*Spoilers below for The Walking Dead's latest episode, which serves as a temporary season ender. *
Holy hell! Season 10's penultimate episode couldn't have seemed more weirdly timed, considering The Walking Dead only JUST used Danai Gurira's final episode to meta-reference the most infamous cliffhangers surrounding Glenn's death and Negan's lineup. Not to mention the "trapped in the cave" ending that capped off the midseason finale. Regardless, "The Tower" and the Whisperers delivered a pretty masterful cliffhanger for the franchise, both on a macro level and on a couple of micro levels.
The reason why this cliffhanger is so particularly impactful is because post-production on The Walking Dead's legitimate season finale – Episode 16, "A Certain Doom" – got delayed once Hollywood went into lockdown-mode, and there's currently no concrete sign for when fans can expect to see it air on AMC. For now, though, let's focus on where things left off.
Beta And The Whisperers' Herd Swarm The Hospital
After recently gathering a walker herd while embracing his musical past, Ryan Hurst's Beta continued his "I'm Not Alpha" campaign by taking his zombified army into Alexandria and beyond to continue wreaking havoc on the various communities. Luckily, (most of) the protagonists got the jump on that plan by vacating Alexandria and taking up temporary shelter inside a nearby hospital. At least, it started out as a lucky plan.
Beta has now gone alpha-the-deep-end, we'll call it, and is now following and responding to the voices in his head as if the advice was being whispered to him by the surrounding walkers. Sane or not, Beta delivered his monstrous gift to the hospital's ER doors right as the episode ended, making it look like Episode 16 is going to be a wild close-quarters battle with everyone inside the hospital unable to immediately tell the walkers from the Whisperers.
In the Walking Dead comic book, Hilltop got burned after Alpha's death, and Alexandria also got demolished, so the TV show has already flipped those moments around. It's presumed that the hospital switcheroo was brought in so that Alexandria will (hopefully) still be standing when the Whisperers War is concluded. Will we see Beta and Negan go head to head in the true season finale later this year? Here's hoping!
Aaron And Alden Get Caught Spying
To be expected, the Whisperers' movements were being tracked by some of the good guys, with Aaron and Alden serving as the limited scouting group. They were communicating by radio, but as it always goes in these situations, the radio stopped working when it needed to the most, and Aaron and Alden got busted by a group of weaponized Whisperers.
Unfortunately, Aaron and Alden's fates were left completely up in the air at the end of the episode. One might assume that the Whisperers tried torturing them for information about the hospital hideaway, and then possibly killed then after they weren't useful anymore. I'm not going to assume that last bit, mind you, but I will say that Daryl and Judith's encounter with that Whisperers scout didn't increase any optimism about Aaron and Alden's survival chances.
Daryl And Judith Are Stuck Outside The Hospital
It's hard to tell whether Daryl and Judith are now safer outside the hospital as Beta's herd is about to attack, or whether they're more at risk to getting swarmed themselves. We know they're not going to die in Episode 16, especially after having that big and tearful heart-to-heart conversation. This show cannot and will not come to an end without reuniting Judith and Rick Grimes, regardless of how closely things might play out in those movies as they did with the comics.
Still, we also know that Daryl and Judith are not the kind of characters that would willingly sit back without trying to save everyone in the hospital. As such, they're going to be facing some trouble in the next episode. But could they possibly run into Lauren Cohan's Maggie at some point while trying to figure out a way into the hospital? Where is Maggie going to come into this story again?
Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for more updates on when The Walking Dead will return to AMC for the official Season 10 season finale.
