apocalypse world was testing on mice, and she gets angrier and angrier to the point where she storms away. Hope follows her and tries to calm her sister down, but it’s clear Iris will not be sold on any part of the CRM or what they’re doing.

Steve Swisher/AMC

The power goes out, and Lyla takes Leo out to a remote area of the campus, saying she hadn’t been “completely honest” with him. At first, it’s unclear whether she’s taking him out there to talk to him or to kill him, but in the end, it’s the former; while she doesn’t reveal the details of “Project V,” she does tell him about what happened to her family. It’s a sad story (and at this point, aren’t they all sad backstories on TWD shows?). Her daughter was bitten, and her husband stayed with the child one night to comfort her; again, predictably, this ends with the daughter turning and killing him. Lyla panics and locks them both in the room, unable to kill them… and that’s where things get, uh, weird. She doesn’t go into specifics, but she tells Leo that she did “terrible” things to their zombified selves to try to bring them back to life. So maybe it’s not too far-fetched that she’d be involved in the CRM’s walker-creation/genocide?

Earlier in the episode, Iris sent a transmission to the colony where Elton (Nicolas Cantu) and Will (Jelani Alladin) are. She was only meant to say that everyone’s fine but they’re delayed, but she went a little rogue and said they’re going to “burn the place to the ground.” That was not well-received by the leadership of the colony, which tries to call for a Phantom-Menace-style “vote of no confidence” in Indira’s leadership, but she apparently holds onto control.

Will, however, is done waiting. He’s determined to get inside the CRM base, and Indira’s son — who has had maybe ten lines up until this point — goes with him (the poor guy might as well be wearing a red shirt). You already know where this is going: Will tries to sneak in, the soldiers are waiting, Indira’s son gets shot in the face, Will runs away.

Steve Swisher/AMC

On the Jadis front, we learn that Huck was apparently her mentor in the CRM, so the two are good buddies. (We get what might be a tangential Rick (Andrew Lincoln) mention when Jadis says she gave the murky group “something they wanted,” but that’s it.) It’s not clear, however, whether Jadis is really on Huck’s side; she readily admits that her mother wanted her to keep an eye on Huck while she was away, but she seems more concerned with helping Huck prove that she’s still a good soldier than digging up dirt on her. But there’s plenty of dirt on Huck that has yet to be dug, so… whether from Jadis or Percy (Ted Sutherland), who’s still muttering ominous things to Iris about his “life’s mission,” it seems likely she’s in grave danger.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Sundays, 10/9c, AMC