New Walking Dead Video Reveals How The Saviors Escaped The Sanctuary

During the first half of The Walking Dead's eighth season, Rick & Co. enacted their plan to use a walker horde as a way to keep Negan and his Saviors trapped within the Sanctuary's walls. The plan worked for all of five minutes before Daryl's side mission put a literal giant hole in it, and Rick was quite troubled to later discover the villains had all fled. We didn't know quite how it happened, but a newly released clip from The Walking Dead's midseason premiere lays out the crafty (if somewhat silly) escape plan.

Morgan, currently of a mindset where shooting Saviors is a favored hobby, has eyes on the Sanctuary right when the Saviors start putting Eugene's bonkers idea to work. (At least we assume it was Eugene's idea, since he's apparently the only one in that group who actually thinks about such things.) The Saviors' goal was to create two solid lines of walker corpses that would form a path through the horde for everyone to walk through without fear of being overtaken. It's hard to tell whether this would actually work in "real life" or not, though it would absolutely take longer to accomplish than it did during the clip above; that said, it's understood that creative license was taken for timing purposes.

The use of walker walls is an interesting tactic, and this clip actually hints at two connected issues that are equally as important and interesting. The first, which we'd recently discussed when the midseason trailer was released, involves Eugene's comic book knack for manufacturing bullets, something that that live-action show only used once back in Season 7, when Lucille magically stopped the homemade bullet from killing Negan. As Morgan is watching the Saviors put their plan to work, someone on the radio mentions that they would run out of ammo before they'd run out of walkers, which would definitely be the case if they were only working with a finite supply of bullets. But what if Eugene actually did get his ammunition-making set-up underway within the Sanctuary without TV viewers being aware of it?

The second point here centers on the Saviors utilizing the walkers themselves as a means of escape, and in a different way than the "cover one's body in zombie guts" method that has worked well for everyone so far. (Except for maybe Father Gabriel, but the jury is still out on that.) Negan and his army have shown proficiency when it comes to using an enemy's strategies against them, regardless of if that enemy is living or undead. As such, we can probably expect to see Negan introduce an extremely dangerous new means of creating chaos for Team Family.

The source material's iteration of the All Out War brought in the new and seemingly logical threat that coating weapons with walker guts has an extremely adverse effect on another person's ability to survive. For instance, walker blood rubbed on the outer skin doesn't inspire much worry by way of infections, but if someone gets shot with an arrow coated in walker germs, and the tainted arrowhead gets lodged inside someone's torso, that person would have a much more likely chance of turning. Not to mention having an open arrow wound to try and fix.

Sure, that would cause fans to go back and wonder about other instances where characters likely would have gotten infected zombie blood in their own open wounds. But it would potentially explain why The Walking Dead TV show introduced walkers messing around with radioactive material, and it would possibly explain why Rick also didn't see any walkers roaming around the Sanctuary anymore. Assuming the Saviors would be stockpiling such hazardous material, that is.

What do you guys think the Saviors are up to? The Walking Dead Season 8 will return to AMC on Sunday, February 25, at 9:00 p.m. ET. To see what other shows will also be showing up in the near future, head to our midseason premiere schedule.